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We took today off from hauling and sorting, but I still wandered about taking pictures and noticing things. Like these giant calipers that Grandpa acquired from somewhere. They weigh at least forty pounds. I’ve no idea what he planned to use them for.

This is a cabinet in Grandma’s kitchen. She may have covered it with contact paper herself. I’m not sure. But I find it strangely lovely if not typical for kitchen cupboards.

All over the property I see places where nature is attempting to reclaim structures. This ivy is climbing up the spiral stairs to the apartment above the garage.

I am not certain where these giant lamps came from, or why Grandpa has three of them. They’re the size of a human torso.

Grandma’s lilac bushes are thriving even without her here to water them.

Most of the doors in the house lock with hooks and eyes or with these sliding locks. This was a challenge when we were kids and accidentally locked ourselves into spaces.

Grandpa had at least two Oscilloscopes. My brother plugged one in, but it will require fixing to be functional. I’ve always been fascinated by the quantity of dials on this machine. So many things to adjust. I remember seeing it work.

This bowl was in Grandma’s kitchen. I usually got to see the wheat pattern when scooping out the last of the mashed potatoes. Even the chips remind me of the long years of use.

Grandpa wrote notes on many pieces of equipment.

It seems that Grandpa decided that the old means of turning on this electric stove weren’t good enough, so he re-rigged the entire thing with switches. Then he labeled it with big black marker so that other people would have a clue how it worked. Sometimes his solutions added greatly to the life of objects, other times they just gave him additional tinkering work as the thing constantly broke down. Not sure where this stove fit on that spectrum.

Grandpa often sorted his tools using blocks of wood with holes drilled into them. We found at least a dozen of these, all filled with assortments of duplicate tools. Most of the tools were obviously used when he acquired them.

Every now and then I pause to look up at the tall trees that grace the property. They are beautiful. This tiny community really is a lovely place to be.

Over forty whole televisions, many more pieces of televisions. Many of the televisions were in wooden cabinets.
Seven 8 track cassette players
Four reel to reel tape recorders
three hair dryers from the 1960s, the kind of hair dryers that came with a long hose and a vinyl hood to go over curlers
two oscilloscopes
twenty small motors of various types
A dozen stereos with radios and record players. Many in large wooden cabinets. (Though a few of these were actually in the house rather than the garage.)
Ten or more blocks of wood that had been drilled with holes so that they could be used as tool racks.
Tools, many many tools, vice grips, wrenches, screw drivers, drill bits, hammers, multiples of everything.
Pieces of tools, handles without hammers, saw blades without saws, etc.
Then there were the frankentools, where part of one tool had been attached to the handle of something else. Usually with an epoxy or silicone glue.
fifteen or twenty work lamps, most non-functioning.
Thirty or forty pounds of screws, bolts, nails, hinges, locks, door knobs, and other metal bits.
hundreds of fuses of any type you can imagine, ditto resistors, and radio tubes.
Three giant lamps that must have been removed from some stadium somewhere.
Thirteen pressure gauges
Four electric heaters
Three bicycles with no wheels. (We found the wheels outside fastened twenty feet up to living trees where they served as clothesline reels. The tree had grown around the bicycle parts so they appeared to be growing out of the tree.)
Random pieces of wood with things attached (voltmeters, circuits, light switches, and sometimes there were hand written notes on the wood saying things like “motor burned out, circuits good.”)
Eight linear feet of radio and TV repair manuals.
Fifteen linear feet of a radio repair magazines.
Twenty or thirty other small electronic devices.

All of this was hauled out and sorted. Some was delivered to recycling center, thrift store, or dump. The rest gets hauled off over the next week.

Estimated size of this garage is 600 square feet or less. It was packed.

My Grandpa was a radio repairman who expanded into televisions when they became common. He had a workshop and a tendency to acquire things which he intended to fix. These are the televisions we removed from his garage today.

This is a view of about a third of the garage, many televisions remain.

I went through and counted, we have 22 of them left to haul to the recycling center where they will be stripped down for parts. None of them are in current working order. I’m told that my parents had already hauled away piles of TVs on a previous visit here. So my best guess is that Grandpa had around 80 TVs sitting around that he intended to fix or to use for parts to fix something else.

Standing in the garage with Kiki, she looked around and said “I didn’t even really know him, but he’s here.” Yes. That building is filled with who he was. and there are finally enough TVs removed that we can see it. We can see what he valued and how he organized it. Grandpa was all about function and re-using things.

I remember his hands were rough and always stained with dirt or grease. Apparently he went through a lot of bandaids and then kept all the containers because those little metal cans would surely be useful for something eventually.

In contrast, Grandma collected beautiful things. Here you can see a few of her lamps. Along with the clown doll which creeped me out, particularly after I’d seen the movie Poltergeist.

We’ve sorted through lots of glassware, all sorted and carefully stored. Here are the decanters that she displayed in her windows.

Up above the lovely decanters is a reminder of why the house has to go. Water damage.

And then there are the places where we’ve tried to keep out the wildlife with only limited success.

Today was spent sorting, labeling, and hauling off larger items. Tomorrow more of my siblings will have arrived and we’ll have a much larger work crew. The hauling will continue as will the discoveries. All the work reminds my of why I love this house and why we have to let it go. It reminds me of why I love my Grandparents, and my sadness that they are no longer here. This process has me remembering things I had forgotten and telling some of those stories to my kids. I’m thinking about what people leave behind them when they go. For now I need to rest. I’m going to be stiff and sore tomorrow.

It is the first day of our summer schedule. I haven’t felt the impact of it as strongly as I have some years in the past. Link and Kiki were already home all day, so we’re just adding Gleek and Patch. The kids aren’t noisy or messy in the ways that they used to be, so that isn’t an issue. But I am going to have to re calibrate my brain which thinks that all the kids at home means Saturday Mode.

This year’s variation on the summer rules has each of the kids assigned one house chore per day and one hour of either making or learning. After they’ve done these things (and after noon) I won’t police how much time they spend on screens. The good news is that they all have projects that they want to accomplish. I’m excited to see what they make and learn.

Now if only I can kick my brain into gear.

My peonies are giant and beautiful this year. Just wanted to share.

I’ve spent all day making my spaces be different. Now, at 10:30 I can say that they’re more organized, but for most of the day it was moving things around into different piles. Howard came into my office at one point and I asked if he could tell I’d been working on it. He said that yes he could tell that the piles were far more organized than they had been before. The goal in my office is to remove clutter, hang art on the walls, and remove the ugly utility shelving. That last will be the hardest part because I’ll have to find new homes for everything that is currently being stored on the there.

My gardening efforts were more immediately rewarding. Ninety minutes with clippers trimmed back the grape vines and re-shaped our bonsai-ish tree by our front window. Gleek helped me with the gardening work because she has a plan and needs funds to make it happen. The plan is a chicken plan, where she gets to have a little flock of chickens. Howard and I don’t really have an interest in tending chickens, but if Gleek is devoted enough to the idea to fund it herself, then we’ll gladly give over some yard space to a chicken coop. I suspect she’ll actually follow through with this plan, because any time she has a chance to play with neighbor’s chickens, she loves them. And they like her back. She is a chicken whisperer who manages to coax unruly chickens into sitting in her lap and letting her pet them. It is going to take Gleek a while to save up enough money, so no chickens this summer. Which is fine. I have many things to do that aren’t managing a flock of chickens.

I’m not certain why today turned into a day of doing all the things. Hopefully I can continue to re-arrange things over the next week. For today I’m tired and sore.

This is not being a great week for focused attention. We can start with the fact that it is Spring Break, so Gleek and Patch are out of school. This means that the sound of games begin around 10am instead of around 3pm. The sound of games isn’t really a problem all by itself. The real trouble is that the kids come find me to ask questions or tell me things. often to answer I have to stop what I’m doing and go do something else for a bit. Then I have to try to remember what I was doing. About the time I’ve gotten rolling, another kid needs a thing.

On top of kids in the house, this week we’re finalizing the cover for Force Multiplication. We’ve gotten to the stage where I tweak something and send to Howard, then he tweaks and sends back to me. The turn around time is pretty fast. Yesterday I went through file versions A-G. Today I’m already on version C. When it is all done, I’ll probably put together a gif slideshow of all the cover tweaks. It is fascinating to see how the design morphs over time. But I can’t post it until we have a final version.

If seen some wonderful online pranks, things that made me happy at their existence. The annual roll-out of ridiculous merchandise on Think Geek is a good example. I go there to see and laugh, but I am not tricked. I have dear friends who love the online pranking. In general I don’t. It raises my ambient level of anxiety because every single thing I look at, I have to think “Is this real?” And then there are the pranks that punch me right in the anxiety triggers.

For example, this morning Gmail added a button called “mic drop” where if you sent an email using it, an animated gif was added to your message and all responses to that email chain would be automatically archived. The trouble is that the button was right next to the send button, and I could picture myself accidentally clicking it and losing track of important business communications. Other Gmail customers reacted as I did, and the button was deactivated shortly after I saw it.

I spent some time yesterday thinking about how some people don’t ride chemically induced waves of mood on a daily basis. At least I think they don’t. I’ve heard rumors. That is not my lived experience. My daily existence involves management of stresses, and close attention paid to when people are over stimulated. And then there are days like yesterday where everything is fine when I wake up, but things go emotionally sideways, not because of events, but because of weirdness inside my head. I wonder if I would enjoy April Fools Day more if I didn’t have to manage the psychology in my household quite so much.

For now, I’m just going to look at this photo of a flower I took this morning. I may do photo a day again this April. I enjoyed that last year.

It always takes a few days for me to sort myself out post-convention. I would dearly love to just spring back to work, but energy and sleep debts must be paid. The good news is that as of today, I appear to be paid in full. I plowed through some work on Force Multiplication, bringing it closer to print ready. I wanted to work more on Planet Mercenary, perhaps I’ll find a spurt of energy later this evening.

…and apparently I did because it is now later in the evening and I got some more work done. We only have 14 more margin art spaces to fill in Force Multiplication. That and creating textures for the cover. Then we’ll be ready to test print. So close.

I had to take some time to play homework warden this afternoon. Gleek had an overdue essay to complete. Patch had to face the dire assignment of drawing a still life. This actually is pretty dire to him. It punches his anxiety buttons, because his brain screams at him that he’ll get it wrong and that will be his ultimate doom. But we can’t excuse him from all of life’s hard things on account of anxiety, so I’m giving him space to wrestle with this a bit. Hopefully he’ll be able to make himself get started tomorrow.

Some days are just ordinary. Perhaps I’ll have thoughtful things to post on a different day.

All the passengers are fine, my car is not.

My car will be fine again in about two weeks.

I am grateful for auto insurance and the relatively low deductible we have on collisions.

I’m really glad that the other car was barely scratched, so the young woman driving it doesn’t have to deal with repairs the way I do.

I’m also glad that the smash was the result of a ten second miscalculation rather than a stupid driving decision. It falls firmly into the category “these things happen” rather than being a regret.

I’m pleased that when I called to tell Howard I would be late I remembered to lead with “I’m fine, Patch is fine. I had a car accident.” That was putting the most critical information first.

I wish I’d done a better job of collecting and handing out information in the moment. We got the critical pieces, contact info, insurance, etc. But when my insurance company asked for make and model of the other car, the best I could say was “Something jeep-ish? It was blue.” Not a moment that made me feel intelligent. I was aware that I wasn’t thinking entirely clearly, and I tried to counteract it by going slow and talking through the steps. I’ve had a lot of hindsight thoughts since. Though interestingly they’re all about the aftermath and not about the accident itself.

Smash occurred Thursday night. I spent a significant portion of today arranging for repairs and settling my own emotions. I really didn’t want my car smashed. I’m sad every time I look at it. At first I was afraid that I’d totaled the car. I pictured myself having to shop for a new one, but having to buy one used because the insurance only covers replacement of current state, not new value. And my mind raced on to think about the fact that we’re still paying off the car and I didn’t know what sort of financial impact that would have on our year. And I spent quite a lot of emotion on not wanting a different car. I like this one.

But Howard looked at the car and pointed out that it looks awful, but really it is only the hood that is terrible. The engine is fine. The car still drives. The impact wasn’t even hard enough to deploy airbags, which feels strange considering the mess it made of my car’s hood. And looking at the picture I feel a bit sheepish about my anxiety. While the damage definitely has to be fixed, it is no where near as bad as my emotions claim it is.

I’m very tired today. Some of that is because I didn’t sleep well last night. Most of the not sleeping well was because my brain was rehearsing how things need to go from here and how I could do better next time. Emotional processing takes time.

I used Howard’s car for errands today. I was cautious in driving, but more aware of how normal driving feels than I was nervous. Though my brain keeps making up stories about me wrecking his car too. Which would be far worse, because his car has been with us for over a decade and has a name.
Maybe mine should get a name out of this. It certainly took good care of me, absorbing the damage so Patch and I were fine.

As you can probably tell, my thoughts are still a bit scattered. I’m hoping that a better night’s sleep tonight will help me reset.