The week that was

The feeling of days and weeks merging together seems to be the new norm for a lot of people, and I suspect too that depending on where one lives, the melding of months might not be too far behind. Hopefully some of the more dire "news" out there isn't to be believed, because if so, years could end up being indistinguishable by the time all is said and done.

Days and weeks bleeding together is nothing new to me, nor is years, those seem to be merging fairly seamlessly in recent decades as well. I believe this to be a byproduct of getting older, of course in my case it could also just be a byproduct of not spicing things up enough, I am rather set in my ways after all.

For the most part, I can usually only tell the weeks and months apart by weather changes and/or doing something/going somewhere out of the ordinary, the latter being increasingly rare as of late, that being said, last week did end up being slightly less ordinary... and now I'm gonna proceed to bore the spit out of you by talking about it!

[This first thing was already discussed, and shown, on Twitter, so my apologies if you've already seen it -- feel free to skip to the next section if you have]

I think that it was just in the last couple of weeks or so (I don't feel like looking for the post to link it up here) that I covered some of my year-long sorting project. In it I mentioned that I had run out of two-row shoeboxes, and needed another one. With everything closed, it's not exactly easy to find such things, and I wasn't about to pay the crazy prices (gouging?) on Amazon, so the only thing left to do was to make one... and I did!

Looking back at it over a week later now, I still think it looks good, although I wish I could get a picture of it without the phone camera giving it a bunch of funky angles. Nothing is glued or taped in, so if I ever want to get another "real" one, I can just take out the inserts and have my shoebox back.

I didn't really need at the time, but decided to make another one anyway, so Monday morning I played around a bit, and came up with this one:

Pretty cool, huh? I even took a few more pictures to show a fellow on Twitter...

Like the first box, nothing is permanent, but the dividers stay snug thanks to the combs. I really like this box, and now that I've started using it, I can honestly say that it works just as well as any store bought box, maybe even better? OK, it's not better, but it is just as good!

Tennessee is slated for a partial reopening later this week, so in theory I could go to the print/copy/card shop in town and get a couple of boxes, but I like my homemade ones just fine, and don't really see the need to buy any more. Besides I'm sort of the mindset now that if I ever need any more, I'll just make them, I have quite a few shoe boxes -- including one more big one, that could easily be made into another 4-rower. I'll come back to sorting in a minute or two, but I'm trying to do a linear post here today, so bear with me.

So that covers the highlights from Sunday and Monday.

Tuesday wasn't terribly exciting, but I did get a message from my friend, Marc, letting me know of incredible find that he had come across earlier that day. Since it was a private message, and I don't know if Marc shared it publicly (or wants it shared publicly), I'll have to leave out what it was, but will say that it was something that someone had offered up for free, and was something that is very near and dear to my heart. During our exchange, I lamented that such things never happen to me (especially out in the middle of nowhere), which unbeknownst to me, may have set universal doings into motion.

Wednesday was a garbage day, and even though I've mentioned it before, but for any new readers, I live in an area where there is no curbside pickup, so you've got to take your garbage and recycling to a central collection point, sort of like a dump, but not really a dump. Coming from the "big city", this took me a while to get used to, but is now something that I look forward to, if only because it provides an opportunity to find, and ultimately bring home, more junk. It's also not that far away, so it's not like I have to commit a whole morning/afternoon to doing this, which is nice.

Technically speaking, scavenging isn't permitted, but also isn't stopped if one goes about it in an orderly manner, which is good, because I've found quite a few neat things there over the years -- always from the recycling bins, not the GARBAGE garbage... that would be gross... and isn't really possible anyway.

It's not uncommon for me to pluck bottles from the glass bin, as I've always got ideas for projects involving glass, but on this particular day, it ended up being a treasure trove... of sorts!

The bins have three separate compartments, each with it's own sliding door, so if one section is full, you can move on to the next one. The only way that one can really get something is if a compartment is nearly full, otherwise it's just not possible to reach in very far. On this day, they were nearly full, and as is often the case, a lot of stuff was in garbage bags, and I am almost always compelled to tear open any reachable bags to see what's inside, which is what I started doing on this day.

The first bag, which was actually heavy duty, and double bagged. For lack of a better expression, gold, in the form of 50's era consumer glass (jars, booze bottles, etc.) came spilling out of the first bag that I tore open. These would be considered worthless junk to most bottle collectors, but not me, I love pretty much anything that's older than me, and the 1950's are considerably older than me, so I'm more than happy to bring home such things (or at least to go through them).

This is getting a bit long, so I'll just skip ahead a bit and say that I ended up tearing open, picking through, and ultimately taking out seven bags of glass. I was trying just to pick individual things out of the bags, especially given all of the broken stuff, but it was taking too long, so I figured I'd just grab everything and sort through it at home. I was starting to draw some stares by the time I was done, which is usually code for it's time to stop, but I was done anyways so it was okay. I had kind of been in a zone for about twenty minutes, so imagine my surprise when I started loading the first bag and noticed that a) my hands were covered with a red sticky substance, b) I had apparently forgotten to put on the work gloves that I always take, and c) that red sticky stuff was blood... my blood!

I would later find that I had about a dozen cuts, nothing too deep mind you, but still enough to spill Jon juice (how's that for a description?) all over. Thankfully I always have hand sanitizer in the car, so between that and plenty of isopropyl alcohol when I got home, nothing ended up getting infected. After loading all of the bags, I also noticed that my back was kind of hurting, and not a normal kind of ache either, but more on that in a sec. First...

Two bags were opened when I got home, this was all of the non-broken stuff.

Pretty much everything is from the 40's through the 70's. Not everything will be kept, but there were a couple of notable items, including a glass motor oil bottle (they stopped making those in the early 50's), an old embalming fluid bottle, and multiple cork-top medicine bottles. Given the dirt factor, as well as all of the crap inside the jars, I'm thinking that these might have been in either a barn or shed that may have come down in one of the recent storms.

So anyways, my back was already aching pretty good in just the time it took me to get home, so I didn't end up doing much the rest of that day. Trying to sleep that night wasn't easy, and I really ended up doing myself in when I tried to put my socks on the next morning. I felt a sharp pain, and cramping set in almost immediately, which was bad enough that I had lay right back down. I honestly thought that I might've tore something, but now I don't think so, I think I strained a muscle when getting the bags, and probably made it worse when attempting to sock myself. Thursday would be no fun at all, lots of cramping, lots of spasms, and since the strain(?) is somewhere behind my left lung, there was much pain if I took too deep of a breath.

I was really thinking that I had seriously injured myself there for a day or two, but as of this writing (Monday), things are much better, which is good, because I have way too much to do do to be laid up for weeks or months with something like this. I'm in pretty damn good shape (not bragging, just sayin'), so lifting 30-40 pound bags shouldn't have affected me like this. The only thing that I can think is that it must've been the angles that I had to twist into to grab the bags, either that or it was just simply a matter of not stretching before I started lifting them. Either way, I think I may have lucked out and avoided serious injury this time, hopefully I'll be more mindful of such possibilities in the future. And hopefully too, if I continue to get better, I might be able to go through...

... the rest of these later this week. They'll be a lot of broken stuff, old breaks, and new from either my theory of a collapsed structure, or from being tossed in the bin, but there should still be a lot of intact stuff as well.

Because of the pain I was in, Thursday and Friday were pretty much a wash.

Saturday and Sunday were better, pain-wise, but it was raining like an SOB, so I was pretty much stuck inside all weekend. I decided to make the best of this situation, and tried to get more sorting done. I had taken a few weeks off from the big sort, but before I did, I had finished both the football and non-sport keepers, which left a ton of basketball to do, and then maybe a couple of hours worth of baseball to finish -- baseball it was!

Behold... the final keepers for baseball! Other than the Junior's and Ichiro's that I still have in a binder, this is everything. I didn't count how many binders that I took apart, or how many monster boxes that I went through to get here, but I finally got here, and I couldn't be happier with the results. The whole point of this sort has been to reduce my collection to the things I care about the most, and for the most part it has worked. Even if I emptied the Junior and Ichiro binder, all of my baseball keepers would still fit into these two shoeboxes, and that's exactly the sort of thing that I was hoping for. The football keepers fit into one shoebox (sorry about not taking a picture), and the non-sports fir into one two-rower as well (yep, no picture of that one either). The Basketball keepers are gonna end up requiring a little more space, but will still be reduced considerably by the time I'm done, then I'll just have to start figuring out what I'm going to do with all of the non-keepers.

I realize that this week of mine may not have been too terribly exciting for a lot of you, but for me it was somewhat notable, notable enough that I actually knew which day was which, and can still remember what happened on each of those days! Now the question is, will I be able to say the same about this week when it's all said and done?


Thanks for taking a moment to look at my page.