Pancakes, Pumpkins and Productivity

October 4, 2010

First, it’s on. 

The garage sale, that is.  My neighbor Donna and I are both woefully unprepared but we’re getting our stuff out there come 9am next Saturday.  Remember how P and I were going to go through all of the items in question this weekend?  Never happened.  We decided it was enough to know we need to unload a bunch of crap.  Which items specifically will fall into the “for sale” bucket are tbd (probably around midnight Friday).  Plus, it was just too nice outside to hang around the basement wondering how we accumulated all of this junk. 

So instead, here’s what we did.  It was a wildly productive weekend, and anytime my to-do list makes good progress, I am happy.  Even better that we had fun along the way.

  • Friday night, date night for P’s birthday.  Good food.  Nice drinks. 
  • I had a solo trip out to Long Island on Saturday to visit a friend and her first baby.  Sorry Long Islanders, it’s lovely there, but it’s never an easy trip.  But I actually didn’t mind all that much because it was the first time in years I had that much car time to myself, which meant 1) songs with adult lyrics played very loudly and 2) nobody in the back seat who minded.  Oh and the baby is precious.  5 weeks old.  I love newborns, though they make me ache for just one more resident of Fordeville. 
  • I made pancakes for breakfast on Sunday.  This really isn’t a big deal.  I have no fancy recipe to share because it was plain and from a box, but the reality is that we just never seem to have time to cook anything for breakfast recently (unless you count toasting).  And it’s one of the few foods that the whole family likes.  So that was nice.
  • We went to a local nursery and found they were doing hay rides, the pumpkin patch, the whole “fall is here, despite your denial” deal.  My son loves a good tractor ride and both kids had a ball picking out their pumpkins.  Bonus points that it was right up the road.
  • Off to the mall we went in search of an iPhone for me (done!  and wow), Halloween costumes for the kids (done! even one for the poor pug) and a birthday present for P (done!).  The baby napped through my iPhone consult and they both slept in the car on the way home — we could not have planned this if we tried.  True planet alignment. 

Here are a few shots from the pumpkin picking.  While this fun ensued, I’m sure that alien pods continued to multiply our stuff in the basement.  But I’m too scared to look, until maybe Friday.

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Filed Under: Family, New to Town, Places Near and Far, To-Do Lists Extraordinaire Leave a Comment

Operation Basement Purge

October 1, 2010

Six months in, I still don’t know my neighbors very well.  They are all very nice people, but the reality is that I’m not home much during the week and we just haven’t made it much beyond quick hellos in passing. 

But in one of these passing conversations in our adjancent driveways over the summer, my neighbor Donna and I got to talking somehow about junk in our houses and how it multiplies over time, etc.  She suggested a joint garage sale and, at the time, I thought it was great.  Yes, we said, let’s do that in the fall before it gets too cold out.

So Donna called me yesterday and, apparently, the time is now.  As in, next weekend.  I admire her ambition because, I think — at least from what she described — she is as ill-prepared as I am to get this together in a week.  But it’s now or never (well, now or springtime) and next weekend is the only time we could get our schedules to align in October. 

This seems like a bit more than I can deal with right now.  If you saw my basement, you might cry for me.  But I hate, HATE the clutter and we are hoping to refinish the basement before Christmas, so this seems to be the best motivating force we could have.  Go Donna.

Donna and I agreed to see how much respective progress we could make this weekend in getting our stuff organized enough to hit the Go button.  It’s going to be an interesting weekend. 

I’ll fill you in after the Official Assessment of Plausibility.  And with that, I’m fairly confident I’ll have an opportunity to cover one of the core yin and yang debates in my marriage:  Keep vs Toss.  More to come.

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Filed Under: Borderline Neuroses, New to Town, Project Colonial, That Which Drives Me Crazy Leave a Comment
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