Day Three: More Hidden Around the House

10/10/2007 - Wednesday

Last night after finishing some work and chores, I took another look around the house. I came upon a closet with deep shelves. The things in front of the two shelves I considered were being routinely used, but there was a clutter of things in the back of the shelves. What did I find? Well, the most interesting was a bottle with about 8 seventeen-year locusts from the early 1970s preserved in formaldehyde. I had a long, hard think to decide if that was something I was ready to dump now. Surely no one would want it, but it reminded me of my first husband and our townhouse apartment we were renting in Evanston while attending graduate school. We'd never seen locusts like that before, and we decided to save them so perhaps one day later in our loves, we might take a few moments together to reflect on our days long past. Well, he's no longer on this earth, and there'll never be a time for us to contemplate our early days together. So, I just tucked the bottle back into the corner of the closet for another day to decide on the fate of the locusts.

However, there were many other knickknacks among the other clutter on those shelves including old vases with little chips, various small decorative pieces long abandoned, coloring and painting implements used by my children in their younger days, as well as parts of holiday decorations. I easily filled two plastic shopping bags with the things I thought Goodwill-type stores could put on their shelves. They would be my bag(s) for today. And, I did take pictures of those. This weekend, I will work on adding pictures to my blog.

Yesterday, my hopes were to check out eBay for some of the old magazines I’d save. I did go to eBay, but was distracted when I remembered the china I received from my brother-in-law, and began hunting for that. It is possibly rather rare china because it was made in the former country of Czechoslovakia prior to WWII and then when the Germans occupied the country, the china was stamped by the Germans. I did not find the exact pattern, but did find lots of Czech china on eBay, much of it not dated, but some of it dated only as early period. Another project is looming; I need to get back on track with today’s A- Bag-A-Day. However, at 12:30 AM, I also need sleep so I can be awake, alert, and perceptive in the classes I need to teach tomorrow.