I think it was yesterday, maybe it was the day before — time gets so lost right now — when Sam made the half of the (stereo-)typical baby noise. She said “Ga” — Now all we need is a “Goo” to go with it, and we’ll be set!
Also, people are coming tomorrow to see the house! It’s still not in great shape, but mostly it’s just clutter. I’ve finished the work I want to do to it (mostly thanks to the family helping out last weekend.) I’ve painted (and re-caulked) the bow window, painted and patched the trim around the garage door. Grandmère and Tom painted what was going to be Sam’s room. Gramma Carolyn, Grandmère and I polished the brass bed. It looks sooo much better, it had been far too long since it had seen any attention.
Fortunately, I’ve given away all the Free Stuff, so that reduced a lot of the clutter, and Carolyn’s done an amazing job sorting and purging our files. I have probably shredded two full garbage bags worth of various files that we’d been hanging on to for an amazing amount of time. For example, I just sent a grad-school project back to the person I worked on it with. It was from 1993! I’d been carrying around the code and writeup for a DOS profiler for 13 years! All of this purging is starting to feel good, though still a little worrisome. “What if I need that some day?” I just threw out the siphoning hose I got from Pop-pop to go with my car when I turned 16 (20 years ago.) I’ve NEVER siphoned gasoline. The only time I remember him using it was to take gas out of the 1973 VW bug, to get some for the lawn mower at the shack. He didn’t manage to get it out of his mouth quite in time and so wound up with a mouthful of gas. Yuck!
The next things to go through for us are the books. Books hold an almost sacred place for Carolyn and myself. This will be hard. I suspect that we have something of an unspoken agreement that we’ll take as many books to California as our apartment or house there will hold. This, of course, makes no real sense. I mean, I’m looking over there now, and I see “The official PATROL LEADER HANDBOOK” for the Boy Scouts of America. I don’t think I even read it when I was a patrol leader. Why am I saving it? For Sam? I bet things will be a little different in the GIRL SCOUTS! Especially 35 years LATER! And in a much more URBAN SETTING! [sigh] I could really do without so many of these books. But having books around is like my adult version of a “lovey.” It’s so comforting to be in their presence.