Gone but not forgotten: about half of the things underneath the Christmas tree.
No -- nothing else was stolen from the apartment, nor did I reduce my friends and family by 50%, and contrary to what you might think, this isn't a recessionary strategy for getting through the 2011 holidays.
It is however, a sad commentary on the weekend, when I pulled out all of the cmas decorations, which had been housed in the special storage space in the building's basement, and discovered that the bottom bin had taken on water during this past summer's flooding (see post on 7.24.11). Since I decorate around the tree with holiday tins collected from year to year, it's also where the ornaments have been stored.
In an odd twist -- those same tins protected almost all of the ornaments (including the hand crocheted ones from my mom and my mom's mom which now have a musty smell -- but so did my mom's mom's place -- it's where I learned what mothballs were, after all) ... but they ended up sacrificing themselves in the process as they turned rusty and nasty.
It was a brief moment of sadness -- but there are those who lose a lot more in other things that truly are disasters -- so a moment of silence and out to the dumpster they went (where they were picked up within the hour by the scrap metal pickers that patrol the city's 'hood).
And tonight ... the tree gets decorated!
Since you can so easily be replaced and re-collected in the years ahead, rusty holiday tins I've discarded that have now been re-purposed by some dumpster diver, you really won't be missed that much.
OUR SUMMER FLOOD (FOUR MONTHS AGO):
http://articles.cnn.com/2010-07-24/us/illinois.chicago.flooding_1_flood-warning-outages-storms?_s=PM:US
TEN THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT MOLD:
http://www.epa.gov/mold/moldresources.html#Ten_Things
NON-GIFTY SUGGESTIONS FOR UNDER THE TREE DECORATING:
http://voices.yahoo.com/decorate-under-christmas-tree-2281418.html
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