Inventory

What with soccer season in full swing, school stuff cranking up for kids & adults, transitions & overtime at work, pilates classes starting again, chain link fence removal duties, saying goodbye to Joe, and keeping up with the election & the playoffs & the financial meltdown, we've fallen rather behind on our (admittedly feeble even at the best of times) Household Clutter Management Protocol. In fact, this morning as we sorted mountains of laundry and grappled with cleats & shinguards and endless revisions of the plan to retrieve Josie from her sleepover, a consensus emerged that it would be a whole lot easier to gather up the family photographs and a few choice pieces of clothing, burn the house down with the remainder of our possessions inside, and move to Portland.

So as the winds rose outside this afternoon, we spent a couple of hours attempting to tackle the heaps of strange objects that have accumulated on every horizontal surface in our house. Several interesting items emerged, including: a carefully packaged wad of blue masking tape wrapped around a folded up sketch for Josie's Halloween costume from two years ago, wrapped around a lost tooth; a green vinyl wallet printed with pictures of sushi; two alkaline batteries soldered together by a cherry candy; four tiny and colorful rubber shoes; an envelope labeled "Menna" with three dollar bills in it (these funds were ceremoniously transferred to the owner two doors down); the base of the folding music stand, the disappearance of which had caused a great deal of emotional turmoil two weeks ago; a snarl of pale pink iridescent fringed yarn, which took twenty minutes to untangle and wind up into a neat skein; $58.81 in change; and a box of bald and battered Barbie dolls, ready to be passed on to the next generation of little girls in the neighborhood.

Also two pairs of swimming goggles that went missing last June, right about the time it got hot enough to go swimming.

And the body crayons.