Quarantine: Fri. 6/19 -Sun. 6/21
Friday was the last real day of school for the kids. Greta had a virtual moving on ceremony since this is her final year in the two-year multiage class. Missing out on the in-person ceremony is definitely one of the sadder losses of this virtual school year. Lucia said goodbye to her class too, though it's unclear if she'll see them again tomorrow. In any case, school is done. What next year will look like is anyone's guess.
Andrew and I have undertaken a huge task: cleaning out our house. It's dire, I'm afraid. We have spent the past 8 years filling this house with junk. We're overwhelmed. We've decided to tackle one area at a time. Today we worked on the crawl space in the basement, because nothing says Father's Day like cleaning out a basement crawl space. We found a box marked CORKS, and indeed, it was a large cardboard box filled to the brim with corks, which I'm fairly certain we moved here from California. It went on from there. I'm trying to sell or give away everything on our local swap group. (I managed to find someone to take all the corks.)
This is not a small job. It is a job that suggests I have a real problem. I won't call myself a hoarder, because I know hoarding is a truly awful problem with a lot of other things connected to it, so I'll just say--I have a problem with SAVING. I saw today, in stark clarity, that I have crossed a line of saving. For example, I found a whole bag full of marker caps. I know I saved these with the vague idea of doing some kind of hot-glue collage-y project with them with the kids. But you know what? If I haven't used a big bag of marker caps in a collage-y project after 3.5 months of global lockdown, I'm probably never going to use them. They went in the trash.
I could give many more examples.
We did not finish the crawl space today. We made progress, but it is not done. And we have a very large house with many other areas just like this crawl space, and honestly I don't know how we're ever going to finish.
But! It was of course Father's Day today. I made waffles and bacon for breakfast and we gave Andrew cards and gifts. Then there was the long spell of the crawl space. We wanted to have crabs for dinner, since the lockdown prevented us from having our annual crab feast for Andrew's birthday, so he drove out to Linden, NJ, where, oddly, there's a place the brings crabs in from Maryland. So we had a nice dinner of crabs and some shrimp for Father's Day dinner.
Then we watched National Treasure 2, which is even more wildly absurd than the first National Treasure. It did make me think that maybe I should have been an archivist. That might have been a way to channel my SAVING tendencies into something other than filling a very nice house with actual trash.
The kids have been swimming every day. Legos are more a focus than ever, but only the Friends figures, not even the bricks.
What We're Reading
Margo: Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas
Andrew: Collected Essays of James Baldwin
Greta: School for Good and Evil #5
Lucia: all the School for Good and Evil books at once, and also Fox Trot books
Andrew and I have undertaken a huge task: cleaning out our house. It's dire, I'm afraid. We have spent the past 8 years filling this house with junk. We're overwhelmed. We've decided to tackle one area at a time. Today we worked on the crawl space in the basement, because nothing says Father's Day like cleaning out a basement crawl space. We found a box marked CORKS, and indeed, it was a large cardboard box filled to the brim with corks, which I'm fairly certain we moved here from California. It went on from there. I'm trying to sell or give away everything on our local swap group. (I managed to find someone to take all the corks.)
This is not a small job. It is a job that suggests I have a real problem. I won't call myself a hoarder, because I know hoarding is a truly awful problem with a lot of other things connected to it, so I'll just say--I have a problem with SAVING. I saw today, in stark clarity, that I have crossed a line of saving. For example, I found a whole bag full of marker caps. I know I saved these with the vague idea of doing some kind of hot-glue collage-y project with them with the kids. But you know what? If I haven't used a big bag of marker caps in a collage-y project after 3.5 months of global lockdown, I'm probably never going to use them. They went in the trash.
I could give many more examples.
We did not finish the crawl space today. We made progress, but it is not done. And we have a very large house with many other areas just like this crawl space, and honestly I don't know how we're ever going to finish.
But! It was of course Father's Day today. I made waffles and bacon for breakfast and we gave Andrew cards and gifts. Then there was the long spell of the crawl space. We wanted to have crabs for dinner, since the lockdown prevented us from having our annual crab feast for Andrew's birthday, so he drove out to Linden, NJ, where, oddly, there's a place the brings crabs in from Maryland. So we had a nice dinner of crabs and some shrimp for Father's Day dinner.
Then we watched National Treasure 2, which is even more wildly absurd than the first National Treasure. It did make me think that maybe I should have been an archivist. That might have been a way to channel my SAVING tendencies into something other than filling a very nice house with actual trash.
The kids have been swimming every day. Legos are more a focus than ever, but only the Friends figures, not even the bricks.
What We're Reading
Margo: Catherine House by Elisabeth Thomas
Andrew: Collected Essays of James Baldwin
Greta: School for Good and Evil #5
Lucia: all the School for Good and Evil books at once, and also Fox Trot books
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