Now it's time for the garage

The attic is cleared.  Now it's time to finish the garage.  We have been working on parts of it all along.  We certainly couldn't handle a 2 1/2 car garage with a 20 x 10 storage addition in one day.  Started at 8:30 am and gave up at 5:30 pm.  (There were a couple of food breaks.)  Pretty much done.  The problem is that there is about 25 pieces of Styrofoam to get rid of and the recycling bin and trash bin are full.  Someone in the house who shall remain nameless has a penchant for saving the boxes of everything he buys.  So now we have all these boxes to flatten and recycle and all this rigid Styrofoam that held the products in place.  Too tired to worry about it now.  Time to eat.

Over dinner we hatched a plot to dispose of the Styrofoam.  When it got dark, we prepared for action.  Black clothing.  Blackened faces optional.  We would take as many pieces as we could carry and go to look in neighbor's recycling bins.  Any that weren't totally full, well, you can guess.  We did this separately so not to attract attention.  When our arms were empty, we went back to pick up more.  Oh, so much for dark clothing, the stark white Styrofoam glows in the dark.   

There is this woman who moved in 18 months ago down the block, but she doesn't live there.  Every two weeks she comes to her place and there are alot of cars in the street.  Never met her.  No one on the block has.  She wasn't home.  Her bins were still by her garage, so I pulled her recycle bin to the curb and filled it with the last of my stash.  As I was strutting home with a satisfied look on my face,  she drives in.  Even though I was very tired, I found the energy to sprint home.  

My partner in crime returned from his journey.  Congratulating ourselves on a job well done, we then focused our eyes on the three bags of trash that didn't fit in our trash bin.  We actually stood in the driveway discussing the situation.  Since our life of crime was already started, we decided to become career criminals.  We disposed of the 3 bags in the same way - not in the direction of the neighbor who returned home.

We are going to have to leave the state to avoid capture.

Clearing out the Attic

Before the sunny fun of retirement begins, a little rain must fall. 

We attended church at the early time to have the whole day to clean the attic.  Ladders, gloves, and vacuums were gotten out to tackle the project.  What a mess!  Years of dust and recent bits of the inside of the roof (we had a new roof put on last week so with the pounding...you see the picture) covered everything like icing on a cake that we didn't want to eat. 

If we were playing a drinking game that you take a drink every time something happens, we would have been drunk by 10 am - if the something was us saying, "why did we keep this?"  As you know, we don't drink so we had to keep going. 

Among the treasures that were found: 

• empty, original box from pots and pans we received as a wedding gift
• class notes from our college days: 3 years worth from me (graduated in 3 years including summers) and 8 years from Case (don't forget dental school)
• ribbons that Mom and I used to braid the ponies' mane before we took them to a show
• Tad's 6 foot diameter solar system project from elementary school (I think he got an A.)
• Easter bunny dressed in a red tuxedo from my 7th Easter
• tax receipts from 1985 through 1999

All of these items and more were spread out all over the house.  At 1:30 the door bell rings.  It was a young couple who wanted to see the house to possibly buy it.  Two weeks ago they had written down our open house dates.  We cancelled those dates and said that on the website.  "Sure, why not? Come on in."  They looked agile enough to step over boxes.  They decided not to buy the house.  Not for the reason you think...the husband was very tall and the top of his head was too close to the basement ceiling...that was the reason.

Sad to say that the attic did not get finished on Sunday.  We have to finish eating that cake another day.

Not a new chapter but a new book...

  A good friend recently commented to me that I was not just starting a new chapter in my life but a whole new book.  This blog will be my view of retirement, the Northwoods of Wisconsin, and life in general. 

   First things first, get out of the northwest suburbs of Chicago.  Easier said than done.  Our house is still on the market.  We have lowered the price four times.  Whether the house is sold or not, the final trailer will pull out of our driveway on October 1 and head north.