The Fall school term begins in one week and my minions are back. Once again I am asking them to go above and beyond - to actually work.
They are really good workers - they get to do things like clean aquariums and wash glassware and top off stain bottles. They sort slides and clean the oil off of them. They clean microscopes and flush eyewashes. They cart heavy bags of sand and soil to the second floor greenhouse when the elevators are being worked on. They restock supply drawers, make media for the Micro labs and then get to wash more glassware. They organize the (hot and muggy) greenhouse and work on its (recalcitrant) irrigation system...
Without them I would be dead in the water.
All I ask is that they get ALL of the algae out of the aquariums - that they autoclave the aquarium gravel before reassembling said aquariums - and that they do the jobs completely and SAFELY.
If they want to be Whiny McWhinersons while doing so - OK by me.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Larry, Moe, and Curly Prune a Cactus
What kind of cactus? I don't know. The kind that is BIG with prickly stuff on it - but not too spiky or I wouldn't have dared.
On Saturday Stubble, one of his friends, and I took on a HUGE cactus. Well, huge for us. Judging by the 6 foot tall stockade fence on top of a 2 foot high retaining wall that it was leaning against, the cactus was at least 9 feet high. And just guessing by the sound of gushing water that came from underneath it every time the sprinklers were turned on, it had grown through something important.
Earlier in the week I had watched a video on an Arizona landscaper's website that described how to cut back a large cactus. The process involves a pruning saw, a large piece of carpet, leather gloves, and patience.
The Bearded One (always ready to improve on procedures) suggested that our sawsall might be of use (there goes the patience part). As it turns out, what the sawsall does is to turn the cactus to mush while making no appreciable progress at severing the desired section. Sadly, the boys put away the power tool and the "Diablo" blades - chosen for their name rather than their usefulness... The non- corded, non-battery powered pruning saw cut through the cactus in no time flat.
Comedy ensued as the three of us tried to use the pruning saw, control the portion of the cactus being cut, and keep everyone safe from the visciously toothed (and hugely overgrown) Aloe adjacent to the cactus. All while balancing on the retaining wall.
Surprisingly nobody fell of the wall or had cactus land on their heads, but both Stubble and I were greviously wounded by the Aloe.
In a remarkably short time the desisred portion of the cactus was removed and we started on the irrigation. I breathed a HUGE sigh of relief when we discovered that the damage was to a portion of drip line rather than to a sprinkler riser. The cactus, not one to give up easily, held onto the drip line as we pulled and hauled at it. After much sweating and cursing, we abandoned the drip line in place (under the cactus) and ran a new line which works just fine, thank you very much!
Our souveniers from the experience are about 300 pounds of cactus in the composting bin, a horrible sunburn on Stubble's shoulders ( I told him to use sunscreen), and battle scars from the aloe on all parts of our wrists and arms that weren't covered by leather.
I sincerely hope that every plant "downstream" from the cactus will be appropriately grateful for the repair when they are watered each month (during the summer -during the rainy season they are on their own).
For those of you who care about such things, from the internet search that I did after writing the major portion of this - the cactus is of the San Pedro variety - very fast growing and known for it's mescaline content. (shhhhhhh!)
On Saturday Stubble, one of his friends, and I took on a HUGE cactus. Well, huge for us. Judging by the 6 foot tall stockade fence on top of a 2 foot high retaining wall that it was leaning against, the cactus was at least 9 feet high. And just guessing by the sound of gushing water that came from underneath it every time the sprinklers were turned on, it had grown through something important.
Earlier in the week I had watched a video on an Arizona landscaper's website that described how to cut back a large cactus. The process involves a pruning saw, a large piece of carpet, leather gloves, and patience.
The Bearded One (always ready to improve on procedures) suggested that our sawsall might be of use (there goes the patience part). As it turns out, what the sawsall does is to turn the cactus to mush while making no appreciable progress at severing the desired section. Sadly, the boys put away the power tool and the "Diablo" blades - chosen for their name rather than their usefulness... The non- corded, non-battery powered pruning saw cut through the cactus in no time flat.
Comedy ensued as the three of us tried to use the pruning saw, control the portion of the cactus being cut, and keep everyone safe from the visciously toothed (and hugely overgrown) Aloe adjacent to the cactus. All while balancing on the retaining wall.
Surprisingly nobody fell of the wall or had cactus land on their heads, but both Stubble and I were greviously wounded by the Aloe.
In a remarkably short time the desisred portion of the cactus was removed and we started on the irrigation. I breathed a HUGE sigh of relief when we discovered that the damage was to a portion of drip line rather than to a sprinkler riser. The cactus, not one to give up easily, held onto the drip line as we pulled and hauled at it. After much sweating and cursing, we abandoned the drip line in place (under the cactus) and ran a new line which works just fine, thank you very much!
Our souveniers from the experience are about 300 pounds of cactus in the composting bin, a horrible sunburn on Stubble's shoulders ( I told him to use sunscreen), and battle scars from the aloe on all parts of our wrists and arms that weren't covered by leather.
I sincerely hope that every plant "downstream" from the cactus will be appropriately grateful for the repair when they are watered each month (during the summer -during the rainy season they are on their own).
For those of you who care about such things, from the internet search that I did after writing the major portion of this - the cactus is of the San Pedro variety - very fast growing and known for it's mescaline content. (shhhhhhh!)
Thursday, July 19, 2012
All Creatures Great and not-so-Great
"The birds are screaming," said Ms. Flippers on Friday morning.
We have a family of house sparrows nesting in a v-shaped support under the deck. The Bearded One tried to evict them by removing the beginnings of their nest several weeks ago, but they were too fast for him in the end. He went to work one day and by the time he got home, the nest was completed and they had already begun to live in it.
It isn't that The Bearded One hates birds, although he would rather that they didn't make a terrible racket outside the bedroom window early in the morning, it is that they use things that he cares about as a bathroom - like his car and the deck furniture and the deck itself.
One thing that Bearded One would dearly love to do is to remove the old (and now useless) TV antenna from the chimney. The house has been modified for both cable and dish, yet the old antenna is still there providing a handy perch for birds that want to foul the stairs and handrail leading from the patio to the deck. Last weekend he got out the power washer. He cleaned the stairs and after much intervention and much grumbling, agreed not to power wash the deck while the birds were in residence - the fact that there were eggs in the nest did a lot to dissuade him.
The nest was occupied, the eggs had hatched, and on Friday morning (following an unexpected summer rain on Thursday night) it was collapsing. Ms. Flippers, an incipient wildlife biologist, was concerned. We got gloves and tried to push the nest back together, but it was too far gone. Deciding that if we did nothing the nestlings would die but if we did SOMETHING there was a chance - we got a 4 cup gladware bowl, slid the remains of the nest (and one of the nestlings) into it, retrieved the second nestling from the bare wood of the deck support and gaffer taped the entire thing in place. Then we sat back to see whether or not the bird parents (who had been watching the entire enterprise from the back fence) would return.
Yes, with in about 10 minutes they were back and have seemed to be unaffected by the presence of the plastic bowl. We still hear cheeping from the nestlings and see them feeding every evening while we watch Jeopardy, so we know that all is well.
All being well - that brings us to the crows (again). There is a HUGE flock of them in the neighborhood and they LOVE our yard - well, not so much the yard as the power line that runs across the back of the property. It is the perfect vantage point for them to survey the "done-ness" of the produce. They started with our peaches. They have moved on to our tomatoes and our cucumbers. At this point we are thankful that they seem not to care for the Persian Cucumbers... because that is all that we have left that has not been pecked to inedibility. We have yet to get an undamaged tomato off of any of the myriad plants that we put in. They have also started in on the green beans. We tried the Trail of Tears beans
that are green to purplish red with black bean centers. They are a "dual use" bean - either as snap beans or as dry beans. Very cool! Except the dang birds eat the "outside" bean and then spit out the black inside bean, leaving quite a mess in the garden.
The Bearded One has installed an electronic scare crow - the same one that we used last summer as a "scare raccoon" by the pond:
(see this), (and this), and (this)
You just set the frequency differently and aim it at the garden. Since its installation 4 days ago we have had no crows show up to feast. Of course, we have had no mature edibles for them to attack either. Time will tell as far as the crows go, but we do know that Stubble and The Bearded One can no longer go into the back yard because the high frequency hurts their ears. The "new" plan (should this prove to work long term) is to hardwire the Yard Sentinnel(s) - I figure I need two more of them - and install an off switch near the back door to allow for man-type back yard work.
Now for the majestic, non-garden eating part of the animal world:
Last weekend it was The Bearded One's birthday. We celebrated by having good weather and going sailing. While we were tooling along the coast with me reading a biography of Jimmy Stewart, Stubble handling the jib sheets, and Ms. Flippers fishing off the stern; the Bearded One suddenly ordered,
"Reel it in! There are dolphins!"
And there certainly were dolphins. Usually if we see them at all it is one or two playing in the breakers outside the harbor. This time is was a pod (if that is the correct term) heading north along the same course we were following. There were probably 20 of them - racing each other and dancing in the sunshine. They were beside us for quite awhile and it was pretty spectacular. I much prefer them to crows.
And the really whippy part of this display of nature is that the night before, Ms. Flippers had given him a dolphin sculpture as a birthday gift.
Happy Birthday Bearded One. Isn't it nice that I was able to arrange for live dolphins at the last minute?
We have a family of house sparrows nesting in a v-shaped support under the deck. The Bearded One tried to evict them by removing the beginnings of their nest several weeks ago, but they were too fast for him in the end. He went to work one day and by the time he got home, the nest was completed and they had already begun to live in it.
It isn't that The Bearded One hates birds, although he would rather that they didn't make a terrible racket outside the bedroom window early in the morning, it is that they use things that he cares about as a bathroom - like his car and the deck furniture and the deck itself.
One thing that Bearded One would dearly love to do is to remove the old (and now useless) TV antenna from the chimney. The house has been modified for both cable and dish, yet the old antenna is still there providing a handy perch for birds that want to foul the stairs and handrail leading from the patio to the deck. Last weekend he got out the power washer. He cleaned the stairs and after much intervention and much grumbling, agreed not to power wash the deck while the birds were in residence - the fact that there were eggs in the nest did a lot to dissuade him.
The nest was occupied, the eggs had hatched, and on Friday morning (following an unexpected summer rain on Thursday night) it was collapsing. Ms. Flippers, an incipient wildlife biologist, was concerned. We got gloves and tried to push the nest back together, but it was too far gone. Deciding that if we did nothing the nestlings would die but if we did SOMETHING there was a chance - we got a 4 cup gladware bowl, slid the remains of the nest (and one of the nestlings) into it, retrieved the second nestling from the bare wood of the deck support and gaffer taped the entire thing in place. Then we sat back to see whether or not the bird parents (who had been watching the entire enterprise from the back fence) would return.
Yes, with in about 10 minutes they were back and have seemed to be unaffected by the presence of the plastic bowl. We still hear cheeping from the nestlings and see them feeding every evening while we watch Jeopardy, so we know that all is well.
All being well - that brings us to the crows (again). There is a HUGE flock of them in the neighborhood and they LOVE our yard - well, not so much the yard as the power line that runs across the back of the property. It is the perfect vantage point for them to survey the "done-ness" of the produce. They started with our peaches. They have moved on to our tomatoes and our cucumbers. At this point we are thankful that they seem not to care for the Persian Cucumbers... because that is all that we have left that has not been pecked to inedibility. We have yet to get an undamaged tomato off of any of the myriad plants that we put in. They have also started in on the green beans. We tried the Trail of Tears beans
The Bearded One has installed an electronic scare crow - the same one that we used last summer as a "scare raccoon" by the pond:
(see this), (and this), and (this)
You just set the frequency differently and aim it at the garden. Since its installation 4 days ago we have had no crows show up to feast. Of course, we have had no mature edibles for them to attack either. Time will tell as far as the crows go, but we do know that Stubble and The Bearded One can no longer go into the back yard because the high frequency hurts their ears. The "new" plan (should this prove to work long term) is to hardwire the Yard Sentinnel(s) - I figure I need two more of them - and install an off switch near the back door to allow for man-type back yard work.
Now for the majestic, non-garden eating part of the animal world:
Last weekend it was The Bearded One's birthday. We celebrated by having good weather and going sailing. While we were tooling along the coast with me reading a biography of Jimmy Stewart, Stubble handling the jib sheets, and Ms. Flippers fishing off the stern; the Bearded One suddenly ordered,
"Reel it in! There are dolphins!"
And there certainly were dolphins. Usually if we see them at all it is one or two playing in the breakers outside the harbor. This time is was a pod (if that is the correct term) heading north along the same course we were following. There were probably 20 of them - racing each other and dancing in the sunshine. They were beside us for quite awhile and it was pretty spectacular. I much prefer them to crows.
And the really whippy part of this display of nature is that the night before, Ms. Flippers had given him a dolphin sculpture as a birthday gift.
Happy Birthday Bearded One. Isn't it nice that I was able to arrange for live dolphins at the last minute?
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
A savage horde of Crows
They are in the neighborhood. They love sweet things. Juicy things. Soft things.
Like peaches.
Except for the first two pickings (My husband got about a dozen and I got about a dozen. Ms. Flippers got 2 and Stubble got none) - the CROWS got ALL OF THEM.
Dang black winged vermin!
Like peaches.
Except for the first two pickings (My husband got about a dozen and I got about a dozen. Ms. Flippers got 2 and Stubble got none) - the CROWS got ALL OF THEM.
Dang black winged vermin!
Thursday, June 14, 2012
And How Does Your Garden Grow?
So this was supposed to publish on June 14th...guess what didn't happen?
Very well, thank you. The silver bells and cockleshells are doing just fine and the pretty maid (Ms. Flippers) just hand pollinated the corn last night.
I have learned lots and lots about vegetable gardening lately, my previous attempts at raising veggies being the type that occurr in pots on decks and patios. Some of those were wildly successful, some not so much - like when a local wild animal got onto the deck and overturned pots of herbs (turned out all he really wanted was the cat nip)...or when I tried the much advertised Topsy-Turvy...
What I have learned, in general, is that it is all just one grand experiment. I have been reading mini-farming books and following several Extension Services (did you know that there is one land grant college in each state that is required to maintain an Extension Service and that this is all part of the USDA's education program?). Here is a summary of the knowledge that I have gleaned:
The plan next year, after figuring out what went well and what didn't is to amend the soil as needed and to plant at least half of the available garden - starting in September with the cool weather root vegetables... in the spring around March/April we will start the melons and such...
Here's to my Mom, daughter of the soil (well, a dairy farmer), who always had fresh green beans in her garden - and tomatoes that we could just pick and eat whenever we felt like it. Here's to Mom, from whom I inherited my love of dirty fingernails and my inability to keep garden gloves on when I'm weeding. Here's to my Mom who would be as excited over my drip irrigation system as I am.
As the Bearded One said last weekend when we were changing out irrigation heads and replacing drip tubing and I was as filthy and muddy as a kid in a puddle and had a grin to match, "You really love this, don't you?"
Ay-Yup!
Very well, thank you. The silver bells and cockleshells are doing just fine and the pretty maid (Ms. Flippers) just hand pollinated the corn last night.
I have learned lots and lots about vegetable gardening lately, my previous attempts at raising veggies being the type that occurr in pots on decks and patios. Some of those were wildly successful, some not so much - like when a local wild animal got onto the deck and overturned pots of herbs (turned out all he really wanted was the cat nip)...or when I tried the much advertised Topsy-Turvy...
What I have learned, in general, is that it is all just one grand experiment. I have been reading mini-farming books and following several Extension Services (did you know that there is one land grant college in each state that is required to maintain an Extension Service and that this is all part of the USDA's education program?). Here is a summary of the knowledge that I have gleaned:
- Don't start out big. That way lies disaster and/or insanity. We currently have about 5 rows of our total garden space under cultivation.
- Every individual environment is different from the acidity of the soil to the clay content to its water retention properties. This means that any given set of "soil additives" are not universal and although you can get information on what is known about "your general area" it won't apply to your own backyard. You need to TEST and EXPERIMENT and PRAY. I will be contacting my local extension service office (only about 5 miles away) to learn all about soil testing.
- A cucumber is not a cucumber is not a cucumber: As you can tell from the dizzying array of choices at Home Depot, there are many species of tomato from which you can choose. Guess What? Not all of them will do equally well in every yard. My reading instructed me to choose several varieties of each thing that I wanted to raise and plant them all to see which ones did best in my soil and which one(s) my family liked. With luck they will like at least one variety of each thing that grows.
- In my area I should be able to garden year round. We don't get hard frosts. Or maybe only one a year. On the plus side this means that I can use the garden space year round to raise broccoli. On the negative side it means that I can't grow my favorite apples that require over 100 days of freezing temperatures to blossom and produce fruit.
- Just because you can grow from heirloom seeds and save them and replant next year doesn't mean that they will be disease reisitant. Oh NO. Some of them will be very tasty but extremely delicate...
- Tell your husband NOT TO KILL THE LADYBUGS! Or the spiders.
The plan next year, after figuring out what went well and what didn't is to amend the soil as needed and to plant at least half of the available garden - starting in September with the cool weather root vegetables... in the spring around March/April we will start the melons and such...
Here's to my Mom, daughter of the soil (well, a dairy farmer), who always had fresh green beans in her garden - and tomatoes that we could just pick and eat whenever we felt like it. Here's to Mom, from whom I inherited my love of dirty fingernails and my inability to keep garden gloves on when I'm weeding. Here's to my Mom who would be as excited over my drip irrigation system as I am.
As the Bearded One said last weekend when we were changing out irrigation heads and replacing drip tubing and I was as filthy and muddy as a kid in a puddle and had a grin to match, "You really love this, don't you?"
Ay-Yup!
Friday, June 8, 2012
Forgotten Treasures
Apparently, I have been writing (seriously) for a long time. How this could have slipped my mind is beyond me. I knew that there were many things out there that I had started but never finished. As far as I know, the only things that I have finished literary wise are three song lyrics (only one with an accompanying melody) and two NaNoWriMo challenges.
As I dug through boxes that my Mom had sent from back East to California long, long ago I found notebooks and folders and little pieces of paperclipped paper. Most had in them at least the rough draft of a first chapter. Some had only a first paragraph or a first sentence. One had only a name on a piece of scrap paper - but what a name: It is apparently the only female character in all of the writing that I have done who is not (at least initially) named "Sarah". What I was going to DO with her I have no idea, but at least she wasn't "Sarah". My mother's name wasn't Sarah, there really aren't any Sarah's in my family; maybe like Elwood P. Dowd, I always had such hopes for the name.
I consider these finds to be treasure of a sort. I surprise myself by how much I like what I have written. I wind up thinking: "Well, that was certainly written by a 24 year old, but it is a fun story." Or "What great characters! Instead of just following them through this little crisis in life, how much fun would it be to visit them 30 years later?" Or "Oh crap! I've started this same story three different times in slightly different ways - maybe that means that I'm supposed to actually finish it!"
I am currently in the process of moving all of my writing from scraps of paper to a USB device so that all of the dusty, yellowing sheets of paper don't completely disintegrate on me. Then I will do what mature adults do: back it up and put a copy in the fireproof safe. Because if I can lose all of this for 20 years by stuffing it into an old shoe box and stuffing THAT into the back of a dresser drawer and then "getting on with life", I could certainly lose my stories forever. Already it has become apparent that using the turquoise felt tip pen to write deathless prose was somewhat less than a success - readability wise.
Do I believe that I will ever finish these stories? Probably not the science fiction one that involves a version of the moonspinners of Greek legend, but I realize that I turned the main plotlines of it into a short story about my cat and fairies in the garden that was written for my great nephew..."Rufus and the Handmaidens of Time" (one of the finished NaNoWriMo projects).
Probably not the mystery about a library researcher in the days of InfoSearch Services (where college students were sent into the University stacks to copy chapters and articles and such for pay) - we all just google it now and nobody could relate to poor "Cassie" (original character name, "Sarah") these days.
But now I have hard evidence that all of my free time in earlier days was NOT spent shopping, watching TV or playing "Pong"...
so there, Stubble!
As I dug through boxes that my Mom had sent from back East to California long, long ago I found notebooks and folders and little pieces of paperclipped paper. Most had in them at least the rough draft of a first chapter. Some had only a first paragraph or a first sentence. One had only a name on a piece of scrap paper - but what a name: It is apparently the only female character in all of the writing that I have done who is not (at least initially) named "Sarah". What I was going to DO with her I have no idea, but at least she wasn't "Sarah". My mother's name wasn't Sarah, there really aren't any Sarah's in my family; maybe like Elwood P. Dowd, I always had such hopes for the name.
I consider these finds to be treasure of a sort. I surprise myself by how much I like what I have written. I wind up thinking: "Well, that was certainly written by a 24 year old, but it is a fun story." Or "What great characters! Instead of just following them through this little crisis in life, how much fun would it be to visit them 30 years later?" Or "Oh crap! I've started this same story three different times in slightly different ways - maybe that means that I'm supposed to actually finish it!"
I am currently in the process of moving all of my writing from scraps of paper to a USB device so that all of the dusty, yellowing sheets of paper don't completely disintegrate on me. Then I will do what mature adults do: back it up and put a copy in the fireproof safe. Because if I can lose all of this for 20 years by stuffing it into an old shoe box and stuffing THAT into the back of a dresser drawer and then "getting on with life", I could certainly lose my stories forever. Already it has become apparent that using the turquoise felt tip pen to write deathless prose was somewhat less than a success - readability wise.
Do I believe that I will ever finish these stories? Probably not the science fiction one that involves a version of the moonspinners of Greek legend, but I realize that I turned the main plotlines of it into a short story about my cat and fairies in the garden that was written for my great nephew..."Rufus and the Handmaidens of Time" (one of the finished NaNoWriMo projects).
Probably not the mystery about a library researcher in the days of InfoSearch Services (where college students were sent into the University stacks to copy chapters and articles and such for pay) - we all just google it now and nobody could relate to poor "Cassie" (original character name, "Sarah") these days.
But now I have hard evidence that all of my free time in earlier days was NOT spent shopping, watching TV or playing "Pong"...
so there, Stubble!
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Precious Things
We first knew something was wrong when we opened her top dresser drawer and found it full of newspaper bags. All carefully folded into 1" squares and neatly stacked.
My Mother in Law was a hoarder before there was a reality TV show for it. The Bearded One thought nothing of it for a long time because he had always lived that way - with a Mom who paid the bills and then put them aside for further action (in their original envelopes with check numbers and notes written on them).
When I first knew him and went to visit his family, the house was cluttered but as I knew that my Mom was not normal (in a cleaning sense) I didn't think anything of it either. After all, a cousin trying to comfort me over the state of my apartment had said, "You know that you shouldn't feel bad - you lived with someone that it is impossible to live up to." And I eventually came to accept the fact that not everybody lived in a home that looked like you had a live in maid and ate every night like you had a cook on staff...My Mother: The original "Wonder Woman"!
When we visited my MIL after having a child we noticed that the "stuff" had multiplied. Every surface was piled with papers. There were stacks of things in corners. There were stacks of things under chairs. There was a path from the living room to the kitchen. A path from the bedroom to the bathroom.
I joke a lot about hoarding with respect to my family's life and we DO keep a lot of "stuff" but my late mother-in-law was a full on worthy-of-intervention-hoarder. She has been gone for a number of years now, and at the time she passed, we didn't have a clinical term for what she did to her surroundings and her belongings. As The Bearded One cleaned up her effects he found:
It is so sad when everything in your life becomes so "precious" that at the end there is nothing much of value left.
My Mother in Law was a hoarder before there was a reality TV show for it. The Bearded One thought nothing of it for a long time because he had always lived that way - with a Mom who paid the bills and then put them aside for further action (in their original envelopes with check numbers and notes written on them).
When I first knew him and went to visit his family, the house was cluttered but as I knew that my Mom was not normal (in a cleaning sense) I didn't think anything of it either. After all, a cousin trying to comfort me over the state of my apartment had said, "You know that you shouldn't feel bad - you lived with someone that it is impossible to live up to." And I eventually came to accept the fact that not everybody lived in a home that looked like you had a live in maid and ate every night like you had a cook on staff...My Mother: The original "Wonder Woman"!
When we visited my MIL after having a child we noticed that the "stuff" had multiplied. Every surface was piled with papers. There were stacks of things in corners. There were stacks of things under chairs. There was a path from the living room to the kitchen. A path from the bedroom to the bathroom.
I joke a lot about hoarding with respect to my family's life and we DO keep a lot of "stuff" but my late mother-in-law was a full on worthy-of-intervention-hoarder. She has been gone for a number of years now, and at the time she passed, we didn't have a clinical term for what she did to her surroundings and her belongings. As The Bearded One cleaned up her effects he found:
- An entire bedroom closet full of paper towel and toilet paper
- 12 medium sized moving boxes of unworn clothing - still with tags and/or in original wrappers
- Paper bags full of chipped dishes (formerly good china) and mismatched silverware
- BOXES full of financial records - back to the 1950's
- Boxes and old suitcases full of family photos ( the people in which could no longer be identified because there was no longer anyone alive to do so).
- Envelopes FULL of old postage stamps that were put away unused when postage increased. The oldest was an entire roll of 8 cent stamps featuring Dwight Eisenhower. I won't be purchasing stamps for years!
- Letters written to her by The Bearded One's Dad when they were courting and lived in different states
- Congratulatory telegrams that they had received on their wedding day
- the cake topper from their wedding cake, carefully wrapped in tissue
- The Bearded One's first pair of shoes - bronzed
- Old high school and college transcripts that gave the lie to everything she had told The Bearded One about her own academic career
- Professionally taken portraits of The Bearded One and his mother, each holding a cat - looking cross-eyed and/or goofy (the people, not the cats)
- Lovingly wrapped coffee mugs, ashtrays, memory books, knick knacks, what nots, and dust catchers - all featuring owls in some form
- TRUNKS of sheet music dating back into the 1920's that had belonged to The Bearded One's Dad (a professional musician) - the majority of it disintegrating and moldy
- Cases of recordings made by The Bearded One's Dad and his students
- Hand written sheet music given to The Bearded One's Dad - with copyrights and publishing information gleefully written in
- Personally inscribed photos of the Dad's former students who had "made it big"
- A folded flag - having been used in a burial at sea way back in WW I - the name of the deceased having been lost in time
It is so sad when everything in your life becomes so "precious" that at the end there is nothing much of value left.
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