Thinking about Stuff

I don’t usually spend much time on YouTube, but this week found me watching George Carlin’s routine on Stuff. I couldn’t help but laugh when he said that we have so much stuff that we even rent storage space for some of it. Oh dear. That’s exactly what we have been working on the last week or so. Finding a place to store our stuff.

There is a good reason for it though.

When we first came up to the cabin in July, we had in the back of our minds the thought that we might have to return “home” for the winter.  Or might want to.  But Rob and I soon agreed that our decision to move here was the right one, and it was time to deal with the house and put it up for sale. There was no point keeping it through the winter, so with a good referral for a realtor from my super sis Lynne, we put our home of 35 plus years on the market. Not without a little preparation of course.  Rob did an amazing job of taking care of a few of those pesky chores that just never seemed to get done, when we were always so busy taking care of the business instead. After a short but rather intense period of time and hard work, he had the house in reasonable shape, cleaned and ready for showing. It sold quickly, with a very short closing time, so we suddenly found ourselves having to deal with all of our “stuff”.  Now we had already gone through a lot of areas of the house last winter, knowing we were about to make some changes, and cleaned out quite a few items. Still, we have been there for a long time, and our varying interests over the years have produced a lot of things we don’t really want to get rid of.  Printmaking, airbrushing, woodworking, clothes embellishing – well it just requires a lot of “stuff”. So we needed to deal with it.

Of course, we also closed our business in April, and that already had added some more items to our inventory. Some of which will be very useful in our new house, but the problem is, we don’t have one yet! The cabin here is 800 square feet with one closet, and 2 chests of drawers. Nonetheless, some of our stuff has already come to the cabin. You don’t want to put food items, liquids, or anything that can’t tolerate freezing into storage.

Rob laughed this week when I said that I think I needed an intervention for my spice collection. And he assured me that yes, he had attached the kitchen cabinets properly and they would not fall down from the weight of my spice containers. (However, there are no cabinet doors on them, so you can see that I have tucked them everywhere!)

Now there is a lot of stuff I will gladly part with, but dried chiles and spices are not one of them. Back in May and June too, while Rob was on two timber framing courses I also made purees out of a lot of my whole chile peppers and froze them, so now our refrigerator freezer is also full of chile pastes. The trick will be to use them up, and not just hang on to them all, knowing how hard it is to get good dried chiles anywhere. (Hey, maybe we could start our own business…. no, no, no just kidding)

Needless to say, preparing the house for selling, and then being in a period of limbo while we waited for it to sell, and then the scramble to empty it, has disrupted our plans here somewhat. We are both anxious for the final closing date, and looking forward to both of us being here, with only this property and cabin to worry about. It will be the first time in a long time that we haven’t maintained a store, a warehouse, a house, and a cabin.

Not that there will be a long period of idleness. We still have a lot of pre-winter preparation to do here. But already we are talking of curling up and reading, researching, cooking, planning, and enjoying this little cabin through the fall and winter months. 

Along with the house selling distractions, the weather has also been rather wet and dreary, so I haven’t been out with my camera too much. We did have one unseasonably warm and dry day, and Rob took the opportunity to caulk up some of the old screw holes on the shed. It is pretty much ready now for when he starts working on the timbers in the spring!

 

 

I did have a couple of surprise visitors the other morning. Just when I was feeding Jet his breakfast, a small fawn walked past the kitchen window. I distracted Jet until it had gone past, then lowered the blinds so that he wouldn’t see it and get too excited. But then I realized I couldn’t watch either, or take any photos! I put my eye to the small glass panes at the front door, and there was the adult doe looking right back at me! Sweet.

 

I waited about half an hour, and then cautiously took Jet out on leash, but they were gone. Which was good, as we always have an off-leash play time, and I didn’t want any deer chasing to go on.

The Blue Heron is still around, and I heard the Kingfisher again this week. But the geese are flying, and I guess it won’t be long before all the migrating birds are gone. The woods are a bit quieter without the bird song. Luckily the blue jays and chickadees and woodpeckers and ravens all hang around for the winter, and will make sure it doesn’t get too quiet around here!  We have a great book on building bird houses and nesting platforms, so Rob made sure not to pack it away with the storage items, and is hoping to have a chance to read it this winter.  Of course, if you watched George Carlin, you know that the only reason you have a house is so that you have a place to keep your stuff, and I’m pretty sure birds don’t have any stuff. Which is why they can migrate every year so easily. These days that has a certain amount of appeal!