the north country

well i'm back. i brought a lot of stuff with me. there's a lot of junk, but there's treasure strewn through the rubble.

to catch you up if you aren't tracking with what i am talking about:

Sycz and i flew up to oregon last week, and drove back down in a u-haul full of the rest of the stuff left over from my mom's estate. the word 'estate' here is tricky. when i think about estates, i think of brick houses, rolling lawns, tiffany lamps, boxes full of silver, french maids, and lots of treasure (ie. dubloons). however, in the case of my mom's 'estate' we have loads of boxes of crap, littered here and there with items of insane sentimental value, or moentary significance.

the trip itself was fine. i really enjoyed showing mike around cottage grove. it really is an interesting place. we wandered up and down mainstreet, hitting up all the antique stores. we went to goodwill and bought a lot of clothes. i bought a sweet british looking plaid blazer for 10 cents. we walked down to the river behind my grandma's house and fed bread to the ducks. they worshiped us and ate furiously from the mana we rained down on them.

it was really cold, and we both liked that a lot. at night it was in the upper 20's, and it was really nice during the day hitting the mid 50's and we even had some sun while we were there, awesome.

anyway, we got a u-haul, filled it up saturday morning and drove back down to whittier straight through. we got in to town here about 1:30 sunday morning. the drive took us about 13-14 hours, give or take. not too shabby in that huge ass truck.

now to the stuff. there's a lot of it. we filled up the bottom two or three feet of the entire floor of a fourteen foot truck with boxes. major pieces included a piano, a large chair from the late 1920's that brlonged to my great-grandma, and sveral chests, which i have yet to even open to devine their contents.

the way this stuff was 'packed' defies catagorization. sorting through things then becomes super laborious. i was looking though a box of really un-interesting books, only to come upon an envelope containing a picture of me taken only a couple of hours after i was born by the hospital photographer. other strange-find highlights include my great-great grandfather's high school diploma from 1923, a lone recipe card for my mom's famous peanut butter cookies, my papa's (moms dad's) gold fillings in a small glass vile, a full bottle of 409 at least five or six copies of the exact same seals & croft album on vinyl.

amanda and i sorted everything into three piles. keep, sell, and donate. in a couple weekends we're going to have a big garage sale here at the house and try to recoup some of the money that i spent on gas driving this stuff down here. our friends can have first crack at anything we're going to sell at the garage sale, for free. if there's something you need there, you're welcome to it.

other highlights include about 25 disney records from the 50's and 60's that are in fantastic shpe. i priced them out tonight on gemm.com and was pretty happy. there wasn't a single one that was selling for less than $10, and all together they priced out to a cool $450. So that was really nice. I am going to put them up on ebay individually and try to get as close to $400 as i can for them. i think i should do alright. Oh yeah i am going to be selling the piano too, so if you know anyone in the market for a nice american made solid-oak upright, let me know. it needs to be tuned, but it's got a great sound. i learned to play the keys on this one, and we bought it new.

anyway, i gotta get back to going through boxes. my house is buried underneath this stuff, and i want that to be over as quickly as possible.