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So today my daughter and I went over to my brother's house to start clearing things out.  Since there is no intention of either my daughter or me contesting any decision Mom makes as executor, it's moving pretty quickly and we're already at the point of being able to donate, gift, sell, or otherwise dispose of his things.  So the house was listed last week. It had a cash offer almost the instant it went on the market last week, so it's time.

There has already been some discussion about what things we might want once things are settled.  My daughter wanted his dining room set since she didn't have one of her own yet.  His is nice and suits her tastes.  Mom suggested she might want his new cookware set, and I suggested adding his iron skillet since she only has one, and I have lots. lol.  So today was the day my daughter's friends could come over with a trailer to pick up the suite, and a few other things that she'd asked if she could have.  For me, I have to arrange for someone with a trailer hitch to pick up his flatbed trailer, and I haven't been as on top of things as she was. Whoops. Too busy working retail for the holidays, so I'll have to get on that soon.  Soon.  In the mean time, I asked permission to take a pair of his jeans so I could make something out of them.  I ended up getting two because I picked up one pair and they are lined in PLAID FLANNEL!! so yeah... I got one of those and one of the regular ones.  Otherwise, I spent most of my time there packing up his clothes, so other than the actual bedroom suite which mom hasn't decided if she wants it for herself, just wants his mattress, or wants to sell or leave to the new owner, the room is empty of all his things.  Initially, mom thought my cousin might want his pants, but they are 36 not 39 and they will not fit Perry who is a 40 waist now. I'm going to ask her if I can donate them to a men's shelter along with his three pairs of hunting boots, his sneakers, a pair of  and a pair of casual oxfords.  He has one pair of dress slacks and a nice dress shirt in the back of his closet and a pair of dress shoes I want to donate to Clothes that Work instead.  But I hope I can find a men's shelter locally that is mostly veteran focussed. 

My daughter has his printer now.  I also adopted his monitor (bigger) and have it up here now.  SO MUCH BETTER (his only computer was his work computer which went back to his workplace).  I asked Mom if she wanted his big TV and she laughed. Apparently he'd tried to get her to take his old one when he bought the new one. She didn't want it, so I brought it home with me, and brought the old one up to my room. I brought the one from my room up here, but now it isn't working.  I'm really surprised how small it seems now.  It used to seem so big.  Anyway, I got his TV set up in my living room and it really is nice. It's 5g and way bigger than mine and way smarter too. I had to have a Roku on mine to watch half the channels. I can see that there will be a learning curve though.  I wanted his snow blower, but dang... it's WAY too big for our tiny needs. What we need is more like an electric snow shovel. lol. Otherwise, I brought home a couple of his lamps to use up here, and there is one more that matches that I'll get once it's closer to the closing date.  I didn't want to leave the front room without a light until really close, and we'll still have to go over and finish emptying out his kitchen anyway.  I packed up his bathroom, left one of his fresh bars of soap and all the bathroom cleaning supplies.  We don't need them.  He had like 5 things of speedstick. He must have known that Colgate was going to discontinue it and bought up extra!

I didn't take everything I packed up with me though. Most of it is just packed up pending deciding what to do with it, to save time later.  Three 18 gallon totes and that's all his regular clothes undies and socks and extra bedding and socks and hunting clothes and all his jackets.  50% of the clothing I packed up were his reinforced hunting pants and his various jackets for hunting at different times of the year. I put his shoes in one of his travel cases.  Those I particularly want to donate to a shelter, because they are good quality and well cared for, so they should last someone quite a while.  I'd rather donate them directly rather than just taking them  to Goodwill or something like that.  I hope mom agrees.

It's weird, you know? Going through my  brother's house and taking care of his clothes and stuff.  Bringing his TV home with me to my house.  It's just a weird feeling packing up his house for him, and realizing that it's not really his house anymore, and in a couple more weeks it will literally be someone else's house. I didn't expect it to sell so fast, and I was surprised that it was ok to have it listed so soon to be honest.

In the meantime. Yule is here, and Santa is coming on Christmas. I hope you all are enjoying your Yultide celebrations, and are ready for Santa in a couple of days.  I'm ready. Up until today I was 100% finished with wrapping, but I found a couple of things that had to get purchased for a couple of people. So they need to get wrapped and I have a few dog toys to wrap for Blooper from Santa.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my ramble. That's my report for today. 

Pro: I'm off on a Saturday for the first time in forever.
Con: I'm working on Sunday instead of Saturday because Sunday is PINK SUNDAY and I have to be there to run the event. Bleh.

I feel more or less unprepared (as usual) for Pink Sunday.  It usually happens earlier in the season, so I have both the sense of unpreparedness for my event, AND my feeling of unprepared to start the flurry "exit" activities to shift my department from holiday shopping back to normal shopping, AND preparing for Spring resets on every brand on the cosmetics wall in late January then STRAIGHT into Valentine's Day prep. Lol.

Technically it's not my job to do the resets, and now we also have a new position in our store, Inventory Specialist, but our IS is new to the job (but not as new to the store.) She and I are on the same page and same way of thinking on a LOT of things, but she's never done a coswall reset which is actually 13 resets at once plus 1 additional off the wall.  LOL. So I HOPE that my boss will let me be involved intimately with the coswall reset.  Almost always the individual resets that I don't at least supervise end up not being done correctly, sometimes with massive problems.  Like l'Oréal last year, which I had to basically redo from scratch it was such a mess, and 4 or 16 bays of internal barcodes were accidentally removed by a third person when the first person didn't communicate very well to the third person what she was actually supposed to be doing, which was NOT removing all the internal barcodes.  SO yeah... I hope it goes smoother with me and the IS and possibly a specific shift manager handling everything.  I'll have to add this into my notes to discuss with the Store Manager at our meeting next week. I think this is also her first spring coswall reset in this store, but I can't remember. She might have already been here, but if she was it was a matter of weeks.  Not to cast shade on the last manager, but I like this manager a lot better.  Mostly it's just that we see eye to eye on more stuff.  The previous manager was a bit of a controller (and CHEAP OMG, gods help us if we needed to order replacements for things. This manager is more likely to WANT us to be empowered come up with solutions and implement them ourselves.

Still working on Roy's house.  Still writing chapter 18 in my head with nothing on paper, but I'll probably start getting into the keyboard on it in the next few days. It's just been super busy at work, and SUPER busy on my day off.  Lawyer meeting scheduled to take 30 min took on HOUR and 30 min... Next item on my list was to call the gastro doctor to ask again about my stupid pill, and they were already closed by the time I walked out of the meeting. BLEH.

Oh yeah. I also cloned the pattern from my festive holiday vest (which is wearing out. Poor thing is threadbare) Expanded it an inch or two because I'm not shaped like that any more, and learned how to add a dart.  I bought cheap clearance fabric to make a mock-up to make sure I've got the dart and the expansion correct before I cut into my good fabric.  If it goes well though, one of the fabrics is a pretty nice green plaid, and the other is a white one white snowflake pattern. So if it works, I'll have another slightly less festive holiday waistcoat that could be for Yule, or St Patricks Day if I wanted it to be. We'll see.  Today all I did on it is mark the dart on the fabric from the pattern, and mark the seam in from the seam allowance. (I made a big seam allowance, so I can let it out in places it needs to be if it does.  I can always trim it when it's done.) I had some scraps big enough to cut a couple masks, so I sewed a couple of seams on them. I probably could have finished them, but I wasn't in the mood. I'm tired tonight and just want to sit on my ass.

Anyway that's my status report. lol.  How's your week been? Ready for Santa? 

To all who celebrate whatever various and sundry holidays occur around this time. Have a happy, merry, bright, fun, safe one.

It's Zombie Jebuz day!

Enjoy.


Edit: I just wrote my English assignment (an Evalutation Essay) on this video. hee.

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Seriously, most of the time I just like to say home and enjoy a quiet night. I did clean out my guest room. It's much better. The hallway is very cluttered now, but I went through a lot of stuff and got the storage boxes out of there into the basement. I think I'm going to gather all my computer parts from old computers and list them on Craigs List. $100 takes it all. Any of my computer building friends who want to take me up on that, you get first dibs. I'm also going to list my Franklin Mint Monopoly Set for $100 because I'm not using it, I'm not enjoying it. I no longer have the documentation because I bought it when my child was 2 years old and well you know how that goes. I didn't buy it to keep in a showcase, I bought it to have a nice set to play with, and at the time our gang did get out board games and play them, but not so much any more.

So I guess what I've been contemplating really is just finding ways to get rid of more stuff that I don't need and don't use. I really need the money and some of this 'junk' does have value that I can sell it. It's not like I'm doing anything with it other than holding it in numerous boxes and workbenches and junk piles all over my house. Time to shovel a lot of this stuff out the door.

Now I'm done with that for tonight. I'm just chilling out and relaxing for the rest of the evening. Will do some Crochet, play a game or two maybe. Chat with some friends (you know, those ones who actually turn on their messengers once in a while so I can see them to chat. *snort*)

Our holiday was a little slim all around this year. However, I got the one item that I particularly particularly wanted this year.


Click for large view.

( Dragons under the cut because they're grown now... )