That’s where the new handy-dandy ree-cycle cart was supposed to get delivered to. I wonder if the folks at 713 Henry got mine? ’cause that is NOT my address. Henry Street is halfway across town from me. I know where it is because my uncle owns a rental house on that street and I pass it whenever I am heading out to Trader Joe’s or wherever on Stadium. Anyway, we’ve reached a new level of high-tech ree-cycle around here and I’m not sure I’m as happy about it as Kayak Woman thinks I am. Heck, I LIKED sorting the garbage! But KW did one of her stoopid videos anyway and you can’t really hear the GG when he backs into the drive but he yells, “Luuuuucieeee, I’m home!” And she babbles something about helicopters too. Because SEVERAL of those flew over while she was doing her video. She thinks it’s because there was an accident on the freeway when she was driving home from work today. She didn’t see it but she thinks it happened just AFTER her exit because there was a little slowdown just BEFORE her exit. If that makes any sense. Anyway, she got off the freeway and was sitting in the long, slow left-turn lane from Jackson onto N. Maple and cops and ambulances and faarrr trucks and the whole works were coming along and she had to wait through two lights. Which was OK under the circumstances, of course!!! Anyway, nearly an hour later, helicopters started to fly over the Landfill neighborhood toward the freeway and that isn’t all that usual since Tommy Monaghan found true religion and stopped buzzing the neighborhood with his Domino’s rig. Or maybe the ca-ca-ca-cas were *not* going to the crash. Anyway, the video is below. Just a bit over two minutes and not very exciting. Maybe someday she’ll show you the severed heads!

I am dying to try out the html5 video tag. From what little I know (and it’s very little), it seems like I should be able to host my own videos via this tag. Not sure my webguy would want me to fill up his server with videos but maybe a few once in a while would be okay. Flickering in and out of my consciousness all day was “html5 video tag html5 video tag html5 video tag”. Alas, once I started looking it up, it seems like more work than I have time to do tonight. So I had to bag it for now and you are stuck with YouTube for this looooverly little Garbage Woman video. It was inspired by my childhood/facebook friend Mimi who, when I posted my first little beach video on FB, commented that if *she* had a video of her morning, it would be of her taking out the trash. Well, taking out the trash is one o’ my specialties, don’t’cha know? Sincerely yours, Garbage Woman 😉

P.S. If you look closely, you will get a couple glimpses of meeeee in a bathing suit. No, it is not a bikini. I quit wearing those eons ago. You are happy about that.

The phone company I hate today is the one that rhymes with mint* and once when I tried to get online to PAY THE BILL, I didn’t have the right password (because someone around here — probably me — changed it for some godforsaken reason) and they insisted that the only way they could send me the password was to text it to the phone, which would’ve been just ducky if the phone in question was in my hand in the Landfill Chitchen here on the Planet Ann Arbor and not sitting over in Dakar with a dead battery. I mean, you guys, do you want yer money er not?!? We’re having a similar little password issue today but I won’t bore you with the details and anyway it is fixed. I think. No one is anywhere near Africa, at least. And we are done with mint as of today, so I don’t need the password any more. Last week, I hated the phone company that would rhyme with bat if you took out a certain symbol and pronounced it as it is spelled and not as individual letters. I won’t bore you with that little incident either.

But I’m not gonna write about phone companies today. I am gonna write about television sets! Specifically OLD TV sets. Good old Sony Trinitrons from the 1980s. Remember those? One of ours is *exactly* from 1980. I remember when we bought it. I remember when we hooked it up to our Apple II Plus as a monitor. The GG would run his probability machine on it and boys would stay up all night playing Space Eggs in my loverly but rickety old apartment on Seventh St. And then there was the time that I came home to the Landfill from somewhere and… No one was here… And… I heard a spooky little sneaking up on someone song doo doo doo doo doooooooo do do do do… The GG and the little mini Lizard Breath had been playing Sticky Bear ABC and had left for some mysterious errand or other and they had left it on the letter “G”, where a bear was sneaking up to steal grapes.

We used to actually watch TV sometimes. I was never above putting my kids in front of the TV now and then. I mean, I also read to them. (Read to your kid a half hour a day? Roight. Try to get my kids to let me stop after a measly half hour.) But there are times of the day when the chief cook and bottle washer needs to get down to business and if a snack and a little TV or a movie keeps people calm and happy for a while, so be it. Mouse would watch a video over and over and over until she knew it by heart and then she’d be done with it and on to the next thing. Later on I (very randomly) remember Clarissa Explains It All and a bunch of Nickelodeon stuff. We *all* (even the GG) knew the Anne of Green Gables videos by heart (and yes, we read ALL of the books too, probably a couple times through, so we know what liberties were taken by the BBC). And Free Willy too, one godforsaken spring break spent at the moldy old Houghton Lake cabin back in the day. Man, am I digressing. And using “man” a lot. What’s with me?

Anyway, at some point we kind of stopped watching TV pretty much altogether. Did the Internet take over or did life get too chaotic to adhere to some TV programming schedule. I dunno.

Today *someone* decided that it was time to get rid of those old Sony Trinitron monstrosities. In fact, he was about ready to load them up into the Ninja to haul over to Ann Arbor Recycle along with a bunch of other old luckyshuckial crap. Problem. We figured out that we would have to pay $100 to dump those old TVs. That would be okay except that they both still work! And they work pretty darn well. Believe me, I was really excited about the idea of dropping those things off today. But even I couldn’t justify spending $100 to get rid of two four working TV sets. So they are on Craigslist. Will anyone want them? I do not know. I would not.

We took some other stuff over to the recycle joint today. Printers and other crap. No TVs. I was taking a kind of Wall-E photo of old appliances and things over there when someone from the Volvo behind my little Ninja said something to me. I turned around and there was a big old golden retriever in the front seat of the Volvo and a beautiful woman and her husband, namely, the parents of The Beautiful Jess, one of my Lizard Breath’s best friends in life. They’ve been friends since middle school and still are now that they both live in San Francisco but that would be a whole ‘nother story and not necessarily mine to tell. I do wish I could get out to the left coast more often.

* I stole this big company rhyming theme from Nancy Nall, a Detroit-area journalist and blogger and friend of friends.

This is my yard at the old house on Superior Street. It is sunset in this photooo. That house is the neighbor’s to the north. Lemme think who lived there. There was a stream of folks. Harshbargers were there for a while and for some reason, I thought that the phrase “Harshbarger’s nose” was absolutely roll on the floor laughing hilarious. I have no idea why. I don’t remember what a Harshbarger looked like. And there were the Propsveldts (y’all, I do NOT know how to spell any of these names) later on, who had kids just a bit younger than me. I’m sure I teased them. There was a toilet in the basement of that house that sometimes flushed itself and once the mom of the house (I don’t remember that family’s name) was home alone at night with her five kids or whatever it was and she took a baseball bat downstairs. I am in the Courtois family now and I have learned that a toilet is not normally something to panic about. Back behind that house you can see the Malette’s house whose daughter Connie was one of our long-suffering baby-sitters. I do not think The Engineer and I were very well behaved kids with most baby-sitters, even the ones we liked, and Connie was one of those. I guess she did it for the money. That big smokestack in the background belongs to Lincoln School. I red-queened over there every morning until I decided (alas) that I was too cool for red-queening.

You can’t see our little white house in the photooo. And the garden is just to the left of that person in the summer pajamas and probably a diaper. A nice, wet cloth one, no doubt. I remember wearing summer pajamas similar to those when I was a little older, five maybe. I’m sure I had survived the throes of toilet training by then but one hot spring night, I kept asking for Fizzies (who remembers those) over and over and over again. More Fizzies! The Commander finally said, “You are going to wet your bed if you drink any more Fizzies.” “Oh, no, I’m not.” Roight. I can still remember getting up in the morning in rather damp pajamas.

The title? Well. Welcome to the world of Garbage Woman on a day when our handy dandy A2 Garbage Cart stinks absolutely to high heaven. I swear, when my work friend Cynthia visits friends in the neighborhood this weekend, she will be able to find my own personal Landfill by the smell. I need to clean that thing out. I can’t find a decent high-pressure nozzle anywhere around here. I know there is one somewhere. Since I don’t know where, I’m gonna buy myself a new one tomorrow morning. That is all.

Do I want to go to Houghton Lake this weekend? Yes. But. Alas. I am not psychically ready for the process of going to Houghton Lake this weekend. I am not ready to do all of the packing that is required for a trip to Houghton Lake in the winter and the dark and probably snow driving it’ll take to get there. It practically takes two great big duffle bags to take just the clothing I might need at Houghton Lake. I flew to San Francisco for five days in October with all I needed in a small carry-on bag. The Great White North is a whole different story. Snowpants? Maybe or maybe not. Balaclava? Probably but maybe not. Inner and outer ski jacket. Ski band and mad bomber hat. A bunch of those magic gloves which is just about all I ever wear in the winter any more. Boots. And then there’s all that other stuff. Ski gear. Snow shoes. Sleeping bags. Food. I don’t even want to think about food. Technology-related gear. How many computers? Three? I forget how many cameras. Phones. Power cords, memory card readers, blah-de-blah-de-blah. Reading material? Unfinished prodjects intentionally misspelled. FROGGY and friends. grok grok grook grodko! And I do not know what is in all those bags that the GG travels with. He did manage to fly to California without them.

Blarg. Then there’s the whole thing about how it takes three blasted hours to get to Houghton Lake. I want to go to Houghton Lake but I have to work tomorrow and we are going to The Commander’s house next weekend and, after this week of viruses and whatnot, I am not ready for a weekend trip. I bet people won’t miss me much because, especially after this week, I will no doubt be more likely than ever to hide grumpily behind my laptop computer.

I will not be going to Houghton Lake this weekend but the GG will and that is all okay. Heck, he’ll fix the webcam. What I wish I could do this weekend is take a smaller, less-encumbered road trip. Like the trips we took to Kalamazoo while our kids attended college at K. I loved having my kids at college in Kalamazoo. At 100 miles from us, it was both close and far away. Mouse’s last couple of years in college, we frequently drove over there on Sundays to watch plays she acted in or directed. We would leave the Landfill around 7:00 AM and hit the Zeeb Road McD’s for coffee. We would call just before our exit to say we were just outside of Kalamazoo and then call again before our turn onto Westnedge. We would pick up Mouse for breakfast at the Crow’s Nest and then we would hang around her wonderful little apartment. We would take a walk around the neighborhood if we had time and/or the GG would take a nap. At some point, Mouse would have to be at the theatre and we would usually walk around the campus a bit or hang out in the library coffee shop, using the wireless. After the show, in the late afternoon, we would roll home in time for a cocktail and dinner.

I miss those days and I sometimes can’t believe we don’t have a child in college any more. We can still see Mouse act, since she is acting here and there on the Planet Ann Arbor. You could even say it’s easier that we just have to drive down to the Lydia Mendelssohn or over to the Riverside Theatre. But I miss those days of rolling clunking along on the rickety-rackety I94 18-Wheel Slogway over to Kalamazoo.

Anyway, it is Garbage Night here on the Planet Ann Arbor. I wish Garbage Night was still Monday.

Good night,
Garbage Woman

I didn’t say that. It was Gunther, who was putting out his trash (and recycle bins and compost bin, etc., etc.) this morning. I was confused. We had Memorial Day earlier this week and when we have Memorial Day in the week, that means that they pick up the garbage (and the recycle bins and compost, etc., etc.) on Saturday instead of Friday. I knew that. Except that Gunther and probably about 80% of the neighborhood was putting their trash out today or had already done so. Sooooo…. Was I missing something? I didn’t know. I hate having garbage day on Friday. It used to be on Tuesday and I liked that a lot better. When it is on Friday, about once a month or maybe two, I have a week where I have two or sometimes even *three* blasted weeks’ worth of garbage (and recycling and compost, etc.) to put out. And that is because if you have octo-women and property in the Great White North, you need to go there once in a while and if you can manage to get a Friday off, you can leave the night before and then you can’t deal with the blasted garbage on Friday… Oh well, I trundled on to the Recycle Ann Arbor website and garbage day is indeed tomorrow so, I wheeled a very full garbage cart out there tonight and I’ll get the recycle bins out there when I have put every last scrap of recyclable crap in them, which could well happen tomorrow morning. And there is nothing in the compost bin that I know of because nobody has been around the Landfill enough in recent weeks to fill it and I am working on dredging out the Landfill Dungeon, which means I am not working on the Landfill Jungle. And if you click on the pics above, you can see a little blast from the past, which is The Commander and Grandroobly doing the weekly garbage run at Fin Family Moominbeach back in about 2002 or 2003. Yes! You are right! They are not particularly happy and that is about all I will say about that because if I say anything more, I will get in trouble! Except that The Engineer and I used to get a huge kick out of the whole blasted procedure.

G’night and gitcher garbage out on time,
Garbage Woman

She’s my Seattle cuzzint out there at Raincharm! I won’t say how old she is but she’s not too far behind me. Two kids in college and the whole nine yards.

That is not a picture of Jay there. What were you thinking? My cuzzint may be an engineer but she does not look like a bulldozer and, given a choice of vehicles, she is more likely to be found driving a toilet. That’s the Planet Ann Arbor leaf pickup crew there. At 0-dark-30 this morning. This isn’t just Jay’s birthday, it is the first leaf pickup day here in the Landfill sector of the Planet Ann Arbor. Problem? Well. There are some leaves on the ground. Maybe two percent? Or three percent? Or maybe even five percent? I dunno. I did not rake any leaves into the street for the pickup because I didn’t want to be bothered with raking an infinitesimally small percentage of the total number of leaves that fall in my yard into the street. Back in the day when I was a youth theatre guild administrator and set my own hours, I might’ve managed to rake a few of our leaves, just for the joy of it. Full-tilt boogie full-time career? Not. By the time the *second* leaf pickup day rolls around, our leaves will be down and I will be going hucklety-buck. I forget when that is. Sometime in November. Even then, not all of the leaves are down but it works.

I think the planet rotates the leaf pickup dates because ours is not always this early. One year, our first pickup date was something like November 8th and we actually managed to get all of the leaves out into the street by then. The second date was December 11th and we had a few more by then but what happened that day? 12 inches of snow. Leaf pickup? Not. I think the street cleaner finally got some of them in April. But it was sure a fun day and I shoveled a bunch of times (another thing I do for the sheer joy of it) and we had to cancel a tech week rehearsal at the Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre (not a good thing) and it snowed the whole week and I couldn’t see out zee veendsheeeld of the POC because zee vipers ver totally screwed and my feet were wet and cold all week from running up and down the slush-covered back stairs of the Lydia. That was one long sentence but I miss those fun times.

This year, we have early leaf pickups. I just don’t understand why they bother to schedule the early and late dates. If the leaves are not down yet, why spend all that money on sending out trucks and crews to pick them up? Just sayin’.

Oh, and we also have to manage to rake the leaves at Houghton Lake somewhere in there. Fin Family Moominbeach? We ignore them, of course. Who rakes leaves in the woods?

“Are you all right?” Thus asked MWCB when I met her at the Jackson Road Coney Island for breakfast this morning. Whereas MMCB (note that MWCB and MMCB are different people) and I have been meeting at Barry’s every Monday for *years* give or take the times when she or I are off gallivanting and we have to miss or switch the day (horrors!), MWCB and I rotate through three restaurants. And we take turns paying. That’s triplets vs. duplets and while I was always a pretty good whiz at playing triplets in one hand on the puano and duplets on the other hand, I cannot wrap my brain around our restaurant schedule and I have to ask MWCB every week: where are we this week and who’s paying? So, would-be stalkers of old bags, good luck.

I was fine this morning. But I was running late. Why? I dunno. Why is it that I am always ready to leave the house ahead of schedule and then I get to putzing around with something or other and all of a sudden I’m looking at the clock going “Oh my gawd! I’m gonna be late!”? And then, I got behind some aging hippy chick in a rusty old Subaru or something who was going about ten miles under the speed limit and, for the life of me, I couldn’t zipzap around her. I know, I know… She was probably just dealing with an aging stick shift. Anyway, I was fine, but, I was late, frustrated, and generally discombobulated. With unkempt hair (stop lights were not long enough for brushing) and a dazed look on my face.

I think this is the first day of my latest career that I just did not wanna go to work. It wasn’t for any particular reason. I mean, there have been times when I was apprehensive about going to work because I had to present something to a group of people. But that was last week. Today I just had about a gazillion picky little detail-type issues to deal with and although I like detail work, I wouldda rather been a vagabond today. I’ve been working every day since before New Year’s 2008 with only one day off, I guess it’s okay if I felt that way today. Roight? It’s okay. It was a quiet day and I got into that zen kind of a mood and got all of those little picky things done. I guess I am settling in to this career and I hope it continues to work out.

Oh, btw, the title is something Woodring said about a quadrillion years ago. It is *not* related to me and my career (I am still learning). And it is not related to the fact that my first high school boyfriend once told his very unworldly girlfriend (that would be me) that he had worked for Superior Sanitation the week before and it took his very unworldly girlfriend (that would be me) months to figure out that he had worked for the local garbage company.

G’night,
Garbage Woman

Okay, Rocky Raccoon or Rickety Raccoon or whatever your name is. I know you have to eat but can you please find yourself a different cafe than the Landfill garbage cart? I’m not even sure how you got in there. I thought those things were supposed to be raccoon-proof. But now that I’m thinking about it, maybe not. Back when we had that ugly old wooden “box” with the three crinkled up old metal garbage cans in it, the ones that were here when we bought the Landfill, I used to run into your great-great-great-great-great-grandroobly all the time. But that contraption was anything but secure. At any rate, it is Garbage Day here on the Planet Ann Arbor and, today when I started to wheel that dern cart down to the street, I darn near jumped out of my skin when the lid opened and your furry little body jumped out! Yes I screamed! I hope Joan didn’t hear me! And there isn’t even that much garbage in there this week, since we were at Houghton Lake last weekend, so I dunno what you found in there that was so interesting to eat. Windex wipes, maybe?

Oh, yeah, almost forgot. Sincerely yours, Garbage Woman

P.S. I heard an ancient Jeep Wrangler in the street just now, 1992, to be exact, and I thought, “oh, The Grumper is home.” And then I remembered a couple things. 1) our ancient Jeep Wrangler is in kzoo with Mouse and 2) the high school junior across the street (female) now owns a 1992 Jeep Wrangler. It’s an automatic but hey, ya can’t have everything!

Give a mad scientist a three-question list, starting with one and ending with three, I mean, how *else* do you start and end a three-question list, and he has to add a zero to the whole thing. Okay, Zero the Hero. I didn’t ask anything about your phone so I’m not sure why you added that item. And I didn’t *call* you. I *emailed* you. Duuuuuhhhhh!

So, question one was “If you get home before me, could you please wheel — or drag or schlep or whatever you can manage to do — our Super Duper Planet Ann Arbor Garbage Cart out to the curb snowbank? Those are approximate words. I wrote the original email on my iPhone so I don’t have it on my MacBook and I’m too lazy to go over there and find it on my iPhone. Actually, I should probably go over there and get my iPhone out and change it from vibrate to sound. Anyway. We normally park two vee-hickles in the driveway and one in the street. If there are two vee-hickles in the driveway, even on a nice dry summer day, it’s hard to maneuver the blasted garbage cart around the second vee-hickle down to the street, especially with that huge mess of cracked concrete next to the old tree. The tree whose top third crashed through our roof and crunched up the POC during a thunderstorm in May 2000. When the driveway is filled with a few inches of snow along with various flavors of ice, boilerplate or whatever, it gets to be kind of like, well, hmmm, I can’t think of a good analogy. It just gets hard. Especially when you are so tired of your blasted beat up snow boots that you’re wearing your Chacos.

And I know all of this because I *did* arrive home first (yay!) even after a run through the Westgate Kroger uscan (see, I still shop there) and, therefore, *I* dragged/schlepped the garbage cart out there. Through the snow. In Chaco sandals. My issue is not that I have to do the chore. I actually like garbage duty. It is that it’s a lot easier to *do* garbage duty when there isn’t a blasted vee-hickle in the way. And we won’t even talk about how precariously the garbage cart is perched out there today on top of the snowbank that the plow left when it plowed The Indefatigable in. Again. Because nobody drives it any more. Kevin? Kevin? Keeevvvviiiinnn????

Oh. Questions two and three? Believe me, you don’t care.

And when I do get a chance to cross it, I will have to RUN. I think I can count on one hand how many times over the last 20-odd years that I have been able to cross that street without RUNNING. And tonight, after I RAN across the street, I had to galumph through about, I dunno 6-8 inches of old, dirty snow to get to the sidewalk. And, although running is not my chosen form of exercise, I CAN run, pretty dern fast at least for a short distance, even though I will celebrate my golden birthday in 2008.

Oh, heck, I had a whole long diatribe about how some of my neighbors were threatened with TICKETS for not cleaning up the snow cement that the SNOWPLOWS left behind. AFTER they (the neighbors, that is) had already done all the shoveling that they thought they had to do under the byzantine snow removal rules of the Planet Ann Arbor. I picture a small, round, bald, red-faced man standing on a chair yelling at his minions to just “ticket them all!” Yeah, stereotyping again. 😉

But I don’t want to write all of that. Folks, this is MICHIGAN. It’s WINTER! SNOW HAPPENS! We all have to pull together. And sometimes make some personal sacrifices. Small ones, in the grand scheme of things. You planet officials have to lead the way. If we don’t know the letter of the law we can’t follow it. So PUBLISH IT. I know. You have it on your website. That’s great. But I have yet to meet anyone who has said (oh, in about October), “hey, did you check out the rules for snow removal on The Planet Ann Arbor yet?”

Whoever it was who made the phone call that resulted in my neighbors being spuriously ticketed even after they had completely cleaned their sidewalk: We all care about handicapped people and kids and whoever cannot negotiate snow on the wheelchair ramps. I won’t even talk about my dad’s last seven weeks on the Planet Earth when he could only travel *anywhere* via ambulance. 😐 But y’all have to remember that when a Planet like Ann Arbor gets dumped with so much snow that the plows can’t keep up with it, even those of us who are able bodied and healthy cannot necessarily keep up with it either. There are frail elderly neighbors who cannot shovel. And other, younger people with diseases like emphysema that make it impossible for them to even walk down the street. Pease give us all a bit of a break.

Love y’all
Garbage Woman

Not only is the water in Lake Superior two whole feet lower than average — that’s near a record low — this afternoon there was a seiche! Click on the pics below to enlarge.

That said, after a whole day (minus lunch at Kenny’s Pitchen, a couple beach walks and a short kayak trip) of moving furniture around, vacuuming spider webs, washing and waxing floors, washing windows, cleaning under the kitchen sink, and hauling garbage around, I declare that we are going to minimize this summer. If it isn’t absolutely essential, don’t bring it here. I’m not kvetching about all the years we all hauled everything under the sun up here and bought *stuff* with reckless abandon. Those were good years. But we are hurtling along into the future and we are leaving behind all the *stuff* we don’t need. And anyone who even *thinks* about adding a new mug or baseball cap to the current collection will be shot on sight! With a nerf gun, that is.

Sincerely yours, Garbage Woman.

I’ll let the GG deal with Karen about television sets. I’m overwhelmed by that *stuff*. But what *do* you do with *stuff*? What kind of *stuff* is worth keeping? What kind of *stuff* is worth passing on to the next generation? Do the members of the next generation really want any of that old *stuff*?

Yesterday, The Commander and I drove over to Royal Oak to have lunch with her sister Roberta and the conversation frequently touched on what to do with *stuff*. You know, old books and dishes and heaven knows what else. All of us have *stuff*. Or know someone who does. Or have had to clean it out of someone else’s house.

So what *do* you do with old *stuff*? Let’s narrow it down to old china and silver and glassware for the moment. *Stuff* that belonged to great-grandparents that you never knew. *Stuff* that was used in an old farmhouse you saw the inside of once, long after your ancestors had moved away. A place that was eventually razed and replaced with a Burger King. Life and bulldozers do go on.

*Is* it important to pass down old family china and *stuff*? Do you really think your great-grandparents cared what might happen to all of their *stuff*? I dunno. We had some of Uncle Harry’s highball glasses in the basement for a long time. Not my own Dear Uncle Harry of canoe galumphing fame, Grandma Sally’s (my mother-in-law) uncle by marriage. He lived with the GG’s family for a while when the Twinz of Terror were very small, helped with the kids and once saved the family from a fire. I have a lot of *stuff* in my basement and it gets harder and harder to clean the place all the time because I have to move mountains of *stuff* to be able to do it. Actually, I have more or less given up. Yeah, that’s right. Spider city.

Before I more or less gave up, every time I would have to move Uncle Harry’s highball glasses around to clean, I would think, “Why are we keeping these?” We didn’t use them. We don’t have room for them in the kitchen. We have our own *stuff*. But I couldn’t quite get rid of them. He didn’t have any kids to pass *stuff* on to and Grandma Sally was dead and I just sort of felt like they were a little reminder that he had lived.

On the other hand, I find that I really don’t give a rat’s you-know-what about what happens to my own dishes and *stuff*. In fact, I’m tired of all my *stuff*. If I ever get around to cleaning out and remodeling my kitchen/dining area, I will definitely buy new dishes. I don’t think there’s any law that you have to use the same dishes your entire adult life and if there is, I intend to break it.

There is a happy ending for Uncle Harry’s highball glasses. They now reside in the Courtois Group Home at Houghton Lake, where members of Uncle Harry’s family can use them. I have mixed feelings about the whole subject though. Honestly, what I would much rather have from my ancestors is some glimpse of what their life was like, their thoughts and interests, friends, likes and dislikes. Who were you? How am I like you? How am I different? I just do not think I can learn that kind of thing from a bunch of old dishes and *stuff*. Honestly, if I died and left all the *stuff* that’s in my house behind, people might actually think I *valued* all of it. In fact, the exact opposite is the truth. I am desperately trying to downsize and get rid of it all.

What *is* important? Is there *stuff* you want to inherit from your ancestors? Do you have *stuff* you want to leave to future generations? What do you think?

Early in life at The Landfill, we had a little black and white Zenith, vintage 1960s. And a nice, new Sony Trinitron. You would think that would be plenty of TV sets. We even watched TV sometimes back in those days. I was partial to Dallas. Who did shoot JR, anyway? I don’t remember. Come to think of it, we had some of those little Fisher Price people around in those days and there was one with a big white 10-gallon hat that the newly talking baby Lizard called “JR.” Bet she doesn’t remember that!

Anyway, for some odd reason, everybody and his cousin decided that our house would be a good dumping ground for old TVs. You know, a young, married couple with a new house and no money and all that rot. Bolette gave us one that smoked when we turned it on. I don’t really mind operating a landfill up to a point. But we have limited space here and I’m trying to get rid of stuff as it is, so if any new TVs come into this place, an old one has GOT to go!!!!! Except that it will *cost* us to dump it. This is The Planet Ann Arbor. I can’t just put trash out on the curb.

Frankly, I would just as soon watch DVDs on my 13″ screen Intel MacBook. With Sam the Archaeologist and a bucket of rotten tomatoes. 😉

Oh, Kee-reist. I wanted to do a big blahg about me and The Commander doing adventure shopping today. But right now, The Commander is trying to convince The Grumpy Growler that the 30-something TV in our back room that used to be in the moldy old Houghton Lake cabin needs to be trashed and that’s distracting me from writing what I want to write. And, although I do occasionally appreciate having a TV around, I CERTAINLY DID NOT want this old poc of a TV. Anyone want it? We have a couple of *somewhat* newer TVs here and one of those is in the basement now because this stupid old thing is in the back room. And I don’t give a you-know-what about hi-def or large screen TVs.

Ohmigod. Now the GG is asking me if I want a new TV. Say what? NOOOOOOOOOOOOO……….