Spring Cleaning 2.0

WE BEGAN A BLOG on Spring Cleaning back on the ninth, but somehow got sidetracked. With the unusually warm weather were experiencing (and thanks to Exxon/Mobil), and some outdoor space to temporarily move "stuff", today The Lounge cleans house of excess baggage, useless trinkets and assorted "ordures" form the land of the never-again-needed.

THE NO CAR GARAGE: As lamented earlier, more than seventy cardboard boxes remain setlled into that area of our home designed for automotive cover. From Fisher Price toys lovingly put through their paces by youthful trolls a decade ago to hurricane lamps I couldn't dump on eBay to three-wide car seats that have no car, our garage makes your community Goodwill store look like a well stocked Neiman~Marcus. Among the first items to go will be bikes; none of them in working condition, mind you. However, if you're in SE Idaho and need a bike part; frame, wheel, handlebars, chain, or sprocket, chances are you'll find it tossed, without thought, throughout this erfuge for rubbish. Then, with some floor space cleared, we'll go after the boxes. If you don't hear from me in three days, send in the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne, will ya? Anything to get Chris a little closer to home...

OFFICE WITHIN AN OFFICE: When Caits moved out, Caroline took her room and Liney's room then became my office. Was a good little office too, until it began doubling as a storage area for event supplies. And painting supplies. And ornament supplies. And out of season clothing. And old computers. And old financial records. And...wouldn't this all look wonderful in the garage?

TECHNO SHUFFLE: With the advent of the MP3 and the external hard drive, I am thinking I can free up a lot of space in my office by transferring all my cd's (studio recordings and boots I've collected over the past 30 years) to digital format. So be looking for info here here in a few days about how you can pick up some wonderful, rare, and otherwise impossible to find pop, rock, hard rock, folk, blues, jazz, and country shows recorded during the last 50 years. A true-blue triple play this; You get some amazing live musical peformances, I get to move through my office without having to navigate an obstacle course, and together we'll all raise some much needed funds for the local students and classrooms here in I.F. that there just isn't enough of. Uh, classrooms and money that is. We always have plenty of students...

MRS GUMP WAS RIGHT: Stupid is as stupid does. A couple of years ago, I heard the tale about how my mother-in-law used to roll newspaper into logs, soak them in water, and when they dried out, would serve as long-lasting logs for the fireplace. At the time we had three paper routes eminating from our home so it seemed like a natural. 100 or so tightly wrapped, bound and soaked paper logs were soon neatly stacked alongside our house awaiting the coming winter, only to realize as large as we'd made them and tightly as they were wrapped, they wouldn't burn more than a few of the outside pages. So I am thinking this Saturday, the homeade logs will find their way to a nearby recycle bin and Huck will need to find something else to chew and spew forth over my slowly greening backyard. "Rits about rime, Raggy! Arf!"...

NEVER, NEVER, NEVER: Lots of talk about the Kindle, the iPad and other technologically superior replacements for the endless number of books that fill the shelves throughout our home. To borrow from the late and formerly great Charleton Heston..."From my cold, dead, hands!" I am all for efficient development and progress, but with the all-too-rapid life-style advancements of the past 20 years, books are one of our last connections to a civilized and elegant society. Call me a Norman Rockwellesque neo-realist if you must, but there are still few things I enjoy more, when I have the opportunity, than sitting in my great-grandmother's 100 year old birch-wood rocker with a large cup of cocoa on the hearth, and by the light of a well-stoked fire, burning an evening immersed in a well-penned novel. I apologize to those of you who recently ran out and bought the latest, over-priced version of "faster, sleeker, but not necessarily better", but the excitement of young Jim Hawkins eavesdropping from inside an apple barrel or the plaintive thoughts of Tom Joad as he meanders along a lonely country road just can't be fully appreciated from an LED screen, while you're sitting on your chrome-plated Crate & Barrel bar stool, waiting for your turn at Wii Bowling. What's next...reading our grandkids Winnie the Pooh via video conference? Here's hoping that out there in one of those boxes, somewhere, is the old Royal typewriter my grandfather had refurbished for me when I took up journalism in high school. I can't think of anything I'd rather recover from the carboard depths. I think Mr. Caen, who a week from Friday would have been 94, would doff his chappeau to it as well.

So...what's on YOUR mind?