Here we are nearing the half way point of this wonderful, if overly hot, summer break of the year 2025. We have gone to Canada’s Wonderland, Vaughan Mills, Bancroft Soda lite mine, the cottage, the beach & surrounding swamp, to sleep overs, birthdays, library programming, summer flag football games, played 18 holes of golf, saw a friend give birth to a beautiful bouncing baby boy as a surrogate, and gone to parties, and even some town events with other friends with similarly aged children. It has been a blast.
With the August long weekend approaching we might venture to drive the kids up to see the Bancroft Rockhound Gemboree one day if we can convince the kids to sit quietly to drive all that way for a day. Bit of a trek at the worst of times, let alone when they are excited about seeing fancy gem stones, and attempting to do some shopping for said gem stones, or gem stone adjacent fancy rocks/fossils. It can be a bit much! Ha.
But here we are on a fine Tuesday morning. The dog and I have the house to ourselves for a bit while the kids are at swimming lessons. I pruned a few shrubs so that my office has a view of something other than a wall of leaves for a change. Behind those leaves is a hedge, but I now get sun light into my workspace. Score! I have put some feelers out to see how my late summer, and fall look to be shaking out work wise, and it’s looking a bit quiet. Now things might change if the tariff situation settles, but it’ll take 6 months to a year for that to realign itself, not going to be an overnight thing, unfortunately.
So if I’m going to have time on my hands, then I’m going to continue my mini purge sessions, and really whip the house into shape. Besides the girls wardrobes & closets I don’t want to attack their things, so I will focus my attention on the shared spaces, broken toys, hidden junk piles, cupboards, closets, shoe & coat piles, under counter storage spaces, and open/disintegrating/dissolving/dried out crafting supplies. It will be enough to keep me occupied for at least a week. Plus, I could start whisking those paint cans out from under the basement stairs, and taking them to the house hold hazardous waste dump in allotments. I don’t think I could get all of it gone in one trip. I believe they have rules about how much can go from a single household at one time. I will need to look into it, because that information pertains to our predicament.
My wife was kind enough to go through and sort much of her Girl Guide crafting mess back into her clear storage bins. We had many, many Walmart bags filled with individual craft projects that had gone out, and returned. But not sorted back into the appropriate container. Plus more beads than you could shake a stick at. So many, just so, so many of them. Different colours, shapes, sizes, mediums, and themes. It borders on insane. But now it is organized, and we have cleared some shelf space by tidying it up. I got some crap out of the laundry room, so we have shelf space if we want anything put in long term storage.
As promised, when I took the broken tech away to the dump I did not fish out my wife’s old (and not broken) home theater apparatus, even though it has sat disassembled since 2005. We still have all the speakers, receiver, subwoofer, and cables needed to run the CD/DVD player. I did however toss all of the busted Wii stuff she picked up several years ago that not once got played, except when I personally had to go through and test each item (much of which did not work). Plus I got rid of my old Xbox 360 console, but I kept the hard drive from the top, as it was removable. Nice! The karaoke machine that smelled of burning electronics when turned on for more than 30 seconds went, my old printer, a dehumidifier, an electronic drum set of pads, an old PC tower, an old monitor, an old clock radio. It wasn’t a tonne of stuff, but it was enough. In the fall I will likely scour my books once again and send some more off to donation. I will go through my t-shirts and either transfer them to the cottage so I never, ever have to take clothes up there again, or they can go to the textile donation bins in town to be recycled into who knows what.
The older I get the less keen I am on just holding on the “stuff/things” that have no value to my day to day life. I found some twenty year old markers from my college days. All dried up. And I finally tossed those. They had sentimental value, but I can’t just keep holding onto 50 dried up markers because they remind me of a good time I had at Sheridan College back in 2000/2001. I mean — come on. Gotta live what you preach! I spent a considerable amount of time cleaning brushes a few years ago, so I can keep my paint brushes, because I was able to salvage them, and rehabilitate them after two decades of abuse! Dried paints, and markers, and pastelle boxes can all go in the trash. I do have two bottles of film developer from that same time (unopened of course) that I just can’t bear to throw out. Next to my first ever point & shoot film camera. It’s crazily terrible against even my phone’s camera, but I can’t think of throwing it away. I never use it, but I see it inside my art box every time I go in my office. Hell I still have my first ever digital camera from 2006, and as far as I know it still works. Also has terrible picture quality compared to my phone. I should toss both, plus the crappy mini tripod I have, but not yet. Not yet. I know my kids would immediately bin them if I passed in 5 years time, so I know deep down all three items are pretty much junk. I wouldn’t keep them if I was offered them from a friend passing. So yeah, in September I will likely purge those items too. I had a good time wandering Guelph with that digital camera. I bought the point and shoot film camera when I was in high school, so it might be nearing thirty years of age sooner rather than later. Holy cow! That’s messed up. If it were a Pentax or a Canon with removable lenses, and flash bulbs and stuff it would be worth keeping, and preserving. But the point & shoots were self contained, and would take no upgrades. So… Yeah.
I recently took some time to sit back down and try my hand a sculpting again. I found a cool picture of a goblin king that I was going to draw inspiration from. Didn’t get too far into it. It reminded me that I need to get a move on my sculpted & painted ceramic Markham Fair 2025 entry. So I might shelve the clay bust once more, in favour of doing something new in ceramic. We will have to see how that shakes out.
I’ve rambled enough for today. Ciao Bella!
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