so much for November

okay so clearly the one post a day in November thing was a complete and utter failure. Life happens, okay? sheesh.
Moving right along!

I have two deep, dark secrets to share with you today, dear readers. One is the dark, rotten, moldy kind, that should be kept out of sight....one is the kind that looks bright and shiny and clean but inside...well, it's more like the first one. Are you ready for this? These secrets are important, they are the secrets to our downsizing success.

1) The basement of our new house. This is truly one of the most horrific basements I have ever encountered. The walls are crumbling in various places, have been ripped out in others, and speckled with black mold in many others. I have a mold allergy and I can't spend more than 15 minutes down there without starting to wheeze. Evidence of the previous tenants abounds, from someone's sad attempt to texture paint one of the rooms (note: swamp green rag rolling does not improve a dark, dank room), to the *ahem* evidence left behind in another: tinfoil covered window, pile of soil in the corner and stack upon stack of shipping boxes. We hate our basement because it is moldy, lacks a proper door, and feels like the kind of place that makes a happy home for rodents or serial killers in movies starring Jodie Foster. But we also love our basement because it is holding ALL OUR CRAP. All the boxes, and boxes, and boxes of stuff that won't fit in our house and we might want and we don't know what to do with. And as a result we are saving thousands of dollars in storage fees while we figure out what we're doing. So we (or maybe Beth given my wheezing issues) are going to tackle the basement with mold spray, gloves and masks, and put all the stuff in boxes in shelves and in plastic to protect it from the damp we know, and the damp we know will come!
wish us luck.

2) My other dark, deep secret isn't really much of a secret. It's IKEA.

IKEA, shiny blue and yellow Swedish siren, luring me to your shoals of disposable consumerism. You with your crunchy, green, family friendly image, your shining clean ballroom, your cheap meatballs and fries. But really are you any better than Wal-mart or McDonald's ? Despite your shiny exterior, your insides are just as tainted by the pursuit filthy lucre.

I returned to the blue and yellow behemoth, Toronto version, for the first time this past Saturday. By some cosmic miracle both our children agreed to stay in the play place as my wife and I giddily skipped through the store. 3 groggy hours later and many, many dollars poorer, we staggered out into the bright daylight of a North York parking lot...wondering how yet again we had been lulled into consumer complacency and wasted almost a whole Saturday inside.

the secret here? I guess it's just that I keep on believing all my downsizing problems can be solved if I spend enough money on Expedit shelving.

Canadian Tire Money, pennies and marbles

What do these three items have in common?
They are THE top three most annoying items to deal when you are moving.
Why? They are small, usually found in all kinds of random and aggravating locations (pockets, bottoms of grocery bags, bottoms of drawers) especially in a less than organized house like ours, and you can't. just. throw them out.
at least not without feeling major guilt about
a) wasting money that could some day be spent on motor oil or a gigantic inflatable motion and light activated Christmas snow globe.
b) wasting money that could be spent on penny candy.
c) wasting money by throwing out toys that your kids like and actually play with and really don't take up THAT much space

Rounding out my list of annoying things to run across when packing:

• Broken jewelry....I really used to like that earring/bracelet/necklace until my toddler ripped it up. Maybe someday my wife will fix it for me? Until then I will store it in a ziploc baggie with other broken jewelry until it turns into a hopelessly mangled Gordian knot.
• Half empty containers of stuff....ketchup, hand sanitizer, lotion etc. I don't want to waste it, but how many multiple half empty bottles of the same crap is it really worth moving? Especially hand sanitizer which seems to multiply like rabbits around here as we try to convince our handwashing hating kid to stop spreading germs (nope, doesn't work).
• screws/bolts/nuts and other little metal and plastic thingies that I cannot correctly label (see cordaround post)--these paralyze me. I mean what if I throw out the one thing that holds our shelves together, therefore requiring a trip to IKEA to stand in their miles long customer service line? And if my wife is not around to ask about them I have to save them in my pockets or little ziploc bags until I can find out if they're okay to throw out.
• Batteries. I can't throw them out or else the silent screams of fishies, bunnies and other wild creatures who will be maimed by their corroding acid echo in my head. I know of two places where they can be recycled in this area: 1-my office 2-IKEA . Neither of these places is convenient when I am packing. Enter ziploc bags, that eventually have to be taken somewhere else.

I'd write more, but I'd better pace myself for the rest of the month. If you don't hear from me, I may be underneath a pile of ziploc bags filled with tiny pieces of crap in my basement. Send help.