Back to the storage unit

Ever since we moved into our house, we have also rented a storage unit to hold some of our excess junk. When D was here for a week, she urged us ("made us" would be closer) rent a second one so we could clear things out of the house that couldn't be thrown away. So the first weekend after she left -- that's a couple of days after this counseling session -- I announced that we needed to go down to the storage units to see if we couldn't find enough stuff to throw away that we could consolidate the two units into one (thus saving some money).

We got there by noon. I made a point at the beginning of saying that I wanted to go after low-hanging fruit -- in other words, I was prepared to skip stuff that (e.g.) I thought was useless but Wife would fight tooth-and-nail over. There was still a lot of low-grade bickering over this and that; but so long as a thing provoked no more than low-grade bickering, I just insisted it had to go and shoved it into the car. When the car was full, I drove it off to the thrift store.

And there I got my first real shock -- the thrift store we had been using up till now wouldn't accept it. "Our dumpster is full, and there's no way we can sell this junk." In other words, I had a car full of -- yes, you guessed it -- stuff I couldn't give away. The irony lay thick upon the ground. Fortunately, they gave me directions to another thrift store, who DID take it all. Otherwise, I had visions of driving to the dump, and having to pay for each load I dumped. I was somewhat mollified by the reflection that it would take many loads to add up to the cost of a single month's rent of one storage unit.

I had wanted to spend only a couple of hours there, since we had other things to do as well. In the end, though, we were there for about four hours, at the end of which my arms were really tired from lifting so many boxes. We went home, Wife went to bed, I started some laundry, and the rest of the evening was fairly quiet. We got take-out food for dinner, and the boys watched a movie on DVD. Not bad for a day's work ....