Goodwill Sorting

We've gone through all the linens and towels and made a couple of boxes for Goodwill. I hope they take pillows!

Next, on to catalog the things we will be giving to the church sale.

In the course of the project, we found some ratty-looking fabric pieces that turn out to be old bean sacks! They have faintly-visible printing that extols their virtues as "seamless". I guess they are a leftover from the Great Depression. I was going to cut them up as dish towels, but now I will find some better use for them.

Paint and shine

Phil has finished fixing the ceiling in the yellow bedroom. It all looks gorgeous, and we moved Grammy Grammer's sleigh bed, my childhood maple desk, and Mom's antique chest of drawers in, to furnish it. The sleigh bed had been occupying the post office, so it's nice to gain more packing space in there, too.

Phil and I also moved the tall chest with the mirror into the front bedroom (the blue room), and that room is looking more settled. As things move around, we get closer and closer to actual packing of our own stuff.

Happily, we had company Friday night: Dawn, David, and Jon came through on their way further north. So we had nicely furnished space for them to sleep in.

So we move steadily onward. (Who knew we had so many sheets?! Some MUST have been from Mom's stash.)

Done with the commercial videos

Finally, we have finished looking at the commercially-made videos and dvds. Put many in the "church sale" box; kept some.

Now we must dig into the tapes Mom made. Some will be interesting; some will not. All appear to be taped off TV, but the proto-Tivo ones can be recycled.

Update: one of the tapes (labelled "8-mm") is a VHS shot while Jack M and Mumma watched films of (among other subjects?) the boys's trip around the US in 1966. Because of the method of re-recording, there are delightful comments from both Jack and Mumma on the tape.

How nice to see that box truck backing into the d'way

Sold a load of furniture last week; enough to furnish a small apartment. I think we owe them a couple of pieces, still, but they also took all our tropical plants. As Ren says, maybe the plants would have been happier in Texas. But I wasn't interested in finding out how to pack and ship; we can grow more.

Video Glut

We've seen these movies in the last week: For the Boys, Crooklyn (first 1/2 hour), Alice, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, The Mirror Has Two Faces, Please Don't Eat the Daisies, An Ideal Husband, and The Indian in the Cupboard. All go into the "give away" box.

Not the first time for most of them; PDEtheD was a first.  1960 seems so long ago!

Best: Indian. All (except Crooklyn) worth watching. We felt that Crooklyn sang true, dialog-wise, but did not appear to have a plot. Which makes it difficult as escapist video.

I'm not telling how many more we had rejected out of hand, having remembered them vividly, or kept out of hand, ditto. THEN, we will be on to the home-recorded vids; probably we'll fast-forward through most of them.

Music Mashup

Started "final boxing" the Music today...sheet music in Box 1; band music (and some piano) in Box 2; Vocal sheet music in Box 3. Or something like that. Feels good to be this far, but there are still bends in the road before we see Mount Joy.

Antique velvet

This afternoon, I delved into some pretty-much-destroyed boxes that had been caught under a roof leak in Mom's attic years ago. They still contained their treasures: burgundy velvet, black velvet, and so on. I immediately ditched the leatherette and pieces of leather, which were too far removed from their origin that they were not even interesting. There are some small harnesses, which appear to be dog harnesses. I also ditched the metal zippers that had been harvested from garments long ago. There were two new zippers (using the term "new" advisedly; they were still in their original packages), which I kept, as well as a dandy descriptive sheet that showed where to use the new "slide fasteners" in garments.

I especially like the patterns. The packages look much as Simplicity, etc., patterns do now. The charm is in the markings: "Virginia, Spring '44" and "checked 12 '44; 15 pieces, all here". The pictures on the envelopes are simply priceless. So I'll go through them more thoroughly at my leisure, assuming I get some leisure some time in the next 25 years.

Phil is generously allowing me to keep fabric remnants from my mother's projects...I recognize some of the fabric. I'm keeping ALL of the fabric that must have belonged to my grandmothers. Too cool to dispose of right now...it all evokes the poetic in me. Perhaps it's false nostalgia, perforce, because I wasn't there..., but I think it's my inner magpie, fascinated by the novelty of a connection between life a hundred years ago  and life now. Actual, physical life, that is, or the remnants thereof.

Thank you, Minnie and Irene and VIC (Ginny to all of us...). God rest you merry.