Jed

I haven't been standing still, I've been lying in wait? Or something? Anyways, paid off a couple of days of prep work going through stuff today by taking a) ten more books to the library booksale, b) an outgrown kid's raincoat, hat, and a barely used hat/muffler/glove set to the library children's resale shop, and c) four bags of ripped bottom sheets and worn-out pants and such to textile recycling.

(I know, I know, visible mending, but my pants inevitably wear through in the seat and crotch and I just don't want visible mending there. I can however report that after years of indulgently buying new sheet sets when the bottom sheets got too ragged to use, we have made a new commitment to only buying individual bottom sheets for awhile to get more use out of all these perfectly fine tops. Also knit bottom sheets (like modal or cotton jersey) really do not hold up as well as woven, fyi. Also I'd been holding on to most of these bottom sheets for many years thinking they were big pieces of fabric I might want for a kid costume or craft situation, but the baby's class is touring the high school this morning (!) and the big one is thinking about college visits, so I think that whole phase of my life is winding down, and also in fact nobody has wanted any homemade costuming in a decade or so either.)

One of the things that sucked and continues to suck about the fire (yes I am still sorting through fire stuff, it's an enormous emotionally-fraught job and also the situation keeps evolving as the kids age and become more able to remember to wash their hands) was/is the loss of the opportunity to dispose of things as we would want them disposed of. We've thrown out hundreds of books because we didn't feel good donating them anywhere with smoke contamination, and while we were able to recover a lot of clothing and linens (for professional cleaning) we were paying by the pound and we threw out a lot as well (and some, like the packed-away kid's clothes in the eaves, I just didn't have time to do more with than frantically hunt through for some favorites). Which is all fine - safety always wins, and it's totally fair to optimize for time or money sometimes rather than minimizing waste - but one of the things I like about disadvent-type work is getting to dispose of stuff deliberately rather than waiting for some disaster (or, like, the decisions of others, if my own ownership was suddenly not in the picture) to force some sub-optimal path.

We went through a whole bunch of miscellaneous bits of hardware - plastic cups of random screws and baggies of leftover Ikea pieces - and ended up keeping almost all of it, but better organized and put away. Sometimes the disadventure is the work you do along the way and not so much the actual volume of stuff removed.