Cleaning up and trying to relax

I am sorry I have not been as bloggy as normal while I am at home.  (yes I know that is not a word but in today's culture that seems to be ok)  I have been busy with filling out applications online for jobs that are filled in less than 24 hours.  I have also kept myself busy helping around my parents house and trying to relax on a vacation.  So I am going to do one of those odds and ends type of blogs.

Cleaning up my parents garage has proven to be a bigger job than I originally anticipated.  At first I thought we were mainly just going to clean up what is there so we could see the floor again and clean the stains off.  But then mom wanted to pare down her seasonal decorations for the house.  She is keeping her seasonal decorations for the Summerside community in Rolling Green (she decorates their entrance sign and then at Christmas the entire neighborhood stop and street signs).  But after last year's removal and storage of Christmas decorations took almost a week and she was worn out from it all, she decided to reduce what she does.  
Mom deciding what Christmas Santa Clauses stay and which go to yard sale.

I am very proud of the progress she made going from three shelves to just one.  Still not tiny house reduction but really good for her and her decorations.

This started a whole discussion on everything on the shelves and Dad's entire tool area and the mess that it was.
those are tools in that big pile

And those are tools and various screws and nails in those tubs
So I started pulling everything off the shelves for evaluation of keep or yard sale it.  Then I started in on dad's tool area and going through tubs full of little bitty things like loose drill bits, screws, adapters, switches and the list just continues.  What I really loved was two sets of screw organizers and most of the screws in piles inside of them.  My dad is no hoarder but after pulling about 30 small bags of screws you buy from Lowe's just lying around never opened I begin to be concerned.  I spent two full days going through various screws and nails figuring out what they were and putting them in their organizing bin and relabeling everything.


That is one screw organizer and then two portable types with various anchors, nails and exterior screws.
This is a powdered tea container being repurposed for holding pencils and markers

This container got repurposed to hold loose wrenches

I took two loose pipe mounting brackets lying around and a piece of dowel to make the tape dispenser

That is a piece of 3" PVC pipe cut to hold the drills up and then old asbestos sampling bags with the loose driver bits and jigsaw blades


This time the bins are separated by use like plumbing, electrical, grill items etc and then labeled.


all the cords separated and bundled so they hang out of the way

Dad's tools and battery chargers

all those tools from the plastic bins now out where you can get to them.

the shelf with mom's Christmas stuff including the tree.

mom's wed night dinner collection and dad's smoker

all the garden tools put back in a place.  
The metal plate from a foam armrest
All this pare down encouraged me to go through the boxes I put up when I left to go to Tanzania and I pared them down to about half the thing I kept from before. A lot of the Peru and Tanzania cloth went to Miss Kate for her to sew some stuff up. After the yard sale we should have about three shelves empty from a system that used to fill every shelf and still need to put stuff on the floor and on top of the cabinets. It would help if they quit shopping at Sam's wholesale club. I do plan to install a pulley system to get the large ladder off the floor and up near the ceiling since it is only used to clean gutters once a year when I come home which I got the jump on doing it in December and knocked last month.

This was also a good time to look for metal that could be recycled such as a pound of screws that I could not find enough of to save. One thing I think most folk miss is the arm pieces on office chairs. I found two of those in their things that were damaged and we replaced. They were keeping the old ones for some reason. So I cut the foam off and dug out the metal plate for recycling. Our church's men's fellowship has a metal recycling program that generates thousands of dollars that is then spent on various mission and community help projects.
Many of you heard I also went on a vacation.  It is the first non-family vacation I have been on in a long time.  I used to love to do cruises in the past and had traveled on both Carnival and Holland America which are fantastic.  This time it was Royal Caribbean.  I am not sure if was the different cruise line, changes in all the cruise lines since I went on my last one almost 20 years ago, or just that I am 20 years older now but it was no where as much fun as it was in the past.  To start with the moment you walk on they are trying to up sale you features that used to be included like a premium meal during dinner, drink packages (used to be sodas and water were free) but now every bit of water you consume you pay for.  What I thought was real tacky is that they will stock your room with water for additional money even if you have one of those drink packages.  

I went to the briefing on the port of call and it turned out to be just about shopping for jewelry and expensive watches at their "preferred" stores at the port.  Almost every opportunity to do something on the ship cost more money.  It used to be everything on the ship was free and you paid for shore excursions.  The shows were free at least and they had a decent singing and dancing group and a great comedian on board.  But if you wanted to do anything else it cost money.  The most outrageous was the towel for the pool area.  If you did not return it to the station they charged you $25 (it was a crappy towel).  But then when you went out on the first port of call on their "private" island they had you take a towel for the boat.  They did not tell you to make sure you brought it back and took it up to the pool return station or you would be charged.  A lot of folks left them in their state room after they got back and fortunately I overheard a steward tell someone they needed to take it back up because he could not check it back in for them.

The shore excursions are normally a lot of fun but fairly expensive.  I was happy when I found an hour and half guided wildlife and nature walk at our first port of call.  It was on $30.  That should have been a clue.  First I signed up for 11 am but when I got on the ship they had canceled the 11 am because the ships crew felt it was too hot to do the walk then so I had to get up at 6:30 to make the departure call at 7:30 which actually did not happen until 8:15.  Then we stood around for almost an hour until they started at 9:45.  It actually lasted about 40 minutes most of which was telling us where we could buy things on the island since this was their private island.  The part of the nature trail was two trees that had medicinal properties, that was it.

The other shore excursion was a dolphin package with a waterpark adventure.  It was not cheap.  It turned out to be more about having your picture taken with the dolphins so you could buy a photo package.


I was not unhappy when they cut the cruise short to get some of the folks that lived in Florida back early enough to get out before Hurricane Irma hit.  It took about 20 hours of driving to get back.  I had done some preplanning by filling up before I parked the car and had a case of water in the car in case it was real bad.  It was difficult to find gas in Florida and the one time I stopped it was about 45 minutes of waiting for a pump.  I did stop the night in Georgia but again it took time to find a hotel that had a vacancy.  The next morning when I got up I had to ask people who had parked overnight to wake (they were sleeping in the car) so I could get my car out.  They also had numbers on cars that the person running the desk said was the order she was to wake them up if a rooms became available.  So after I left she went and cleaned my room and rented it out to someone in the parking lot.  They made a lot of money that day.

I was impressed that SC put out extra porta johns at the weigh stations and closed them down for weighing trucks and just acted as extra rest stops.  They put them out at the rest stations as well to handle the extra load.  

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