Thirty Nine - Just checking in

Well, seeing as it's been so long since I've put fingers to the keyboard, thought I would just drop by and say hi.

First, let me tell you that there's a 'subscribe by email' link somewhere on this page where you can now sign up to receive email alerts if you're at all interested in following what I write here. I mention this not because I am a big head egotistical narcisist, but because I usually post on FB when I have written here, and I'm thinking of getting off the whole FB roundabout. I really only manage to get on there to share pics these days, with the occassional status update, and quite frankly I can do that from here - with more detail and in a more personal way. Kind of like writing a letter to all of the people I like/love all at once.

With no swear words.

Mostly.

This weekend has been one based around 'cleaning out'. I know, I know, the word 'cleaning' isn't at the top of my vocab list, but 'cleaning out' certainly was this weekend (no laxatives involved, in case you are wondering, I am talking about something totally different, as you will soon see).

It's hard rubbish time - yay! Time to get rid of all the crap I have acccumulated over the past six months and see how many people view my trash, as their 'treasure'. This is the joy of hard rubbish time, it's not the feeling of satisfaction of cleaning out the shed (which I got majorly this time, as it had in fact been TWELVE months since I last got rid of the hard rubbish). The joy of hard rubbish time comes AFTER you put it all out on the nature strip, and see who comes around to pick through your total crap to find their little treasures to take home.

This is a big part of any kid's life, by the way. Doing the hard rubbish, then sitting at the window, just waiting for the vultures to come around, then saying to your parents in absolute amazement "What the HELL do they want with that?"

And now, in the age of social media, that same conversation is occuring, as we speak on at least one Facebook page:

"Someone took the lamps? What do they want THOSE for?"

"Don't know, probably desperate. Probably sell them for ten dollars at trash and treasure next weekend".

And here, then, is the conundrum.

If we KNOW that people are going to take our crap and actually make a PROFIT on it, why the blue blazes don't we do that OURSELVES????

Answer? We are lazy.

Well, I realise here that I speak for myself, as I know there are some of you out there who do actually do the ebay thing that I cannot be bothered with (and some make a nice little profit out of it too.) But I can't be bothered with that. Stuff it, they can have it for free if they feel like poking around in a pile of goodness knows what from a household they don't even know.

But I digress.

Scatters came over yesterday afternoon and we spent a couple of hours going through the crap that I'd collected over the past twelve months. Well, collected and then thrown out into the shed, waiting for that wonderful week that we know as 'Hard Rubbish Week' (which starts tomorrow here in downtown Moreland).

I couldn't have done it without him, we moved old desks and broken chairs, old cupboards and mattresses, an old air conditioner. God, it was empowering to get rid of all that crap.

The best bit was the sweeping up afterwards, and the great release of guilt that I have had for a while now that my father's beloved shed was becoming a pseudo rubbish dump. Not any more, he'd be relatively happy with the state it's in now I think. (Although he was one of those blokes who loved his shed so much that you could possibly have eaten off the floor, he swept it religiously and everything was in it's place, so he's probably still looking down from Heaven, shaking his head in despair.)

Then, early this morning I was up and cleaning the fish tank, which had come to resemble the ocean at the time of that massive oil spill two years or so ago. This cleaning effort was due wholly to Scatters, who walked in the door after not having been here for a while, and said in his blokey oh-so-observant tone "Jeez, the fish tank could do with a bit of a clean". It had been on my list for a while now, as the gunk and grime slowly built up over time, and the fish near on screamed at me every time I fed them "Heeeeelp, we are slowly suffocating in here!!!". The fact that someone commented on it kind of gave me that kick up the butt that you sometimes need to do these things.

And, once again, with the job complete, I felt a whole lot better about life in general.

The next cleanup I'll probably do will be the Facebook thing (as mentioned at the beginning of this post). I'm feeling a little overwhelmed with all the notification emails I keep getting, and although I have turned most of them off, I now have this urge to continually log on to see whether anyone has left me a comment. That's bad. It's a bit of a catch-22 situation really: the notification emails annoy the crap out of me, but without them I get paranoid that I might miss something. And quite frankly, it makes my brain hurt.

So, dear friend, feel free to pop your email addy in the box to the right if you feel like it. And feel free not to. I won't know any different.

Talk later

Janeane

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