August 13, 2008
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Effort Rewarded
Yesterday, after I blogged, I lazed around for a while until Doug woke up. Then I supervised his removal of the stovepipe from the old woodstove and removal of the adaptor from the top end of it. Big job, that– everything was glued together with creosote, but he did it, with the help of a Wiffle bat.
He kept drifting back into Dwarfortress, and I kept dragging him out to do more work toward installing the new wood stove. First, there was the old old stove on the porch, there when we moved in, that had to be shoved over to make room for the new old stove when we manage to muscle it out of here. In doing that, he discovered that the porch is rotten, so we will go to our old place across the highway when he gets up today, to find some boards to repair and reinforce the porch.
One thing that was in the way of moving the stove out of here was a box of unsorted paper: receipts, old bills and statements, the cards and letters whose return addresses are the closest thing I have to an address book, catalogs — a lot of stuff that had piled up on my bedside table, BIG lot, filling a box bigger than a case of canned veggies, with its flaps tied up to make a taller box, and heaped up on top. Covered with an old sheet, it had made a comfy bed for cats near the wood stove for a couple of winters.
I got into bed, sitting against the wall, and had Doug haul the box of papers over and find me an assortment of containers for sorting. Through the course of the evening, he hauled three grocery bags of trash out, and I ended up with three smaller boxes of sorted stuff that will need resorting and collating with other paper when the rest of my documentary mess turns up during housecleaning. Throughout the process I muttered a lot about being so flaky that I disgust myself, and once I lifted my voice to impart this bit of wisdom to my son: “Organizing one’s paperwork needs to be done more often than once a decade.” One of the boxes I didn’t get resorted before I crashed, I labeled, “credit card statements, early twenty-first century.”
When I found the receipt for the stovepipe adaptor, I was doubly glad Doug got it loose and we are able to reuse it. We paid about fifty dollars for the thing. I didn’t recall its having been that much, probably because I was originally incredulous at the price, and just blocked the sticker shock from my mind.
Early in the process of sorting, I came up with some unopened mail that had been delivered during one of the times I was very ill and mostly out of it. It contained $25.00, payment from a longtime client, for a reading I had done. That alone would have been enough for me, along with the sheer joy of some organization, and the virtuous feeling of disposing of a clot of clutter. But down near the bottom of the big box I found something I had searched for and eventually come to believe I’d lost — fallen into the trash somehow and hauled away: a $50 cash gift received about six years ago from a SIL. Yay!
Comments (10)
“credit card statements, early twenty-first century.” That sounds rather like something I would do.
Cool on finding missing money! Love it when that happens! (It doesn’t often enough!)
Glad you got your stoving done! I have a terrible fear of paper work, and official looking papers. I am even terrified of car insurance papers, registrations and titles. I guess because when you have to look at these things, it’s because of some on going horror!
I was going to say something else, but I forgot.
NICE!
Congrats on the financial finds!
So glad you got your sorting done, yay for found money — YES! Putting in a stove ain’t no easy yob. Maybe easier, maybe harder in a house?
those are nice things. hoho
sounds like some hard work sorting paid off! pun intended
ka-ching.
Wonderful find – cleaning up the boxes paid off big time for you WTG.
Sorting is something I dearly dread as well, but once you get into it, it’s like a treasure hunt (or you find some booby traps!)
I am also disorganized and clutter loving like that. One of the good things about that is finding all that money and gift cards etc.
Good job!