2020, Family, home, Mysteries, Radio, Technology, Uncategorized

The Find

73 Comments

This past Saturday morning, right before Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me, Husband and I decided to do a Deep Clean on an alcove right off the kitchen. This corner houses a tall shelf unit full of large items like crock pots and cookbooks, and a small chest of drawers. I had accidentally shoved something behind the tall shelves, noticed when trying to retrieve it that it was pretty dusty back there, and realized that space hadn’t been deep cleaned since we moved in 4 ½ years ago (!).

Well, you know how this goes. In the process of clearing everything off, you find stuff you’d forgotten you had – which gets returned to its proper place or tossed. Stuff piles up in the rest of the house for a while, but you promise you’ll put everything back before day’s end, and you roll up your sleeves. And you swear you won’t let the cleaning lapse for this long again.

Then you move the furniture out so you can sweep and swipe and clean everything in sight, and vacuum out the cobwebs and dust fuzzies. As the small chest was being moved away from the wall, I heard a “thunk” as something dropped to the floor, and discovered… MY CAMERA, which has been A.W.O.L. for about a year. I don’t own a smart phone, and luckily I hadn’t bought a replacement. I am so happy to have it back!

So, for the first time since last December, I’m able to submit a blog post AND supply the photo.

What have you found that was lost?  

What cleaning or clearing project are you likely to accomplish during self-quarantine?

73 thoughts on “The Find”

  1. Shortly after moving to this place–a glorified nursing home, although the management wouldn’t wince to hear me call it that–I sold a copy of my wolf book for $10. The sale amused me because I hadn’t actually touched cash for several years. I didn’t even know what to do with it, so I tucked the crisp $10 bill in a wallet and put the wallet in a safe place.

    I haven’t seen it since. I don’t imagine I ever will. I have a limited amount of storage space here, much of it more theoretical than real. I’m not capable of accessing anything high (it hurts to stretch up) or low (because I don’t bend well). I’ve explored all the mid-level places, so I’m confident the wallet isn’t there. When I leave this place, as I surely will some day, the person who cleans up will be rewarded with a bill bearing a handsome portrait of Alexander Hamilton.

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  2. We cleaned out and organized all the kitchen cupboards and drawers a few weeks ago. The next chore is cleaning the cabinet fronts. We are active and messy cooks.

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    1. I keep putting it off because now I have committed to making 12 kinds of Christmas cookies, and I don’t want to clean before the baking is done. At least the lefse is done. That is the messiest of all

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  3. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    During the next month we will be packing up the entire kitchen. This leaves me wondering what I will find. Monday we meet with the contractor to choose and order various elements of the project, and probably give him a down payment. Then the organizing and packing will start in earnest—we will pack up the kitchen, then pack up the car for our AZ foray.

    I often tidy up one cupboard at a time. Each one of those projects produces things I lost that I find, or old stuff I should have thrown away a long time ago. My neighbor’s house key was buried in the coffee cup cupboard. Years ago I took care of her cat while she visited her daughter. The cat has since passed on. I took the key over to her, and she told me to keep it, “Just in case” she needs to call someone or loses hers. I hope we don’t lose it.

    During the winter of late 2017-2018, we stayed in AZ only one month due to illnesses of friends here. Later in March Lou’s best friend died and my co-worker/friend’s daughter had her kidney transplant in April. So we rented our condo to a couple during February and March of that year—that money paid for a new floor. When I got back there in late April I found that the renter re-arranged the entire kitchen, lining all the cupboards with paper towels. She even got into our bins of personal items and arranged those to her satisfaction. I could not find ANYTHING. It was one of the most irritating renter behaviors, ever.

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      1. As you seem to appreciate, BiR, one sign of aging is that the pile of mystery keys gets bigger and bigger. When you throw an extra key in a drawer full of weird miscellaneous stuff, you know what it opens. A few years or decades later, you probably don’t have a guess about what it opens, and yet we are afraid to chuck all the keys we have collected. It’s probably a metaphor for aging: all that accumulated crap that somehow seems too important to throw out and yet has no discernible function!

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    2. I had a sub in my classroom for 3 days while I was at a workshop. After the second day my students went almost en mass to complain about her. He replaced her for the last day. (So my sub had a sub.) She threw out my lessons and taught the students in journalism to write memos then assigned the students to write memos to me about how I was a bad teacher. She knew nothing about me, btw. She had just moved to town. The students were not defending me so much as tired of what she said to them about them. Reason I am bringing this up now: she rearranged my desk, threw out some things, and rearranged the classroom back to desks in straight rows. She apologized to the principal and got hired for one day for a business teacher. She was dismissed at noon.
      I have, I suspect HAD, about a 15 tree ornaments I carved, a flock of chickadees, a cardinal, a blue jay, and about 6 various Santas. They were missing last year. Still absent this year. Two carved ornaments she bought are still here. I suspect she trashed them.

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      1. Well, there is a mental health diagnosis for her—I’ll bet she had a short career as a sub. We could devise a similar Trumpian Trail Baboon exercise for all of us: memos about how everyone else is a bad Trail denizen. Divide and conquer and create conflict. Good grief.

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  4. In mid-December I am scheduled to get a fine new water meter, courtesy of the city. In order to have that water meter installed, I am instructed to have a “clear path” to the existing meter. Currently the “path” in the basement to that wall is, um, not clear. It is, in fact, piled high with stuff from the living room and Husband’s office that we moved there when we had painting done a year and a half ago. Heaven knows what I will rediscover as I peek into boxes and move things around.

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        2. They still need to take out the old one… so even if they install outside, I have to get them to the inside one. 😦 On the bright side, I can use this as an opportunity to thin out the stacks of sci-fi paperbacks that Husband insisted on keeping even though he did not re-read them…

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        2. tim, its been done. Go to Amazon and type in ‘How not to be an A-hole’. There are about 13 version with various titles…

          We first saw this several years ago; considered one for a guy we know.

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        4. but it needs to be presented in a way that gets reviews like the new netflix ditty

          if chess can be made fashionable how about being a wonderful person. imagine the world where being wonderful became a model behavior. live it forward.
          use the 12 step method. don’t claim to be wonderful forever just choose to be wonderful in the moment
          have meetings to fight those non constructive thoughts and sponsees who help you in a moment if weakness
          titles are not what i’m wanting to introduce. substance is all i care about

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    3. We watched it a few weeks ago. It was very engaging, but not enough to inspire me to take up chess.

      Back when we could still go safely to estate sales, at one for an expired dentist, I picked up a chess set where all the pieces were shaped like teeth. It looked like this: https://sourceonedental.com/dental-chess-set

      How could I pass that up? So many of the pieces were modeled on molars, you had to be a dentist to tell them apart. As I’ve indicated, I was unlikely to ever use it and my son-in-law coveted it, so I made it one of his Christmas presents last year.

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  7. i never lose anything but i misplace things so often i have developed a mindset to match. the additionally frustrating part is that when i find it after it’s missing period i set it down and walk around in circles until my sherlock brain helps me relocate it
    my warehouse cleaning currently is giving me glimpses into lots of cool stuff i will find when i get to it. boxes in boxes

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  8. Welcome back BiR!
    My college has gone to all online for the next two weeks. Most of us think they should just go to the end of the semester on 12/18, but It sounds like it’s the nursing and related classes that need the labs is the reason they didn’t. Or maybe they’ll just have them back.
    Anyway, I am working from home too, now. Brought home a laptop, monitor, docking station, lighting console programming wing, and one small moving light.
    Spent yesterday cleaning up an office downstairs so I have a place to set all this up. Found some old family pictures I had forgot about, found an official birth certificate for one of the kids, and a few other odds and ends. Also lost a utility knife in the process…
    You win some, you loose some.

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    2. Hey! Found the utility knife!
      I’ve thrown out a lot of stuff related to the milk cows. Calendars from the breeders that had breeding notes on them, calendars from the co-op that had notes on them that didn’t make any sense to me anymore. A lot of old bank papers. Pulled up part of the old carpet in there (hence the utility knife), hauled out two old printers and one old computer. Four large black garbage bags worth. Funny; it seemed important at the time, you know?
      I’ll try not to be so LOOSE with my standards after this, so I won’t LOSE anything anymore…

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  9. OT – For a little diversion, try this. Do a Google search on wizard of oz. Then click on red shoes. Next click on the Tornado. Those Google engineers are pretty cleaver.

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      1. Oh. Now that’s nice. Everyone handled that perfectly. It could have gone wrong in so many ways.
        (A little impressive too that sometimes once you move a piano you want it tuned again)
        The only thing I’ve seen close to that was a preview performance (the night ((or nights)) before opening). First song there was a mic issue to the point they had to stop and fix it. So the rest of the band just started some jazz and riffed until the mic was fixed. Better than standing there awkwardly waiting…

        A few times there have been major issues with some lighting or technology and I went out with the director before the show and just explained to the audience what was going on and why things would look “off”. And the audience has always applauded more than usual those nights; We’re all in this together; they feel for the performers too.

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  11. Losing my ten-dollar bill and wallet was embarrassing, for I haven’t lost anything in a very long time. The key to that was coming up with a rule: I never put a thing down where it has never been before. If it goes missing, I only have a place or two or three to look.

    That system got blown up when I moved to my fourth home in six years. You can’t put something where it was before when you are in a brand new living space where you have NO history of putting things away. And if you don’t touch cash for several years, you obviously don’t have a usual place to store it.

    It is a miracle if I can find a cooking device. My current kitchen has ONE drawer in which I can keep all the cooking aids I’ve accumulated in a lifetime: lemon squeezer, timers, knives, egg slicers, can openers, cooking thermometers . . . all of that in a drawer about twelve inches wide!

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  12. I’ve gotten quite a bit done since March that might not have gotten done if it weren’t for Covid. Several projects outside including staining the fence and replacing fence posts and gate (although I will admit I didn’t do the gate myself.). And a fair number of inside projects as well. I actually have on my to do list to do some organizing and cleaning in the attic next but that may have to wait until after Thanksgiving.

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    1. I built a mini deck (or an elaborate set of stairs outside our back door where there had been a “temporary” set of stairs for about four years since I added a back door to the house. It felt good to accomplish something tangible.

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  13. I have to get a new water heater, so that will inc=volve a lot of shuffling things around in the basement. And they will likely have to take at least one door off the hinges to get the old water heater out and the new water heater in. It would be a good opportunity to do a thorough organization of the basement. We’ll see if that actually happens. I’ll let you know if I find something that was lost. Who knows what is in that basement.

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