the cure for the common pack rat

As their kids have grown up, moved out, and started their own families, my parents may have found that they have a little more room in the house, but the detritus of years lingers. We all managed to leave quite a bit of flotsam behind. (I'm sure this is not an uncommon phenomenon.) While we had everyone there, my mom wanted us to go through some of the stuff in the basement and figure out what we wanted to take and what could be gotten rid of. Karen, who's good at organizing, hauled a bunch of boxes out onto the deck and helped to sort through it all.

Most of these things have only been kept around for sentimental value. The clear solution is to take pictures--preserve the memory without the bulk! We ended up with "to keep" piles, "trash/donate" piles, and "to photograph" piles. The photographing fell to me. All the trophies, school art projects, and odder items were lined up and made to say cheese in turn.



Goodbye, frog basket! (Elizabeth thought the frog basket was cool.)




A paper-mache bug. (Or papier-mâché, for snoot value.)



Peter's creatively-spelled Star Trek character mahjong tiles.



I'm told that these are dessicated limes that Peter learned to juggle with. I'm still not clear on whether the dessication happened before or after the juggling. ("We can't throw away those limes! I learned to juggle with those limes!" "It's okay, we'll take a picture of them.") I should add here that I don't recall ever seeing Peter actually juggle.



Mollie helped.



Still helping.



Calling in reinforcements. (Petercat was happy to help too.)



Helping is hard work!



Collectively, we purged a huge pile of stuff. I picked out a very few things to bring home. We just don't have room. But I did take lots of pictures.

LOLPetercat

Years ago, my family adopted a pregnant cat that we named Fern. She had four kittens, named Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter (after Peter Rabbit and his sisters). As it turned out they were all girls. Peter had the nicest personality so we kept her and found homes for the others. Having a female cat named Peter has occasionally caused some confusion, compounded by the fact that I also have a brother named Peter. We usually call her Petercat to differentiate.

Petercat likes to attack shoes. Or feet in shoes, perhaps. She bites at the laces and kicks her hind legs. The shoes are always easily defeated and she remains secure in her shoe-hunting prowess.



I was just working on archiving these photos today, and thought they could use a caption.