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Health & Fitness

Amazing Archaeological Finds

What's in YOUR basement?

About six months after we moved to Stamford we finally got around to opening some of our boxes.  In doing so, we discovered a number of interesting things:

  1. We moved with garbage. Not obvious garbage, but items that we had taken the trouble of securely wrapping, and expertly boxing, and clearly labeling, and itemizing on an inventory. We had paid men to carry them out of our old house and carry them into our new house. We now unboxed them, and unwrapped them, and stared at them for a few seconds before we shrugged and discarded them, so that other men could carry them away.
  2. We have many things that I swear I have never seen before. These were most likely items that had gone from store to cabinet to packing box without ever seeing the light of day. There were so many items in this category, my daughter hypothesized that perhaps the movers had given us stuff. My theory is that the movers accidently switched one of our boxes with another household that was moving at the same time, and some poor family–probably cat people–had been extremely perplexed when they opened a box of dog toys that I have not seen since we moved in.
  3. We own enough baking paraphernalia to open a bakery. Our daughter, you see, loves to bake. We actually moved with chocolate bits for baking. And the sheer number of cupcake pans is stupefying.
  4. For non-alcoholics, we possess an unreasonable quantity of shot glasses. I assure you that I do not come home at night after a hard day’s work and ask for a shot of whiskey. I don’t even come home at night, since I work at home and, frankly, not that hard. Not only are we not alcoholics, I, for one, am a permanent designated driver, even for people I don’t know. And all these shot glasses we have are not the collectible kind you pick up at popular destinations as a memento of how drunk you got on vacation. These are just everyday, unmarked shot glasses, and we have a lot of them. For no apparent reason.
  5. The reels and reels of my wife’s family’s old home movies on 6mm film, which were long ago digitally transferred to media that can actually be used, and which we had said there was no reason to bring with us, had come with us. Maybe they jumped into a packing box on their own.
  6. We lost a phone.  Some of the boxes–with kitchen items--were being opened for the second time, having been opened once, entirely unpacked, and then re-packed when we began a major kitchen renovation.  At one time, we had a kitchen phone here in Connecticut.  It is not within the re-packed boxes.  We do not know where it is.  I’m sure it will show up someday when we move from this house. It will probably no longer be charged, however.

 

Of the over 200 boxes we moved with, we have now opened most of them.  Well, many of them.  Of the ones that are left, we at least know what they contain.  Pretty much. 

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Then there is the one box that we actually packed when we moved from our apartment in Manhattan and never opened for the entire 25 years we lived in Westchester.

That one is probably best left sealed.

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For more on our adventures as first-time homeowners at age 57, and moving to Stamford, visit http://theupsizers.wordpress.com/

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