London’s always been expensive, The Colbert Report is still on (what else are radicals like you going to watch) and you should be happy about darts on TV!!!

I hope you had a good holiday, and that the new year brings great things!!

Email back anytime old man!!

Thanks for the tips Bill!

For protein i usually eat

• turkey (i’m with Ben Franklin on this one, it should have been our national bird)
• nuts – i just have some around and every day, some get consumed
• cheese
• beans, mostly soy (tofu wrap for lunch today)
• about once a week pork or fish
• about every month or so, I’ll be somewhere with steak and get a piece of beef

The food changes I made:

• lowering the frequency of pork and beef (i used to eat pork 3 or 4 times a week and beef 1/week)
• started drinking that green juice to get more veggies (the stuff that looks like baby shit). I’ve always drank a lot of fruit juice, which it turns out this is mostly fruit.
• i used to eat a couple eggs with cheese on top, 1-2 times a week. i just stopped doing that.

Hope you are doing well.

Have you met Phil London when you were still at Bearingpoint? anyway, he is African American and must be a republican. He is so angry that Obama got elected, I hear his grumble all the time. I am very confused, at least he can be happy for his children.

It’s been a while since I read the blog the last time, but I enjoy reading them when I do.

Take care,
Heather

I’ve seen Burn after reading and I enjoyed it a lot.

Stas.

I’m still happy with the convenience, but I want them to fix the graphics.

First, with a four car garage they could barely fit one car, due to the piles of crap in the rest of the spaces. In the house one noticed the piles of crap in every room. Every room of a huge three-story house had piles of crap sitting everywhere. Every surface had piles on it. Yes, every surface–tables, counters, and floors–had piles of crap on it. Every magazine that entered the house stayed in the house. My father would have killed us if we had moved, let alone thrown out an old copy of one of his National Geographics, or Popular Mechanics. Thus all were piled in rooms throughout the house. Same with scraps of paper. Yes, that is right, scraps of paper. Those scraps of paper might be useful again. You could use them to take notes on. Dead plants, near dead plants, and overgrown misshapen un-pruned plants. All must be kept. If one even suggested getting rid of it my father would holler how valuable it was and that at Bachman’s, the local garden store, would sell that for a hundred dollars. The coffee table was stacked high with candy of various vintages. You could find chocolates that were no longer manufactured in North America, some of them twenty years old. Of course, this candy was under or on top of other crap. I am pretty sure all of the candy was post 1982, the last year a dog lived in the house.

As you know your brother Bob likes to cook. He was amazed at my parents’ kitchen—a full size, suburban space that included many counters and cabinets–because all of the counters were covered with crap. One singular appliance, a plastic bag sealer, took up a space about two feet by two feet. A microwave oven was topped by linoleum samples, a Yatzee game, plastic containers full of note papers, and assorted other crap. Perhaps the most striking feature of the kitchen was a magnetic knife holder, holding about 500 knives of various shapes and sizes, none sharpened. Next to the phone, there was a handy 1960s era adding machine which was never officially used after 1980, when a calculator was put on top of it. Every kitchen gadget ever advertised on TV sat somewhere in that kitchen. Each used once, when it was found that perhaps it didn’t work as well as it did when demonstrated on television or at the State Fair. It was supposed to slice and dice and make Julienne fries, but it never really did. Both the knives and bag sealer were apparently decorative items because we never saw them used. In a final coup, various containers and pans were stored in the BOTH of the convection ovens, so that when one used an oven, the crap had to be taken out and stacked on other crap.

I was screamed at in about the year 1998 to clean out my stuff from that house, most of it was already long gone, as I was the only child that had removed my stuff from their house. But, my mother insisted that one room had all sorts of boxes that were full of things that must be mine. I spent two days going through every box in that room. I found two large boxes of sample fabric swatches for the drapes my mother had made in 1968. You know, you could use those for a quilt or something, so of course they couldn’t be thrown out. I also found box after box of 1976 bicentennial commemorative red, white and blue glass and candle centerpieces that my mother had made for a Shriner event. Can’t get rid of those. When I finished going through the 12 by 13 room and had found only two boxes that were mine in floor to ceiling piles of boxes and I wanted to throw my crap out. My mother would not allow it. She said, my crap was all valuable and I should keep it because I could use it later. Luckily, I got her out of the house so I could throw it away. None of the other crap left that room until they moved in 2005.

At various times over the years I found myself helping my mother clean and organize her closets. Here is a sampling of the things I encountered: various parts of old vacuum cleaners that no longer existed; bolts of silk bought in 1968 for my mother to sew special dresses; a bag containing three 1987 Twins World Series championship sweatshirts with the price tags still on them; 1950’s vintage men’s dress shirts unused since 1960; five men’s tuxedos of various sizes and colors; my mother’s WWII WOW uniform; enough sets of sweat pants to outfit a high school athletic department; dozens of bottles of lotion, shampoo and conditioner, half empty, first opened during the Nixon administration; a plastic bag containing several hundred packets of soy sauce collected from bad Chinese take-out over the past four decades. Now, you may think some of these items are collectable. But, only if they ever see the light of day. Not when they are all squirreled away never to be used or given to others, because they are all too valuable.

This is only a smattering of the various things that were piled and saved in that house. It was packed floor to ceiling with CRAP! And, according to my father it was ALL valuable. When they finally moved, lo and behold at their auction most of that valuable stuff wouldn’t sell. They ended up having to pay to have it hauled to a dump.

I never became a pack rat. But, I did keep too much stuff. However, I learned from the fire that most of what one owns is just stuff and it doesn’t matter. We lived without stuff for a long time after that fire. When we moved back to the condo after the fire it was too difficult to go through all of the boxes of stuff, so we left them in the basement. When we sold the condo it was a weight off of our shoulders to finally have gone through and gotten rid of boxes and boxes of stuff. Now, I may live with too much stuff. Our apartment closets are full. But, it isn’t in piles, and it isn’t crap. It is clean and orderly.

My siblings however, carry on in the keeping of piles of crap. Only they are worse than my parents. Because my mother would at least clear pathways and straighten and dust the piles of crap. My siblings just leave crap on every surface, including all staircases and continue to add to the piles. They never clean, never throw anything away and can not imagine why Bob and I got rid of half the stuff we owned when we moved. They think I am nuts because my place is clean, orderly, and not full of piles of crap.