Stuff

It seems like these days everyone wants to tell you what to do with your stuff.  Stop snickering.  I'm talking about all of the things you accumulate over the course of your lifetime.  OK, I'm not talking about hangups, compulsions, phobias and stuff like that.  I mean the kind of stuff that fills closets, garages, basements (for those lucky enough to have 'em), the drawer under the kitchen phone, that cabinet in the corner under the counter that's so damn awkward to get to and places like that. 

There is more than one TV show on the subject, a veritable plethora (I love that word.  In fact, I like it so much I'm gonna use it again: plethora) of websites devoted to clutter and hoarding and even a How to Get Rid of Clutter for Dummies book or at least an article on the subject on their website.  On top of that everyone from USA Today to the Mayo Clinic is more than happy to tell you how all that stuff you have stashed away reveals your hidden neuroses and psychoses (or is it psychosises?  Whatever).  If you believe all those articles, websites, TV shows and what have you, you can even hire a professional de-clutterer who will relieve you of not only your OCD but also your stuff and probably sell it all to an antique dealer for a tidy sum to boot. 

Personally I see all of this as some kind of evil plot, probably hatched by the “simplify your life” or feng shui people; all of whom, I am convinced, own stock in the aforementioned antique stores.  The way I see it is that you have spent your entire life accumulating your stuff, and you have saved it because “it might come in hand some day”.  Right?  Yeah, you know it is.  So why in the world would you get rid of it just because somebody (who, incidentally, is making money by telling you to divest yourself of your stuff) tells you to throw it away?  Nooo!  I'm not buying that line.  If you have a place to store your stuff, I can see no earthly reason to start getting rid of it.  Bad things happen when you do that.

I can tell you don't believe me.  You've watched too many episodes of Hoarders in the last year or so and you think it's just my neuroses talking here.  I see that an example or two is in order.  Just like getting rid of stuff that you've had for years, this might be painful.  All children under twelve should probably leave the room at this point.

Example number 1:

 A few years back my wife talked me into getting rid of this credit card that I had had since almost before I started shaving.  I loved that card.  There was no limit on it and, despite propaganda from myriad competitors, it was accepted everywhere I wanted to use it. (I love that word myriad too, but I won't use it again here because some treats lose their appeal if you have them all the time.  I think this is one of them.) Despite my love for that card, my wife didn't like it because she thought the annual fee was too high.  So she let me know how much better off financially she thought we would be if we just got rid of that card.  After several years of hearing how the card was driving us into bankruptcy, and while my attention was temporarily diverted by a particularly engrossing episode of The Big Bang Theory, I agreed to cancel the card.  Bad things started happening right away.  The first thing was that the card issuer was devastated.  I started getting emails and teary phone calls from them offering to do anything I wanted if I would just take them back.  Eventually they began to threaten suicide.  It was traumatic as hell.  I almost had to go into analysis.  Apparently my other card issuers heard about my callous attitude and raised my interest rates in sympathy for their spurned competitor.  The final blow came when Clark Howard told me that the absolutely worst thing you can do to your credit rating is to drop the card you have held the longest.  Sigh.  I can't talk about this one anymore.

Example 2:  

My wife likes to decorate.  And redecorate.  And redecorate again.  I realize this is an affliction that many women are cursed with.  I certainly know women who take pictures of their decorations so that, when they redecorate, and redecorate again, they don't reproduce some decorating detail that they have used in the past.  All of this decorating takes a lot of, well, decorator items.  My wife tends to mix and match them and also to continually add to them.  So we have devoted an entire walk-in closet to decorations.  It's pretty big.  I'm not saying we used to keep a pool table and gym equipment in there or anything like that, but it's close to that size.  Awhile back it was sort of approaching the capacity where, if it was a hardfile, the operating system would start suggesting that things that hadn't been accessed in the last lifetime or so be archived in a salt mine.  So Ellie decided to reorganize the closet and, in the process, she identified a truckload or two of items that she wanted to donate to a local thrift store where many of them had been bought in the first place.  A week or two later she came home from that thrift store with some decorator items she had just picked up.  Usually she likes to show me her bargains but this time she was kind of quiet about them.  So I asked her to show me what she'd bought and, you guessed it, a couple of those items were things she had donated the week before.  After she saw them in the store she realized that she really didn't want to part with them.

Example 3:  

A few years back I saw this article about a woman who was selling murals that were entirely made from bottle caps.  Laugh if you want to, but she was getting tens of thousands of dollars from them.  Now, being a dedicated beer drinker, and a person who likes variety and drinks myriad brands and types of beer (damn! I used that word again.), I decided that I could probably make some terrific murals if I would just save my bottle tops.  So I did.  For years.  And ended up with bags and bags of them.  One day Ellie was on one of her “simplifying” kicks and cleaning out closets and things.  I was so traumatized I had just saved my fourth bottle cap of the afternoon so when she suggested that I get rid of the lawn and leaf bags full of bottle caps I had stored in the linen closet and the commode that had been sitting in the garage since I replaced it a few years ago, I reluctantly agreed.  However, I had a devilish plan to sort of hang onto them and pass along some hoarding wisdom to my descendants at the same time.  So I suggested that we give them to our granddaughter for art projects.  We did that and in short order she presented us with this great piece of art she had made with some of the bottle caps.  I think her next project is going to be a mural on the side of the house.  OK.  I realize that nothing bad actually happened in this example, but I didn't get to make my murals so that's sort of bad.  Or maybe not.  I don't know.

I could go on here with lots more examples, but I won't 'cause I'm sure you get the message.  I believe in holding onto your stuff as long as you have a place to store it.  In fact, the lack of a place to store it really isn't a problem.  When my mom passed away my wife and I inherited her coffee table, which turned out to be in pristine condition.  Know why?  Because Mom never met a TV Guide or Reader's Digest she didn't like.  She didn't have any bookshelves to spare, but the coffee table was sturdy enough to hold every one of those rags she had gotten since Arthur Godfrey's spat with Julius LaRosa.  Mom knew how to hoard things.  And she passed that on to her kids 'cause that's how you learn.  So take my advice:  Keep your stuff.  You never know when it will come in handy.

Rattlers in the Rosemary

OK.  I know it's been a month or so since the last time I wrote an article for this blog.  I don't have any excuse except the fact that I've been so busy that I just couldn't get up the gumption to write when I finally did get some free time. Hopefully that's going to change now.

See, the thing is that I suddenly got thrust into the position of Chief High Muckety Muck for the local master gardeners' demonstration garden.  The MGs had a spring garden fair the last day of March and that event included a plant sale, which is the only fund raising event that was planned for this year.  So it was a big deal.  Part of that deal was to get the demonstration garden in good shape so that the folks attending the fair would enjoy strolling through it and asking questions of the Master Gardeners.  So I've been putting in a lot of time getting ready for the fair over the last three months and in March that time went up exponentially.  The fair went off pretty well, though, and the garden looks good, so now I can take a breather and get on with my life.  Which is why I'm kicking back with a True Blond and writing this blog entry.

The only glitch in the garden fair, at least from my perspective, happened while I was taking a break and grabbing a bite to eat with Ellie.  I had just gulped down a chopped beef sandwich from the local 4-H kids and was working my way through a chocolate chip cookie when one of the veggie garden folks came in and asked me if I had brought any tools with me. I told him that I had a trowel and some pruners in my truck if he needed them but he said that he didn't think they would work and he was looking for a hoe.  I asked him what he needed it for and he told me that there was a snake in the herb garden.  I decided that I had better head out there to see what we had.  The veggie crew guy, who happens to be a retired chaplain with a biblical name that I'll just call Peter, grabbed a cultivating hoe from the MG store and followed me out. 

When we got to the herb garden I could see right away that we had a problem because, instead of the garter snake that I expected to see, there was about a three-foot Western Diamond Back rattler coiled up on the rosemary bush.  People were all crowded around with their cell phones out trying to see how close they could get to take a picture and everyone had an opinion about what to do, most of which boiled down either to killing it humanely (however that might be; lethal injection, maybe? I don't know) or just to “let it be because it isn't hurting anyone” (not right now maybe, but a diamond back packs enough venom to kill a child and make a grown man lose a leg, and judging by the buzz that came from him now and then, he wasn't feeling too friendly).

So I told Peter to extend the extendable cultivating hoe he had and we'd try to dispatch the rattler.  When he said “It is extended”, I knew we were in trouble.  A rattlesnake can strike out as far as half it's body length.  I estimated that that meant that the one we had could reach out about 18 inches, which isn't real far, but they can move very fast so he could get to us and strike before we got a chance to deliver the coup de gras.  It looked to me as though the old saw about discretion being the better part of valor applied here.  So I asked Peter to keep an eye on the serpent while I went inside the ag office and called Animal Control.

It turns out that Animal Control doesn't work on Saturdays, even in cases where there is a lethal snake wandering around among two or three hundred mostly recent arrivals from outside central Texas, of which about half were kids who didn't know any better than to stay away from a rattler and the other half were adults with phone cameras who were just as snake savvy.  So I finally got dispatch to send out a deputy to take care of the problem.  She asked that someone wait out by the road to show the deputy where the snake was and I told her I would do that.

After asking Peter to keep an eye on the snake I walked up to the road to wait for the posse.  I waited.  And waited.  And waited some more.  Eventually Ellie found me there and told me that she would wait for the policia while I went back to the herb garden to help Peter wrangle the rattler.

Eventually not one, but three, cops showed up.  Of course by this time the snake was nowhere to be seen.  So we used some looong bamboo poles to lift up the bushes under which it could hide, with the deputies standing by ready to dispatch the critter as soon as it showed its triangular head.  After five or ten minutes of this there was no sign of the rattler. So we started jamming the poles into the sage and other shrubs to see if we could make the darn thing mad enough to betray its location.  No luck.  The #$%^&* varmint was way too smart for that. 

Finally, after about twenty minutes of this, we gave up and just used the bamboo poles to make sort of a border around the bed and posted a couple “Keep Out” signs.  For the rest of the afternoon I was pretty nervous because I was sure the snake had gotten out of the herb garden and someone would step on it and get bit.  I guess it must have gone to ground, though, because there was no sign of it for the rest of the day.

That was my big day and the culmination of an intense month of gardening.  Now it's over and I'm back.  So watch this space.