Tag: home

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Bob and I moved house after 26 years in one place. Our old house was spacious. Having all of this space meant we had to fill of this empty space with stuff. This meant lots and lots and lots of stuff.

Stuff I had packed away in the hidden crevices of my house and had completely forgotten about. Stuff that I have no earthly idea why I bought or what purpose it served. Pictures of people who I no longer remember. Pictures of the Eiffel Tower — from several different trips to Paris. The same tower, the same picture, a different year. Books I will never read again. 300 plus CD’s that I haven’t listened to in 26 years because I no longer had a device that played the music. Checks from 50 years ago. Business cards from a place I no longer worked at. Old documents from a job I no longer had. Paper clips, sticky notes, pencils found in almost every drawer except the drawer where paper clips, sticky notes, and pencils should have been found. Technology that was dated and no longer used. Old flash drives that I haven’t accessed in 20 odd years. The amount of stuff we had was mind boggling.

We had successfully filled those empty spaces, no doubt about it. Now we needed to purge them before moving. Filling trash bags after trash bag. Collecting boxes for Goodwill Charities. Saving the really valuable stuff for a future garage sale. We could then move because we had less stuff.

When we arrived at the new smaller apartment, we still had too much stuff. We had too much furniture and the furniture we had was too big for our smaller space. So we purged some more. More trash bags. More Goodwill. More future garage sale items.

And still we have too much stuff. So we will probably have another purging event soon.

I realized two things. We spent all these years acquiring stuff and all this stuff did was weigh us down. It limited our options because we, of course, had to have big place to store all of our stuff. The other thing is I don’t miss any of it.

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Back in July, I introduced my first household tip, I am now ready for my second. The gap in time should give you some hint on how seriously I take household chores.

Bob and I are getting ready to move so we are getting rid of our unused possessions at a prodigious pace. One of our tasks in this process is a garage sale. I know Tom and Garage Sale would seem like contradictory concepts as there is nothing more than I hate then talking with strangers and selling shit but a guy has got to do what a guy has got to do.

So yesterday, we found some sterling silver utensils which we forgot about on a frequent basis. We usually discover them when we are trying to get rid of stuff. Decide to save them because they are silver and have sentimental value. Before they get tossed back into the drawer, I polish them in order to make them ready for the next time we use them. Which is admittedly rare, I mean do you really want to use silver when tossing a salad that you are going to then eat in front of the TV. It seems a bit over the top.

Which means they get polished, thrown in the drawer and promptly forgotten until next household purging event. Of course, they are tarnished and require polishing.

Any way, we found these tarnished beauties and we were faced with the question — do we keep or do we garage sale. But before deciding, I had to polish which is depressing because I hate polishing silver. So I do what I always do when faced with an easy but hateful tasks, I smoked a joint, got suitably mindless for this mindless task and polished those mother fuckers.

I am not sure why. I worked really hard on this. At least twenty minutes, maybe even a half of an hour. and the results were somewhat disappointing. First, the silver on the left turned out a lot better than the silver on the right. The silver on the right, from my eyes, don’t look like they’ve been polished at all. Both had stubborn stains I couldn’t remove and the blemishes in the silver would make me think twice before bringing them out for Thanksgiving Dinner.

Which brings me to my question. Why does anybody uses silver? It doesn’t look all that great and it is difficult to take care of. Stainless steel is much cheaper than silver and much easier to clean. I could have washed all the dishes from a 4 person dinner in the time I polished these 4 utensils and 2 of them, in my humble opinion, still look like shit. What a waste of time.

If I have any say in the matter these are going into the garage sale. My judgment on polishing silver is don’t.