These Things Take Time

December is trouncing me with a buttload of things to do.  Plan a holiday party, plan two trips out of town, get ready for the last Twilight Rummage Sale of 2015.  It may be my last chance to sell the big box of vintage ties my mom saddled me with.  For some reason I left them in a friend's van for about six months.  I imagine some folks might want to class it up with a polka-dot tie for parties of their own.

I have a new phase of sorting and clearing to commence in the basement.  Now that I have space to move things around I'm going to make a dedicated area just for comics and stuff I want to sell at future Frankensteins / Comix Thing / Rummage Sale events.

The season (i.e. holidays AND winter) has got me thinking about the charities and non-profits that can use donations year-round, especially now.  These are all places that need goods as well as cash.  Most are in Portland, but I hope no matter where you are you'll think of similar places in your area that need your help:

• Transition Projects: this is a place that shelters homeless men and women, helping them find jobs, get addiction treatment and mental health services, among other things.  I've given them a lot of clothing, which they badly need.  Make sure it's clean and in good repair, ok?
• SCRAP: I've talked about this place a million times because they've taken shitloads of my extra random craft supplies, but did you know how much they help teachers?  They give special discounts to educators and they do community outreach stuff.  When I ran Sparkplug I'd get almost all of our office supplies there, and it was good stuff too.
• Independent Publisher's Resource Center: This place has been a strong presence in my life for the freakishly long time I've lived in Portland.  They like to get small press publications for their library of zines and comics.
• The Dylan Williams Collection:  Speaking of small press comics libraries this one has a special meaning for me, because it's named after my late husband.  They have a super-diverse expanding selection of independent comix and they need more!  If you or someone you know make comics you should send them some.  They'll pay for shipping too!
• Free Geek: This is a good place to get secondhand computer stuff and they recycle EVERYTHING!  I've given them old hard drives, cables, radios, some of it broken-ish and they still find uses for them.  They'll take other appliances too.  They usually ask for a small donation of $$ when you give them stuff, but it's worth it to get rid of the CPU that's been chunking around on the laundry room floor for years.

Everybody says it's just like Robin Hood

I got fed up with things last night and threw a sheet over the TV set so I won't revert to watching DVDs while trying to do other things.  Not that I'm not watching other things (hello YouTube) or overusing the computer in general, but I did manage to avoid the brain fog that overtook me since Sunday.  It seems that everyone I know is feeling it so I don't think it's all me, we are blaming on the weekend time change now.  I did get almost everything on my to-do list completed today.

I am using the ruse of gifting to move some things out of this house.  My brother in law is a musician with a big CD collection, so I am sending him and my sister a nice big box of CDs that I think they will like.  I am sending a friend a package of books as a late birthday present.  Hooray media mail rates!

I am also starting to sell on eBay again, so I put a few things up this evening.  I want to raise some money and make some room.

Yesterday was Donation Tuesday, that is, I gave away a lot of stuff without even planning to do it in a day.  I gave that weird wire rack to my friend Virginia for some extra storage of her own, and made a pit stop dropoff at SCRAP, where I also found cheap and plentiful contact paper.  I had nearly bought some new at Fred Meyer a couple days ago, but it the cheapest was $5.99 a roll!  No!!  I need it to cover some shelves in my linen closet, because I think they got a little oily with some of the medicines and things sitting on them for years.  I don't want clean sheets touching that!  I rounded off yesterday with a stop at Goodwill to get rid of the stuff I had left over.  The day began auspiciously with a call from Volunteers of America, asking if I had any household goods to have picked up.  They don't take furniture, alas.

I had a call from a guy yesterday about a job interview, who told me he was going to call me today to set up the appointment.  He never called, but I wasn't surprised.  If someone calls you to tell you they're going to call you, they have a problem.

    

A Year in SCRAP

This may not look like much, but it represents all of the donations I made to SCRAP this year.  I got curious yesterday, after I made my last donation for this year, to add up how much I had  brought them in 2012.  They weigh everything before they give you the receipt, and then they write it down for you.  I donated about 360 pounds of art and office supplies in a single year!!  That's 360 pounds of paper, plastic, wood and metal that won't be in a landfill!  That's almost a pound a day!

You're welcome crafters!  Hahahaha!!

Getting to be a little much

I'm doing a few clean-y sort-y things tonight so that I can get them out of the way before I spend the day doing fun comic-y things tomorrow.  I repaired a pine storage shelf, the kind you can take apart that usually comes in a kit, which I had repeatedly rammed with my car in the garage until the slats started to splinter.  It was uncharacteristically lazy of me to leave it in the garage in the first place, and even worse when I realized that it was kind of in the way of the car.  I was waiting until there was more room elsewhere to move it, now I spent a bunch of time gluing and weighting down and such.  This is was a good lesson to learn.  Now it's almost as good as new. 

I've been going through those little white storage boxes on the shelves and figuring out which contents to keep.  As I said in a much earlier post, this is a process.  I want to keep a lot of my craft supplies, but I don't need quite so many of the same thing, say, a whole handful of chopsticks.  I'm glad that different people staff the donation stations at SCRAP because I think they must wonder where I'm coming from with all of these random office and art supplies.  I unearth something new every day.

Now I've decided to streamline the shelves in the basement, so I'm sticking to the white plastic boxes.  I'm addicted to containers, but too many sizes and colors add to the messy look.

I'm questioning even more my attachment to things as I handle them.

Here's a little tip: the shoebox size containers I have are great for photo storage!  I can't believe I havdn't thought of it before.  For years I had an orange and green box from Target that was made to hold pics, but I decided to retire it.  Orange and green?  What was I thinking?  I'm proud to be Irish American but the colors of the Irish Republican flag offend my eyes when it comes to decorating.

Pilgrim's Progress

So, I worked a long time tonight just cleaning the basement.  I wish I had picked up some daytime allergy meds today, because now I'm paying for it.  It's too early for a Benadryl tablet, they put me right to sleep!

If you compare this photo with the one I posted September 16th, you can see there has been some change.  Since that time I've sold a lot of books or given them away to Title Wave, and donated arty goods to SCRAP,  or just made a pile for Salvation Army.  I have a laundry room off to the side, and it's now the place where I put the household item donations.  Despite the fact that things are actually leaving this basement room, the change doesn't look like a whole lot.

See that blond wood thing on the floor in the middle?  That's a piece of furniture that really needs to go.  I wish I gave it away when I had a chance weeks ago!  When one of my friends was helping me move it in here, he asked, "Is this thing made of concrete?"  It's probably heavier than a lot of other bigger furniture I have, and now it's stuck where it is because it's too heavy for me to drag up the stairs.

If I had more pictures of the room from different angles you could see that I have made good progress, and I should be pleased. 

I discovered a clever means of making a "shelf helper", which is what those white plastic-covered wire things were that I was praising September 30th.  I took four bricks (39 to 44 cents each at Home Depot) and laid a wire shelf that I found for free on the sidewalk across the top.  I think the shelf I found would normally be attached to brackets on a wall.  It's not a very dressy look but it did the trick for a basement bookcase I have.

I've been reading The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff, and I'm almost done.  There was a movie made based on it called The Eagle, starring Channing Tatum.  The book is much, much better.  It takes place in Britain in the Roman era, one of my favorite periods of history.  I understand this book was written for young adults, but it's a great read at any age.  

You don't LOOK like a chili dog

More selling of books today, and donating to Title Wave.  You may think that my whole life right now is sorting out my crap, and you would be partly right.  I don't have a full time job at the moment, and this is an urgent matter, so I'm trying to stick with it as much as I can.  Also, I worked very hard closing down the store I ran, The Bad Apple, so I'm trying to take it kind of easy.  I messed up my back a little and I have a recurrence of plantar fascitis in my right foot.  I'm only lifting little things for now, and using a cart whenever possible.

Here's an old photo of The Bad Apple, around the time my husband Dylan opened it with his friend Tim three and a half years ago:

That's Patrick McGoohan's face on the wall there, though if you've ever watched The Prisoner you don't need to wonder where that still is from!

This is only a very small portion of the stuff it eventually had.  Books, books, books, and lots of dvds and vhs tapes.  Not to mention the furniture and fixtures.  And, wait, there was a back room where Dylan ran a comic book publishing company, Sparkplug Comic Books.  Here's a photo of that, from way back:

When I think it will be too hard to get my personal space in order, I tell myself that I coordinated moving everything in this space (which was much more stuff than you see here).  This was an 1800sf space!  I should be able to manage the 200sf or so that I am overseeing now.

I'd like to say a word here about Craigslist, and what a help it was to me over the last few weeks!  I sold a few pieces of furniture, and that was great for raising the money needed for the move and the new Sparkplug location.  However, the "free stuff" classifieds are just as good when you need to get a load out quickly.  It's like getting a moving company for free!  I got rid of some huge, slightly damaged metal shelves that I was dreading having to take out on my own. The same for a big old sofa bed with tears and stains.  People will take the weirdest things as long as they're free!  I got about 75 email inquiries in just a few hours on one ad.

Portland Store Fixtures was pretty great for this kind of thing too.  They bought a couple fixtures and completely lowballed me (I mean LOWballed).  But, they offered to take anything else that I didn't want.  Apparently they have ways of recycling that thrift stores can't do.  I gave them all the damaged or flat out broken stuff that I had left after the Craigslist sweep.  The only thing the pickup dude wouldn't take was a pane of chipped glass that I was having trouble throwing out.  Whatever, I just thought I'd ask if he wanted it.  This experience has kept my enthusiasm for the Portland Store Fixtures high.  I got compensated in junk removal.  If I ever wanted to start a new store, I know they'd have whatever I needed and cheap-ish, so I still think they're rad.

I was watching NCIS Los Angeles this evening while making yet another pile of things to take to SCRAP* and a guy in it says "Now I feel like a chili dog" after looking at some photos of a criminal rendezvous at the Santa Monica pier, or someplace like that.  The girl he's talking to looks at him dumbfounded.  Just LOOKS at him.

*SCRAP, 2915 NE MLK Blvd, Portland OR 97212 (503-294-0769), scrappdx.org.  Best place ever to find cheap and plentiful donated art supplies!  Best place to donate them to also!