Reports from a Pack Rat

When we were down south visiting my in-laws over the holiday, I found my brother-in-law in custody of a tin box full of old and battered photographs, a range that had belonged to my sister-in-law and one or more of her aunts. I sorted some of these out, that portrayed family that I recognized, and am now in the process of trying to do some restoration on them. Some are of my SIL, some of my MIL's family, taken during WWII and shortly thereafter, some of my husband as a boy. Nice memories, since I find myself as a preserver of family history for Little Stuff, someday.

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Above is a photo of JG's father taken in 1933: he would have been in his late teens or very early twenties. (Must find out for sure - can't remember his birth year off the top of my head.) The second 'cleaned' version has had the tonal balance changed and some of the creases and blots removed from the face and figure. I still have a lot to do on this one. Unfortunately the tonal values in the face and in the stains on the background are so close that playing with the colour of the stains makes the face lose definition. There are other avenues left to explore, though.

I have a lot of family data. My father's cousin is and has been an indefatigable delver into their family history. My family name is Holden, and Bob has traced the Windsor scions of that name right back to Elizabethan England, found a coat of arms, and put together a fat loose-leaf book of information. He and some of the other cousins of that generation also found the money and will to have the original Holden log house restored and moved to an historical park in Essex County.

My mother' family is one I have done a lot of work on: I did a seminar course in social anthropology a long time ago and was given the assignment of studying my family. I ended up with a huge genological table, a short write up on most of my immediate ancestors, and a lot of other neat stuff, most of it winkled out of my grandmother by my mother. I have a tape of my grandmother talking about raising her babies with sound effects from my baby interspersed. Lovely.

And, for the last seven years, I have been building this blog as a record of her grandparents for Little Stuff. As well, on the computer and now backed up to separate storage are large files of family photos, and other records. I recently read a post in which the writer described how she is archiving her child's art work on line and so I am doing some of that as well. (Because I can't store it all!) I have my two girls' work plus Little Stuffs. I have Commencement programs and University graduation programs and newspaper clippings. And once they are scanned and safely stored, I can Throw. It. Out.! Or, at least, some of it.

My grandfather Holden was a keeper, of clippings and pages from newspapers among other things. The YD has two posters made from the front page of the newspaper on the day Edward VIII abdicated and the day WWII ended. She also has my father's service medals and a fine photograph of him in uniform, all of which we intend to mount into a shadow frame.

I have a braid of my own and one from each of my daughters, mounted in a frame by my mother. I have at least one bronzed baby shoe and there used to be more. I found a nasty little envelope among my mother's things with all of my baby teeth in it. Pack rat and collecter of Stuff that I am, I hope someone knocks me on the head before I get that bad.

Must get back to playing with the old photos. More later. I love this stuff. And I am counting it for 365, okay?

Monday Mission

Thanks to the wonderful blog citizen Painted Maypole for setting up these missions. She rocks!

Kitchen Exercise Routine

Next in our Harried Housewife series of exercise routines, we come to those that can safely and easily be performed in the kitchen in the course of the daily schedule. Simple and effective, they provide opportunities for toning, stretching and manual dexterity, can be done in sets or alone, and have all been tested by our resident expert, Mary G.



1.) The Salad Bowl Stretch

Standing on your tiptoes, extend the arm and each as high as you can over your head, hook the edge of the bowl with your right forefinger and pull sharply. As the bowl falls toward you, grasp it with your left hand and lower it gently to the counter. If more than one bowl is needed, change to a left, right combination. Do not let the bowl strike you on the forehead or forearm and remember to keep your spine straight. If you cannot reach the bowl with your hand, a set of kitchen tongs may be employed to extend your reach. Try not to scratch the bowl.


2.) The Freezer Stuff

Bending at the waist and keeping the knees flexed, grasp the item you need with your right hand, using the left to keep the other items on the shelf from falling out. The forearm may also be employed if more than one item starts to fall. For items on the top shelves, exercise caution to prevent being struck in the chest by frozen fish or ice cube trays. Now squat, keeping the back straight and pick up the items you failed to catch. Bend again at the waist and stuff each item back into the shelf. Close door. Repeat as many times as necessary to find what you need to cook.


3.) The Drawer Pull.

Stand bent slightly at the waist and use your right hand to pull out the drawer. As in the exercise above, use the left hand to keep the contents of the drawer from falling to the floor. Again, descend to a squat and pick up the items you failed to catch. Remember to let go of the drawer before you do this, or you may pull entire drawer out onto your head. Be especially careful of the screw driver and pliers as you catch; they are sharp and heavy. An exercise involving filling in cuts in the vinyl flooring is to be found in Appendix A, under Advanced Techniques.

4.) The Floor Swab

Review this exercise from Chapter 2, Bathroom Bending. Be sure to start in front of the freezer door, avoiding ice flakes and pools of melted ice as you move.


Next week we will learn a series of Laundry Room exercises, starting with the Laundry Basket Long Jump (as it will be necessary to employ this to get into the Laundry Room).

Lack of Resolution(s)

I don't make New Year's resolutions any more. I used to do so. Many years ago I used to start out each January with a list of things that I would do and things that I would stop doing. A long list. Which quickly curled at the corners, gathered dust and ended up under the couch with the half eaten jelly beans and broken red crayons. Noticing that this was not A Good Thing, I began to make shorter lists with more doable things on them. I would then delay the start of the good deeds and denials for unassailably logical reasons such as: well, the Christmas candy is gone but it is only three weeks until Valentine's Day and I will get lots more then, so I will begin the diet/exercise program on March 1st. It is easily possible, given a little determination, to forget all about the New Year's Resolution List by February 28th. I assure you that it is.

Being forcibly reminded of the chocolate generated spare tire and inflated derriere by the commencement of the bathing suit season, I could reasonably decide to make a new set of resolutions to take effect, entirely logically, after the end of the berry and sweet corn season when giving up sprinkles of sugar and gobs of butter would, of course, become easier.

Early in October, when failing to do up the zipper of the heavy weight trousers retrieved from storage, I would, of course, realize that dieting/eating sensibly was of no avail because, so close to Thanksgiving, I should wait until after the holiday dinner when it would, miraculously, be too close to Christmas and the essential obligation of eating the treats of the season to bother. Easier to buy some new trousers.

At present I am avoiding the scales, the mirror and most of my wardrobe. 'Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,' as they say. My mouth is full of delicious Christmas gift chocolate as I type this. My BIL gave me Turin Bailey's filled chocolates. My husband gave me chocolate truffles. The ED put a Lindt bar in my stocking. The eldest grandson contributed a chocolate filled chocolate log. (Absolutely marvelous!) Could anyone suppose, even for an instant, that I would blithely begin, on January 1st, to count my calories, join a weight loss group or even eat more sensibly? As far as I can see, my only recourse is to pig out on this heavenly fare until it is all gone, and to do it as quickly as possible so that the increased curve of my tum and bum do not settle in for a long stay.

If you do not think this is a credible course of action, I do not want to hear it, okay?

For those of you who want me to come and tidy up for you, I would be glad to do so. That is, after I deal with the Christmas stuff, which is still in a pile in the doorway of my laundry/sewing room because I have to clean the storage room and there is no room in the laundry room because of the pile of unironed Christmas tablecloths and the mending which has been accumulating since (blush) last January. No exaggeration.

If I had a list of resolutions, these items would be on it, along with the bathroom shelves and under sink cupboard, the drawers in my night table and the unfinished Christmas present for Little Stuff which I now have scheduled to be finished for her birthday. In May. But, of course, I do not have a list. Or if I do, it is in the knitting basket with the size two sweater sleeves.

Hey, procrastination is an art form. It takes a lot of work to do it right.

Wordless Wednesday

11:30 am

2:00 pm

This post was inspired by Mad's cleaning reports.

Monday Mission -- Creating Christmas.

This week's Monday Mission was to get creative with photo-editing software (I use Corel's PhotoPaint). Since I love doing this stuff I tried to be extremely, wipe your eye, creative. (After all, I'm in the same cosmos with Julie the whiz photographer and other amazingly gifted folk.) I built a Christmas tree with the ornaments zooming forward. When I tried to load it, Blogger did not, to put it mildly, co-operate. Nope. It paused, hung and finally rejected my offering. Which caused my computer, in turn, to hang and have to be rebooted. I thought I was inside the size limit, but something didn't work. And so -- you will just have to use your imaginations.


In my household, we do not buy Christmas trees. We schlep out into the bush and cut one. Since in my household we long ago gave up trying to trim trees in situ ahead of time, this trip involves much arguing between JG and me about the size and branchiness of the tree. He likes tall. I like enough branches to hold my ornament collection. This year, he won.

The chosen tree was on the bank of one of the beaver ponds, and we have a lot of snow already. What shape and branchiness the uncut tree demonstrated was somewhat changed by being 1.) dragged through the snow and slush on the pond and 2.) loaded onto the back of the Kubota to be trundled home and 3.) the tip being inadvertently dragged behind all the way back. When we got it home both the top and the bottom had to be trimmed.

A little tinsel covers a multitude of sins.


I have a wonderful collection of angels for my tree, thoughtfully collected over many years. Some are gifts my peripatetic YD has brought back from foreign trips. This one is from Kosovo, I think.


This one is hand made, and very delicate. It works to hang it high on the tree on a branch that will not support the weight of a glass ball.





And this one was chosen by Little Stuff. The head is bisque. As you can see, all the angels are set off by red shiny balls and stars. I have two sets of lights, because I switched to the cool LED ones a year too soon and, since I did not like the blued white, bought gold. The next year the manufacturers came out with a good white. And so, one year there are white angels, red ornamants and white lights, and the next year there are gold ornaments and gold lights. Although I enjoy this, it does make for a storage problem. There are lots of plastic boxes in the basement shelves and I have to figure out which ones I need on any given year. Some year I may even label them, impossibly organized as that seems.







Edited to say: Good grief! I wish I knew the principles behind some of the positioning decisions this text editor makes. I have now simply stacked the thing; not good, but maybe better.

Blowin' in the Wind

We just got back from our monthly run to the dump (for city folks, note that no one comes for your garbage when you live 'in the bush'.) As usual I come back discouraged and a bit sick because of the mess that is our local garbage disposal site. Plastic bags festoon the trees and bushes all around, and especially downwind, the paper recycle has a huge pile of soggy cardboard outside in the mud, there is a lot of stuff in the actual tip that should not be there and the recycle shed has been closed because no one is prepared to look after it.

It's the plastic bag part I mind the most. For the last year or so all of the bigger stores in our shopping town have contributed to a cloth bag campaign. The bags cost a dollar, are available to buy in most stores and hold a lot of stuff. They fold flat when not in use, are washable and light. A lot of people have adopted them with enthusiasm, but you'd never know it at our waste site. Part of the problem is bears -- they get into the tip when the dump is not open, tear open the green bags and rummage through for anything good. The smaller plastic bags all get ripped open and scattered and then they blow. After the bears have had a good rummage the crows arrive, and loosen any bags the bears might have missed. Some of the township waste sites have electric fencing to keep the bears out, but ours is almost full and due to be closed so this improvement has not been made. And the bags blow.

When we built the house I persuaded JG that I needed a cupboard in the kitchen for recycle and I have capacity to store cans and plastic for about a month. Glass has to go into the tip, as the local recycle business cannot find a market for it, but at least it is inert, so I don't mind throwing it in there. I have two big compost bins, and we burn the clean paper. That leaves uncompostable scraps and plastic wrap to ditch. The other big item is newspapers -- we take two dailies and three local weeklies, plus an enormous number of coloured advertising fliers -- but that gets recycled, thus using up my cardboard boxes to pack it in. And I confess to the fact that a lot of the uncompostable but edible scrap gets dumped back in the bush, thus making the local raccoons plump and happy. So we lug boxes of paper, usually two bins of recycle and one small bag of the rest.

The waste disposal site at a hamlet not far away still has a recycle centre. This is a lot of fun as books, baby clothes, small appliances and lots of other fascinating stuff is all sorted and stored in an old trailer where you can go and add and subtract. There is also a local habit of plonking good junk down at the end of the laneway so that neighbours and passers by can see it and take it away if they like it. JG is enthralled with a jar of goodies one of our neighbours has set out, but so far has not succumbed.

He is a real problem -- you do not want to let him lose at an auction because he bids on boxes of mixed goodies and then keeps it all. He has lumberjack tools, a complete welding outfit, hardwood plank storage, building equipment and supplies and tools, automotive tools, and more. At present we have three storage buildings (one with two annexes) and a garage and the only reason the garage is not stuffed is that we only finished building it in December. Give him time and the cars may be back outside again.

Although I am not, blush, blameless myself. I can't bear to get rid of books and the cabin that we built here before the full time house is at present housing my paperback collection, because the hardcover books take up all the bookcase space in this fairly large house. There are probably 200 books in the office, some of which show in the photo behind the bag, and more bookcases in the living room and bedroom and TV room downstairs. And I need more bookcases. So, while I complain about JG the packrat here, I would not dare complain to his face. 'What about all your books?', he would say. Maybe I had better let him investigate that jar!