Columbus Day

One of the benefits of working at a state university is all the nifty holidays you get, and today was one of them.

There is nothing like a wide open day with nothing scheduled. Hours and hours spread out before you. The possibilities are endless. Sort of.

I spend the morning in the basement. We have boxes and boxes of stuff from two children that were left here for safekeeping. What’s in those tattered cardboard vaults anyway? Notes passed during class in eighth grade, notebooks from college courses long forgotten. Passionate political papers smolder there.

Of course, some containers are stuffed with complete crap. Old Pez dispensers, outdated cordless phones, bits and pieces of toys. Notes passed during class in ninth grade. I don’t want to violate anyone’s privacy, so I didn’t catalogue these, just realized what they were.

I’d like to toss a good bit of this flotsam and jetsam of teenage years, but I’ll wait for them to visit the old homestead and offer them a chance to review the material and decided what they’d like to keep. The emotional attachment to some items may be too strong, and I can’t gauge which pieces might provoke outraged howling, should they go missing.

So, lots of boxes got moved around and furniture rearranged to “winterize” the basement. One goal was to get the treadmill in position. Another was to find a place for a table I am reluctant to throw out. You see, that table was once in my parents’ kitchen in the 1950’s when we were growing up. We five Scanlan kids ate a lot of hot dogs around that table. It was quite the modern kitchen piece of its time, with a sort of power strip built into it. I’m pretty sure I’d blow fuses if I ever tried to use it today, but still, I can’t quite part with it yet. If it did go missing, would there be outraged howling? Oh, I don’t really think so.

In the afternoon I moved upstairs and decided to surprise Kathy by cleaning off our kitchen table. What’s the big deal, you may ask? We now get mail for three families (Ann and Peter in Ireland, and Kathy’s deceased parents), so we’ve got triple the junk mail and triple the magazines and triple the catalogues. There was actually some first class mail that was important stuck in there too.

At the last second I remembered to do the one thing that Kathy had asked me to do today: wash the curtains from the bathroom and the hallway. Whew! It was close, but I got it done just in time.

Now I’m so tired, I’m looking forward to going to work tomorrow so I can get some rest.