The book takes a walk

8/7/09 Walking Home: A Woman's Pilgrimage on the Appalachian Trail (book), given away

Books are emotionally difficult to get rid of. It just seems wrong to pull a book off my bookcase and decide it's no longer worthy of staying in my house. For cryin' out loud, I wrote a book (check it out here or here). That took time, effort, and more than a little chutzpah. I'd be ticked if someone pulled it off their shelf and decided it had to be disposed of. Of course, since I've only sold about a dozen copies and most of them went to my father-in-law, I don't have much to worry about.

Regardless, in the past six months, I've downsized a lot of my books. Many were donated to the Casco Public Library and the rest sold in a yard sale earlier this summer. (Oh, if I'd only known I was going to do this challenge, I could have saved them, and then counted them as downsized one day at a time. It would have gotten me through at least 200 days!) Subsequently, the books I've still got are, more or less, near and dear to my heart.

As a proud Appalachian Trail thru-hiker (feel free to check out the website my great friend Vance made to document my hike), I have a number of great books about the trail. I hate the idea of losing any of them, since I feel so intimately tied to the subject. Indeed, I have my own little A.T. library, with all my hiking books neatly arranged on one bookshelf.

Earlier today, I mailed one away as a gift.

Earlier this week I received a letter from one of my colleagues letting me know that she was moving out of state and wouldn't be returning to our school. It's a big loss for us, but I wanted to wish Christina well and make some sort of farewell gesture. She was an avid outdoor enthusiast and had talked of possibly hiking the Appalachian Trail someday.

I had bought the book in a used book store/organic vegetable market (shouldn't there be one of those in every town?) on the island of Vieques. The A.T. is apparently a hot topic in the Caribbean. It was an interesting read, and I think Christina will appreciate it.

Come to think of it, I didn't really get rid of the book, I just sent it along to its next reader. I can live with that.

The definition of insanity, part 1

8/6/09 A bunch of used painting tools, trashed (4 used paint trays, 3 old brushes, half-dozen used paint-stirrers, a paint-clogged wire brush, and countless sample paint swatches)

Is there any more asinine activity than water-sealing a deck?

Let's say a guy came up to you in a store and made this pitch:

Okay, buddy, here's the deal. I'm gonna sell you $50 worth of chemicals, another twenty bucks worth of tools. You take the stuff home, coat your deck with it. Careful, it's poisonous and sticky, and if you don't put it on just right, it'll look streaky and spotty. Yeah, and make sure it doesn't rain for at least two days before you do it and anther two days after you do it. Wear gloves. Clean-up is a nightmare. Pick a hot day so the back of your neck gets sunburned. Got it? Okay, now that's stage one. Stage one is the fun and easy part. Now pay attention, cause this is the important part. From now on, every year of your life, you get to do this: As soon as the weather is perfect and you've finally got all your deck furniture back out there, take it all off. Come in here, buy $25 worth of chemicals to completely remove the remains of all those chemicals you put on last summer. It'll only half work and the deck will look like a teenager with acne, but bear with me. Once you got it completely clean, you get re-apply everything you just stripped off. Yep, you get to buy all that stuff again and put it right back on. Since all this has to happen during beautiful, sunny weather, it'll probably occupy the best two weeks of the summer. Understand? Hey, don't make that face, friend, it's just time and money! Just remember, if you skip a year, your deck will collapse. Now, where's your credit card?

If some dude said that to you, would you ever say, "Sure, sounds like a plan!"???

Would I?

Apparently I would.

How it went down

8/5/09 Seven throw pillows, given away

Time: 6:22 PM
Transfer location: Denny's parking lot, Portland, ME
Driver: Joanna
Dealer: Reed (aka "The Asset")
Middleman: Craigslist.com free listings
Receiver: Beth
Beth's muscle: Emily (approximate age, 5)
Final report: Deal went down smoothly. Mission accomplished.

End notes: if you only click on one link in the above post, you've got to check out the Denny's ad.

I wash my hands of it

8/4/09 "MEN Moisturizing Body Wash," consumed (bottle recycled)

Through fifteen years of work in education, I've probably received about a dozen gifts from students and their parents. I hope that low total doesn't suggest a lack of appreciation for my work. I prefer to believe that parents were so thankful for my efforts, they felt no gift could adequately convey their gratitude. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Of the dozen gifts I have received, some of the highlights included a camouflage nylon wallet (with velcro seal!), a porcelain figurine of what I think was some sort of Hindu god, and a knock-off Tommy Hilfiger shirt that Bill Cosby would have rocked. Actually, I wore that shirt for several years, but I was just out of college and I hadn't yet developed my now highly-refined sense of fashion.

For Christmas 2004, a kindergarten student presented me with a box of men's toiletries. Hand cream, cologne (Joanna got a good laugh out of the idea of me wearing cologne), a bar of soap, the above pictured body wash, and a few other things I can't recall. Was this a strange gift to give your son's kindergarten teacher? I leave that judgment to you.

For over four years, that bottle of body wash has hunkered down in the back of my bathroom drawer. I'm a bar-of-soap kind of guy, not a body wash user. However, I realized about two weeks ago that the bottle was not going away on its own. Joanna objected to me using it on the basis that this highly artificial product would either A) cause my skin to peel off in wide sheets, or B) lead to a chemical fire in our septic tank. The back of the bottle revealed 27 ingredients, many of which contained numbers and one of which was -- I'm not kidding here -- 26 letters long.

I bravely forged ahead.

This morning, I shook the last few drops from the bottle, wrung out the bath scrubbie (oh, the shame of using a bath scrubbie), and checked by body for lesions. So far, so good.

Tomorrow, I break out a new bar of soap.

The price of movies

8/3/09 Sixteen DVDs, sold for $22.83

Maine has the coolest used (and new, but who would buy that?) music/video store in the country: Bull Moose Music. The people who work in there are always friendly and fun, and you can get really great buys on used stuff. For example, a few months ago, I bought a used DVD of Saw for about $4. C'mon, that's cheaper than renting! (Joanna, it turns out, really does not like slasher horror movies.)

So today I trotted in with a shopping bag of old DVDs I decided I could live without.

"Here to sell something?" the incredibly perky -- and artfully tattooed -- woman at the register asked. Why, yes, that was easy. She scanned each film and then announced the grand total: "It comes to $30.44 in store credit or $22.83 cash."

Yippee, options! I glanced at Joanna.

"We'll take the cash," she said flatly. Okay, we'll take the cash.

Honestly, getting rid of those DVDs wasn't difficult, since none of them made the cut as "Reed Classics." An Evening with Kevin Smith was the toughest, but how many times do you need to watch a fat dude stand on a stage and talk about his small penis?

As a side note, they wouldn't buy two films because they came up as promotional copies or some such thing. Feel free to make me an offer for Jaws 2 or Babe, Pig in the City (Check out how Siskel & Ebert fall all over themselves praising it!). I promise I came by them legitimately and I do believe they both won multiple Academy Awards. Bid high, so you don't lose your chance...

File under "Recycle"

8/2/09: Box of old school files, recycled

I've had this box of files in my closet for six years. It contains the absolutely vital files that I saved after leaving my teaching job at Future Leaders Institute to move back to Maine. Even now, as sort it for recycling, I have pangs of fear. What if I need these examples of student work? What if I forget this amazing idea? Well, then I'll be totally screwed, because this whole box is going to the dump.

Day 1: Birthdays are for Giving

8/1/09: Data the stuffed dog, given to my nephew James

Last spring I went with several of my teaching colleagues to Virginia for an education conference. On our return trip, they presented me with a stuffed toy dog that they named Data. The dog was intended to quiet my constant whining about wanting a pet dog, and the name referred to the data analysis we seem constantly engaged in as educators these days. (To which, I must say, I am not opposed.) It was a funny gag gift and one which I appreciated for both its humor and thoughtfulness.

Cute little Data has resided ever since on the stereo speaker in our living room. (Honestly, he hasn't been much of a substitute for a real dog, although he's been really easy to care for.)

Doesn't this represent so many of the things we have around our homes? Trinkets, bobbles, knick-knacks that we acquire in odd little ways. Why do we keep them? I say it's 10% appreciation, 90% guilt: "I can't get rid of that! Surely the person who gave it to me would be crushed to the soul!"

If I'm going to downsize, I'm going to have to conquer the guilt.

I chose August 1st to begin this year-long challenge because I thought up the idea in mid-July and wanted to start at the beginning of a new month. The fact that my nephew James also turned 3 today was completely serendipitous. Hmm, what to give, what to give?

Of course, we had already purchased a Thomas the Train toy for James, so Data (now renamed Casey) was a bonus birthday gift. Even so, kicking off the downsizing challenge by giving a birthday gift to my only nephew seemed like a perfect beginning.

(Now I just hope that the teachers who gave Data me don't read this, because I know they'd be crushed to the soul...)