Over the Holidays I mentioned how visiting the relatives in California was like going off to Faerie, a timeless place of good food and revelry, in which normal life seems suspended until, poof, you wake up in the Catskill Mountains with a long white beard.
Well, having the relatives visit here is much the same. In this case, Margie’s folks, a pair of wonderful people. And nothing is the same when they’re here.
Little to no TV. Little to no time on the computer. Meals out, or different sorts of meals in. Katherine largely taken care of, but a whirlwind of projects.
So, as Margie drives them back to the airport, I’m sort of blinking and trying to figure out what I’ve let lapse for the past several days, and remember what things got put away in a welter of rearrangement and tidying and which might never be seen again for weeks or months or years.
Speaking of things not see for years, the big project this time out turned out to be our basement. We moved into this house in January 1996, just over six years ago. In that time, the basement has served as The Place Where Things Go. It’s been overflow pantry and a place where things are stored and retrieved and stored again. But it’s also been a place where things go, Never To Be Seen Again. And, of course, over time it’s grown progressively more difficult to navigate in.
This was exacerbated last fall when we had a sewer backup, which required the removal of everything from the furnace room. Some of that everything ended up getting thrown away (or will be, once our insurance claim is processed), but for the most part it meant pushing the saturation point of the other rooms to the supersaturation point, where odd things started precipitating around the edges.
Well a few months back, Jackie and Doyce helped us get started cleaning and reorganizing. The last four days of activity as Casa de Hill und Kleerup, though, actually finished the job.
We have a basement! Really! No, really!
The trash man is going to plotz when he swings by Thursday morning, but, damn, we have a basement. We could sleep people down there. I can run games down there. I can get back to working on my ever-growing comic book collection.
And we can find stuff! Stuff we’d forgotten we had! Stuff we remembered we had, but had consigned to the maw of the Dark Basement Gods.
Yee-haw!
Oh, yeah — Katherine graduated to a “big girl’s bed,” a bunk bed we put together for her, relegating the crib to the (heh) basement. But now there’s a place for stuff like that.
Oh, yeah. Yee-haw!
Tomorrow it’s back to work, a few frenzied days before the weekend, catching up on blogging as well as my Real Job. Then over the weekend — well, likely things will be dark here, as I’ll be up in the mountains on a retreat, and when I get back Sunday I immediately hop on a plane (United Airlines Mechanics Willing) and fly off to Oak Ridge, Tenn., arriving there Late, Late, Late.
So if you visit here, and don’t see anything new … well, I haven’t died, and I won’t be off in Faerie again until June, but I’ll be in and out for the next week-n-change.
Just a tap on the shoulder reality check – if you have had a basement backup once, plan on it happening again – and if you store anything of value down there – do it on shelving a few feet off the floor.
Trust me, the shelves will be worth every penny the first time someone stops midway down the stairs exclaiming ‘oh shit!’
please, please, pleaase don’t put comic books on the floor!
Well, the back-up was only an inch or two into one room — and we just made Home Depot and the Gorilla Racks folks very wealthy by adding shelving up off the floor for everything, so we’re there, definitely (we lost some not-cheap artwork that was in that room, on the floor).
And, yes, all the comic books are well off the floor now, too.
good boy!
Don’t forget the addition of a water sensor in the problem room.
I’ll remember it as soon as it actually gets put in place. 🙂