Actually, I did get started on some cleaning a couple of weeks back. I went through about fourteen boxes and condensed them down to just a few. Those few contain reference material often used for writing as well as some other business I still conduct. That was an enlightening adventure. You should have seen those huge, black trash bags I carried to the road. I still have a box of stuff that needs to be shredded. Anne has a shredder in her office.
I won't bore you with what I found, but in one smallish box I did find a number of goodies worth talking about. The contents were unused presents from one Christmas past. Believe it or not, I found that box this past Christmas Eve. How ironic.
One item went to the growing bag of goodies for the Eagles' next yard sale. It was a small wooden likeness of an iron with a clothespin on the back. I guess you set it up on end like a hot iron and store envelopes of outgoing mail for retrieval by whoever next heads to the Post Office. I guess. Maybe it's to hold recipes.
I found a hand-held, spring operated, sewing machine working much like a stapler. It actually makes stitches as you open and close it. Now I can't mourn about holes in the socks or the elbows or about that short piece of stitching that would make a garment last just a little longer. Guess What? I kept it. No, I didn't file it away; I kept it.
Then I came across one of those small, red, pocket-sized Swiss Army Knives. For years I've carried one around. Last spring, someone stole it. That's one way to say it got lost. Now I have no excuse for trimming my nails with my teeth and for those awful looking hang nails. It has a nail file and a small pair of scissors for that.
And I have no excuse for those huge cables hanging from my clothes where a seam is unraveling, where a button is falling off, where I can clip the corners of my notebook as I go from a full page to a new one so I'll always know the place. And I've got something to use to screw in that loose one on the car door or to use as a prybar for those two pieces of something that seem not to want to come apart.
And I've got that real sharp blade, though small, for cutting cheese, for peeling an apple, for cleaning fingernails, for scraping corrosion off the light cord. And again, I've got that handy pair of tweezers to remove that long hair that you know but can't see that's growing on the tip of your nose. Yeah man, now I'm set.
Only two things were left in the box. One was a package of official Olympic Hanes briefs, six in number, thirty-two in size, which now fit and which in recent years I haven't had the waist for. And in the very bottom I found an old, handwritten outline of the Royal Canadian Air Force Five Level Fitness Program dated December 29, 1969. Being that it is the New Year, there must be a hidden message there. I kept them both.
Well, in the coming months, we'll be doing more cleaning. I am enthused and all cranked up. With the exception of one more box downstairs, I'm about ready to attack the attic. Yes, you heard what I said, attack the attic. Or then again, maybe I should just file that project away to be addressed another day. Meanwhile, look for me out there in my (new?) Hanes Briefs with my (new?) Swiss Army Knife searching for Trouble in Cedar Key.