It’s Already Happening!

April 9, 2020

In a recent post, I wrote about our basement cleaning project. Since then we’ve begun throwing more stuff out, but we’re already wishing we hadn’t. I figured we’d at least have a little grace period, but apparently Murphy’s Law doesn’t mess around.

Can you find what’s missing in the above photo? Neither can we. It’s the rubber sealing ring that is supposed to be in the lid. We found the pressure cooker a few days ago. We pitched a perfectly good ring a few weeks ago.

I don’t know why the ring and the pressure cooker were not together. I thought about it until I got a headache. That’s when I decided that what happens in the basement should stay in the basement. (Especially if it turns out I’m the culprit.)

Last week Bonnie found a glass chimney to a lamp. We think that’s the one that went with the hurricane lamp base that we uncovered a couple weeks ago, but we can’t be sure because we threw the base out. We are keeping the chimney . . . I think. At least until we are sure there are no more lamp bases hiding from us.

There’s one more thing—at least for now. I had a collection of empty gallon milk jugs. Every camping trip I’d freeze water in a few and throw them in the cooler. They stayed frozen for days.

I pitched the lot of them a year or so ago in the middle of an earlier cleanup project because I had begun using a different type of container for ice. This was well before the COVID-19 quarantine. But that is precisely the reason I wish I still had them. Our church is having a drive-in service Easter Sunday. The cars will be parked in every other space. Empty milk jugs will be used to block off the empty spaces.

I could have impressed everyone with my saving skills by showing up with a truck bed full of them. Now, though, I’ll be lucky to bring one—if Bonnie and I can get it emptied by Easter.

One bit of good news for us. Bonnie discovered that the jiggly thing for the top of the pressure cooker we found was missing too. We’ll probably never find it (unless we pitch the pressure cooker), so maybe it’s ok that we threw away the ring.

And more good news.  There’s another law that might stop this. Bad things happen in threes.

If that doesn’t work maybe we’ll go back to just rearranging and rotating our stuff to make it look a little better. We don’t want our project to be a total failure.