At Work

Yesterday, we set to first thing in the morning, getting together a truckload of stuff to go to the dump.  Easy decisions, even my collection of rusted and flattened tin cans which I've been getting together for a grand project over the last five or so years.  Have to postpone that.  There's another collection down at the Washington house, so it's still on the list; just postponed.  Then Ed started work on his retaining wall rail in the afternoon while I got together a half-dozen large bags of stuff to go to the thrift store.  There will be more, much more of that, but I kind of like getting it moved out a bit of a time. 

Yesterday morning, the blog, 'Calculated Risk,' had a quotation from the NYTimes about people whose houses are underwater and are walking away from them. “We’re now at the point of maximum vulnerability. People’s emotional attachment to their property is melting into the air.”  Sam Khater, senior economist at First American CoreLogic.

I certainly could relate to that.  Of course, I have been doing this work for six months, just at a much slower pace.  Now we are into the money game, so to speak.  I don't really have a good sense of how much we can get done over this week, but it feels pretty promising.  The house will still have a full set of furniture, of course, but I'd like to have all the other stuff down to a reasonable minimum.  People looking to buy don't care whether the closet is full of clothes, I presume.

Today, Ed's brother Dave and Dave's wife Margie drove up from eastern Oregon to spend 3 or 4 days with us.  Dave is, as I write and as the sun goes down, out working on the retaining wall.  It is great to have them here, partly because it adds some different conversation to the day.  Tonight we'll watch the first half of 'Heaven's Gate,' I think, a movie we saw when it came out and a movie that was roundly reviled.  We wondered whether it would look different, twenty, twenty-five years later, whether Michael Cimino could fairly say, 'I was robbed.'

In town today, on my way to the grocery store, I saw a bus pull up to the local ice rink and unload an Olympic team of, I think, curlers.  They were all dressed in matching white costumes that made them look kind of like astronauts.  Reminds me to recommend you try to watch a curling game during this Olympics if you can track one down.  It's possibly the strangest sport I've ever seen.  Onward!