I'm in Pennsylvania at the parent's place taking a week of vacation.
My task this week is to clean out the basement, sort out what's good, and toss what's not into the dumpster they're having delivered tomorrow.
Yep, the basement is so chock full of *expletive deleted*it that we need a dumpster.
Btween my parents, who have lived in the house since 1999, and my grandparents (particularly my grandfather), who lived in the house from 1943 to 1996, the basement is amazingly jam packed full of just complete and total crap. It's not a small basement, either. It's a 1903 Victorian with a full basement.
In a flash of desperation this morning, I went to the hardware store, picked up a pully, an eye hook, and a skein of rope, and rigged it so that I could at least hoist stuff out. The steps are about 1/2" and almost straight up.
Oh, the best thing?
The boiler backfired a couple of years ago, and everything is covered in oily soot...
But, in the midst of all of this, I've come across some real treasures... A brass gasoline blowtorch (decoration, unfortunately). Last year I found my grandfather's circa 1930 Eveready flashlight, which still works, and works well. It's in my car.
Then there were all of his lab reports from his mechanical engineering classes at Penn State in the middle 1930s.
Ok, enough bitching...
Now I'm just going to curl up and sob for awhile.
