cool, old.

Today, right at this moment, while I am sitting on the porch and drinking a beer, I am triumphant, and a little bit covered with grime, and also more bejeweled than usual.   We here at team upchurch have a tendency towards disorganization and acquisition of cool old things.  We have a lot of useful things, and lots of cool things,   and a lot of things that straddle the line between old/cool/useful. What I've been doing today is creating the venn diagram of the stuff.  I managed to do a lot of sorting, not much culling.  The culling will be easier now that the sorting is done. 

Today I sorted all of the tools.  We have a lot of tools, from linoleum and wood carving tools to the usual assortment of hammers, screwdrivers, wrenches, saws, cutters, nails and screws and hooks, a few power drills, two dremel tools (the handy dremel moto tool) drill bits, socket wrenches-- all of which could be conceived of as being useful in some way, to things like a length of copper tape, magnetic wire, a rusty crow bar, a very old jig saw and (now) an envelope filled with questionably useful blades for this saw, all of which fall into a gray area.  We also don't throw away each others cool old stuff, so I sorted all of it without questioning the need to keep 17 C clamps of varying sizes.  As I said, the culling comes later.

Tackling the tools led me to the other side of the basement.  I've already sorted and packed up my sewing and fabric stuff, and boxes of old sewing notions, trims, tools and so on.  I don't forsee having time to sew before we move, and I'm very much looking foward to setting up shop on the sun porch in the new house and going into curtain production after we close.  Those are the useful things.  This side of the also  basement creates boxes like the one I packed the other day-  filled with  the special dolls and stuffed animals of my life and my kids  baby lives.  Even my grandma's doll.  A box of dolls and 6 pages of the journal I kept when I was a first time new mother, my wedding flowers wrapped in a scrap of velvet from my mom's wedding dress... this is a well packed box of pure love,  atop which sits the plaster cast of my very pregnant belly from my last baby.  This is a box that probably isn't going to get unpacked anytime soon.  Unless there is a black crisis of epic evil in the world, then I will unleash the power of that box.

I packed a box ( a cool old box naturally) with 11 flocked deer, some embroidery,  vintage button and snap cards, a branch of a giant thorn tree, a (real not flocked)deer skull and a solid perfume pendant of Tabu to make it all smell like 1970.  I unearthed an already packed box, one that I brought home after my Grandma's funeral, of all of her costume jewelry-  the things that she loved enough to take with her to the assisted living apartment from her house.  Louise and I went through all of that tonight-  pendants, clip earrings,  so many sparkly pins, bracelets, strings of beads that always hung off of her mirror and lived on her dresser.  I was fun to go through all of that and see her love of pretty jewelry again.  We repacked that in an old sewing box and are both wearing a lot of it right now.
One of the pieces that came from Florida is a big glass front, glass shelved display case.  My mother in law displayed her extensive Lladro collection in it.  We've never had a display case before and will put all manner of stuff in it.  Like the roly poly clown collection, and the mechanical elephant, and my small ceramic shoes.  We didn't keep any of the Lladro except a little fox and a cat, but they, and the odd rubber hippo from a perfect Iowa garage sale will most likely go in there too.

Look at this one though, I didn't realize Lladro made interesting dust collectors too, and not just freaky elongated turn of the century people.


I also packed up all but a skeleton crew of office supplies, stationary and kids art supplies.  No one uses crayons here, yet I am having a hard time setting them in the give away box.  Surely we will need crayons, even if it is just to melt them.  I discovered a little stack of sympathy cards.  I always buy nice sympathy cards when I see them, because you just never know when you are going to need one, but of course, never knew where they were stashed.  Until now.  They are in that bin marked "stationary and blank journals".


Granted this is only the beginning of the packing, and by the end of it I'm going to be offloading junk like there's no tomorrow, and a lot of what seems keepable today might get down graded from "cool, old" to just "old"