Frost On My Punkins

Snowing again today! We have around seven more weeks of winter left to survive. We have been grocery shopping twice since Christmas, and have not been out and about other than that, except to work.

I’ve been using any spare time I have to sort through old books. I am burning old books, such as manuals for DOS, and other technical books for hardware and software that are gone, gone, gone into the abyss. I am keeping my UNIX reference materials though, and some of the text books I used when I was teaching college courses. I can see a day coming though, when I will burn those as well, as they will have no potential relevance in this isolated life we lead.

We need to purge a lot of “stuff”. There are bits and bobs of all sorts of things, sitting all over the place, stuffed into drawers, boxes, and closets. I am tired of dealing with it all. There are things I treasure, such as my Grandmother’s tea cups and saucers, family pictures, precious reel to reels of original recordings, my wedding bouquet… a lot of little things that only mean something to me. But there are a lot of things that don’t mean a whole lot to me, that I have been hanging onto because I may need them someday.

Well, someday came and went, and I didn’t need those things. I want to let them go. I have begun to add items to a plastic shopping bag, which will be donated to a second hand store. None of our belongings are valuable in a monetary sense.

Visually I enjoy simple lines and open space. This is not the effect one achieves with mountains of small potentially useful items bursting from every nook and cranny. We have furnished two dwellings with our collection of vintage furniture and other household items. What could we possibly want with surplus beyond that!

Worldly Distractions

Weather

-1 °C
Condition:Light Snow
Pressure: 100.6 kPa
Visibility: 5 km
Temperature: -1.5°C
Dewpoint: -2.3°C
Humidity: 94 %
Wind: W 24 gust 41 km/
Wind Chill: -8

Quote

From my book collection:

“When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock,
And you ear the kyouck and gobble of the struttin’ turkey-cock,
And the clakin’ of the guineys, and the clucking’ of the hens,
And the rooster’s hallylooyer as he tiptoes on the fence;
O, it’s then’s the times a feller is a-feelin’ at his best.
With the risen’ sun to greet him from a night of peaceful rest,
As he leaves the house, bare-headed, and goes out to feed the stock,
When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder’s in the shock…”

From the poem: When The Frost Is On The Punkin
From the book: Riley Farm-Rhymes, James Whitcomb Riley, New York, 1883, 1887, 1888, 1889, 1891, 1892, 1894, 1896, 1898, 1899 and 1905, page 27.

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Bex

Same here… bits and bobs in ever nook and cranny just about. When I first retired, a year ago last October, I went great guns for a while cleaning things out. I organized my side of the basement but now it’s cluttered again with stuff – not from me but from husband’s stuff that his parents had to forfeit when they went into the nursing section of their place. All their stuff had to either be discarded or given to an offspring. So we got more stuff.

Then I moved up to my “office” and went thru an emptied an entire file drawer of old papers I’d been hanging on to for probably 30 years. That felt good but exhausting. Unfortunately, I ran out of steam and still have 3 drawers like that one left. I need to be “in the mood” to clean out stuff. I haven’t found that mood back again yet…