DECLUTTER: *Sorting *Health *Progress - '25-26

Subject: RE: DECLUTTER: *Sorting *Health *Progress - '25-26
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 12 Dec 25 - 10:01 AM

Under the "it could be much worse" heading, this morning, the last in a run of sunny warm days before a forecast big freeze, I have a plumber coming over. After I ran the washer then the dishwasher last night I noticed the toilets were making noise. Turns out the sewer line is running very slow, no doubt backed up by tree roots. I never run the washer and dishwasher simultaneously; consecutively is what spared the house from water from spreading further. My home warranty doesn't pay for tree roots, just plugs in the house line only. I'll call them and then when the plumber is here and once we've sorted out which kind of snake gets run the Home Warranty folks will or won't participate.

I had other stuff to do today, but nothing better than keeping the pipes clear ahead of the holidays. Since a plumber is coming over anyway I'll run out and get a good faucet and have him replace the one in the back yard while he's at it. Its on its last legs (and is full of a silicone gel to prevent the most recent dripping.)

Subject: RE: DECLUTTER: *Sorting *Health *Progress - '25-26
From: Mary G
Date: 12 Dec 25 - 01:51 PM

I had not heard about Chehalis flooding. We are five miles away. Centralia does flood and I asked before I moved in how was my apartment going to be affected. It has a few feet of height off the ground. Centralia floods on I=5 at times. In the meantime, we are bone dry here..a bit of mist or light drizzle. No hard rains at all. I can't evacuate easily because I just scrapped my failing car. Oh well.

Subject: RE: DECLUTTER: *Sorting *Health *Progress - '25-26
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 12 Dec 25 - 10:56 PM

Mary, without a car you may need to be creative if you have to leave (rental? Uber?), but without a car you avoid things like license tag costs and insurance. Sounds like a win to me.

Today the plumber cleared the blockage in the front cleanout and I thought changing out the hose bib would be a piece of cake. Turns out that the hose bib took several tries because whoever (decades ago) crimped an aluminum clamp onto the copper pipe for an antenna wire ground overdid it and the copper pipe was bent a bit oval in shape. That shape kept defeating the new sweated-on fitting. The options were to keep trying or to go into the bathroom and cut a hole in the wall through a cabinet to run a new copper line outside (instead of removing brick). He kept trying and on about the fifth try got it, and really undercharged me for the whole trip. His assistant ran the snake for the sewer line and back and forth to turn water on and off while the faucet was worked on. The bill wasn't nearly as big as it could be, and the tip was pretty close to that amount, worth it to me that he kept working and saved me having to bring in a carpenter to fix the wall. Handing over the tip he said "That much?" - and I told him it was up to him how he shared it, but it was worth his trouble.

That faucet has bugged me for years, I've found many ways to try to prevent it from dripping. As of this evening it's a new faucet and working the way it should.

Now back to everything else I was planning to do today.

Subject: RE: DECLUTTER: *Sorting *Health *Progress - '25-26
From: Charmion
Date: 13 Dec 25 - 11:25 AM

It’s snowing again — still? — but I’m grateful for Ottawa’s comparative calm: no line squalls or white-outs.

Subject: RE: DECLUTTER: *Sorting *Health *Progress - '25-26
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 14 Dec 25 - 12:01 AM

Today I finished reading Adam Minter's Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale, a fascinating look at how people discard items (clothes, appliances, electronics, furniture, books, and everything else somewhat durable) and how other people sort it and redistribute it via thrift stores or exports. Often times involving repair along the way.

I learned something new. The word "shoddy" (as I have understood it) implies something of low workmanship or poorly done, but in fact it is the technical name of recycled or rag wool, and how it is shredded and spun into new fibers for wool products, blankets in particular. Minter discussed the mills that still produce shoddy blankets. Wikipedia has more on recycled wool.

There was also a lot of discussion of the businesses that have grown to sort the households of elderly family members going to nursing homes or work on estates after they have died. In Japan, for example, the used items get more reverence and are desirable in other nations because they were made in Japan and are durable. People who sort household items in turn sell them to exporters. Clothes and furniture head to the Philippines, Malaysia, and China, electronics go to Africa. In a separate chapter he shows how American electronic waste is desirable in Africa because the items sold here last longer once they're reconditioned or repaired and put into service there.

This evening I put a mailing label on a box that holds my father's old Casio electronic calculator. I myself used it for while, usually for income taxes, but in recent times it is redundant because the calculator on my phone is as reliable. People collect these things and someone in Florida has just paid for this bit of electronic memorabilia. As Minter points out, in the end, it's just stuff, and better to find a home where someone will enjoy it now than have it go in the trash later if the kids don't want it.

Cold weather is headed this way and I've been feeling a bit blue, so this evening I made a point of pampering my tomorrow self by changing the bedding (in the time it took to brew a cup of tea), cleaning the kitchen, and doing a load of laundry. I set up the next jigsaw puzzle to work, and at that point realized that while some objects go (the calculator) it's not like I'm giving away my Dad, and the table I use for puzzles was his dining table.

Subject: RE: DECLUTTER: *Sorting *Health *Progress - '25-26
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 14 Dec 25 - 11:46 PM

An appointment I thought was on Thursday seems to be Monday afternoon instead. Must call to confirm the confirmation! I do have running around to do, so I'll make it part of this longish drive (established patient of a Physician's Assistant who moved to a new practice. One visit has to be in person, the rest can be remote.)

Caught up with the next door neighbor today, and we concluded that we'll both need to offer to take the neighbor across the street shopping on a regular basis. She doesn't go out (wheelchair bound) but he does, and is still driving at 90 and has announced that he's going to stop driving next year. I've offered before, but now I'll have to convince him to take me up on it.

More boxes packed for shipping and contents listed. I've pulled a bunch of stuff out of the front room that can go into the recycling bin (I reuse Amazon mailers but lately they're sending a kind of tough kraft bag, they aren't bubble wrap in tough plastic, so they don't work well to pad packages, though they may be better environmentally.) I can see more of the floor and some of the horizontal surfaces in there now. (Also lots of dust, so my tender sinuses aren't a mystery.)

Subject: RE: DECLUTTER: *Sorting *Health *Progress - '25-26
From: Charmion
Date: 15 Dec 25 - 10:41 AM

A fruitcake and a couple of jars of Seville orange marmalade are packed up and ready to mail to Windsor, where Edmund’s favourite sister lives. That errand will force me out of the house today, so I might as well knock off several tasks that have been nibbling at the edge of awareness for a while. What used to be a substantial supply of Christmas wrapping paper is almost exhausted — how did that happen? And I need — excuse me, “need” — some witty Christmas cards, preferably without cats on them.

I am pleased to report that the rubber curb ramps spiked into the driveway are working well to get the car in and out of the garage, especially with a layer of rammed snow on the driveway to improve the angle of the drop. I have to back the car out very gingerly, however, as the clutter of neighbours’ vehicles on the street, the height of the snowbanks, and the lack of a sidewalk make for truly lousy sight-lines. The safest place for pedestrians is the middle of the street.

Backing into the garage turned out to be too dangerous because the rubber ramps are slippery when wet, causing the hind end of the car to slew just when it needs a little extra shot of gas to get up the slope. The last time I did it cost me the driver’s side rearview mirror, and I’m not risking that again. The repair was very expensive, and I had to drive around for two weeks wearing the plastic garbage bag of shame over the wreckage. Changing lanes in the tumult of the Hunt Club Road was no fun, either. I think I put an extra pleat in my neck from peering like an owl over my left shoulder.

Subject: RE: DECLUTTER: *Sorting *Health *Progress - '25-26
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 15 Dec 25 - 11:34 AM

Charmion, it sounds like time to have someone grade that driveway up to the garage lip with a load of asphalt! Didn't you say the rubber edge was there until it is fixed?

Today I have a longish drive, made so by the Corps of Engineers' project called Grapevine Lake. All of my working life in North Texas involved driving around a different dammed lake, I'm accustomed to it, but it does make me wish I had the funds to own a personal helicopter.

This morning the dogs alerted me to the mail carrier on the porch, and I met him in the yard with an eBay box to post, thinking I'd missed him because there was a box for me out there when I looked earlier. He tells me that after Black Friday (and the shopping after) there are so many packages that one run isn't enough, so he's at the post office early just to take boxes around the route. This later run at the regular time he has the rest of the mail pieces. Postal carriers can only accept gifts under $20 (unlike our head of state who can accept any damn thing he wants) so I'll think of something, a gift card or a consumable gift. Over time I put a lot of bottles of water on the porch during the summer heat, but when you buy a case at Costco and give all of them out it only adds up to about $4.

My holiday letters are in the design stage, fitting the text around a few photos. I've proof read it several times but there will be errors that jump out at me once the pages are printed and ready to add a personal note before mailing, it never fails.

Subject: RE: DECLUTTER: *Sorting *Health *Progress - '25-26
From: Charmion
Date: 15 Dec 25 - 06:30 PM

Regrading the driveway has to wait til next spring, Stilly. That's the first major outside project to be done next year; the other is replacing my horrible deck and the even worse fence.

Subject: RE: DECLUTTER: *Sorting *Health *Progress - '25-26
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 15 Dec 25 - 11:32 PM

Your driveway and my paint job, they must wait till spring at the soonest.

I made today's road trip into a loop drive, and the first part was pretty, a northern loop around the lake through the Cross Timbers (also called the Cast Iron Forest) that sports gnarled post oaks and vine-filled wild areas, interspersed with various MacRanches (as compared to MacMansions in town). The return trip went south through the urban heart of the NE section of this county and back around through familiar territory (my old route to and from work). Long day. Makes me wonder what Dorothy is up to with her long drives to and from Beaver, and is pattyClink out driving around the countryside in search of tailings or roadcuts for minerals?

Subject: RE: DECLUTTER: *Sorting *Health *Progress - '25-26
From: pattyClink
Date: 16 Dec 25 - 08:54 AM

Indeed we did some driving this weekend, an expedition with my house guests out to some BLM land hunting for small "Baker" geodes, some quite choice, some with strong fluorescence in their chalcedony. Another drive out scouting the access road on the east side of the Cooke Range, but by the time we got there the sun was going down. It's great field weather right now, but you have to wrap things up before 5:00.

And driving the RV to Albuquerque today, where hopefully much higher visibility will see it get sold.

Subject: RE: DECLUTTER: *Sorting *Health *Progress - '25-26
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 16 Dec 25 - 12:44 PM

I love geodes; the thing about them is having the ability to cut them open. When I was a child my family visited the gem and mineral show at the Seattle Center every year (it was probably one of those things you could do with a family free or really inexpensive) but we loved it. We never went so far as to even buy a tumbler, but the joy of looking inside rocks stuck with me. I worked for the Geology professor for two years in community college, the lab tech doing the sorting for sample trays and cleaning in cabinets full of the minerals he collected. On occasion we poked around in the store room boxes and bags for samples he needed and it was always a treasure hunt (he was also a kind of second dad, especially after my father passed away).

Two days in a row boxes were handed off to the postal carrier, and the most inspiring part of this sales work is the gradual decluttering in the front room. The 5-foot tall rolling shelves in the front hall is doing a lot of work now compared to when it was stashed in the pantry closet. I'm keeping it full of ready-to-ship boxes. I could admit defeat and give all of this away to clear the room quickly, but I might as well do what I planned and sell them. My pocketbook is happy with the results.

Good thing there is a local channel playing a lot of classic movies and musicals, it helps as background entertainment. The news is absolutely grim and reading or hearing accounts once is enough. The Unsinkable Molly Brown is on at the moment. Great musical of a cringe-worthy story. (My cousin lived near her house in Denver and years ago we took a walk to see the neighborhood. Before it was restored it wasn't a lot to look at, I see now it has been turned into a museum.)

Back to work.