Stuff

After.

Work produced two videos on preparing for social disaster yesterday; I have watched one, and I must get around to the other. I liked the flour in food-grade bins and the chickens; the handguns--not so much.  That said, if I lived in certain parts of the USA, I would probably get one, too. I was trained on one over 25
years ago, as a matter of fact, and that was in Canada.  

By the way, the worst thing I saw last week was the pools and rivers of blood on the floor of St. Francis' Catholic Church, Owo, Nigeria. The footage really shook me up, and I was on edge for the rest of the day.

Meanwhile, I laboured away at cleaning out the worst of our closets. For inspiration, I thought about Marie Kondo and Rob Greenfield, he of the 44 things. There are now several bags of good-enough stuff sitting in the hallway, and a number of doomed electronics awaiting their fate. 

Benedict Ambrose has already retrieved two objets d'art from the hall and set them up in the living room. He is fonder than material objects than I am, and that is almost always a good thing: it means that his clothes last for decades, his books remain pristine, and he planted the pot-bound pear tree yesterday. He also trimmed the dead branches from Horace the Parlour Palm. Naturally, he was the one to give the plant a name.

Freeing one's household from useless possessions is definitely a ten year project. One tip for beginners is to box up everything and then retrieve things as you need them. After a year, give or sell or throw the rest away. Of course, you need somewhere to put these boxes. 

For almost three years now, most of our books have been stashed in a friendly family's storage room, and at times I definitely have regretted not having them to hand. (Maybe I should make another attempt at finding a carpenter.) My ideal may be to have no more than a shelf of permanent books (with a shelf underneath for library loans), but this is not feasible as yet. For one thing, Benedict Ambrose is wedded to the idea of living in a library, and for another, I can't seem to make myself give up anything in the language section. 

UPDATE: We took my Getting By in Polish (BBC) and Colloquial Polish (Bołeslaw D. Mazur) to the charity shop on the grounds that I have had them for 10 years and don't need them anymore. I hope whoever buys them learns as much from them as I did.  

One day I will have all my flashcards memorised and then I will have a massive conflagration in the garden.