Recap of 8th Living Out Loud project: Little treasures

This theme turned out to be harder for me than I thought it would be. Teller (of Penn and Teller fame) has a book about his parents called When I'm Dead All This Will Be Yours. The title came from a trip to his father's cellar in search of a flat-head screw amongst all the coffee jars of stuff. While searching for this particular screw, his father proclaimed with a sweeping gesture, "When I'm dead, all this will be yours!"

I think about Teller and his dad a lot when I'm dealing with my parents and all their stuff. So much of it is just worthless junk. But mixed in all of it are some true gems. It's just going to take years to find them all.

You all did a fabulous job of telling us what your personal treasures are, and the results are amazingly diverse!

Candice's What do you treasure? She did a fine job of being able to answer the question of what she would go back for were her home on fire. And after hunting for pictures of myself recently, I have realized the frustration of getting pictures of the person who's always the photographer. So her treasure is even more special for that.

Kim's Treasured Objects with a Purpose Kim has so many things that she has collected over the years, I was curious what she would pick. It amazed me that her treasures are things she uses every day.

Megan's Unadorned I was reading this and Rich looked over and said, "Hunh. She had that ring on when we were dating." I'm not sure if I'm more impressed with what she had to say or her ability to take a picture of her own hand.

Karal's Rock On. Convincing her to write stuff down in a blog will stand as one of my best ideas ever. I found a few rocks of my own this afternoon digging around as well as a 35mm film case full of sand from Los Angeles a friends brought me. Little things like that can mean so much.

Deb's Stuff and Nonsense I think the Christmas ornament is my favorite. Rich has all these treasured ornaments he brought with him to our relationship and I don't really have any. I should work on that.

And my own Treasures have happy memories

I also know that Gina has written an entry but left it at work, so I'll update that once she can post it.

Edit: Gina's entry is here - Living Out Loud #8 - and is a great tribute to both of her parents as well as her in laws. Thanks for sharing!

This month, I choose Karal as our winner as she truly stuck to the spirit of living out loud for this project. I should note, though, that Candice gets an honorable mention for having an item that fits the description of "take from a burning building" worthy.

Karal's prize is a compact flash card for her dSLR camera, to help ensure we see plenty of photography from her in the future. You can never have too many compact flash cards.

As always, I'm grateful for everyone who participated and hope you all enjoyed reading these. I have a few ideas brewing for our next project so stay turned for an update on that within the week!

Treasures have happy memories

I come from a family of pack rats. I even have it on my business card. So in some ways, I thought it would be easy for me to find all my treasures for this month's LOL project because I never throw anything away. But when forced to pick something I treasured, it became more and more difficult. I first went to the attic and dug out the box labeled "Genie's Goodies", confident I would find all my treasures in there. I found tons of memories, some good and some I'd rather not recall that often. I found lots of trivial bits from my first marriage, my old pocket knife, lots of old letters, some (empty) boxes of medical marijuana from my ex-father-in-law, and a giant pile of junk. In the end, I couldn't find much I wanted to write about. It mostly reminded me that I keep a lot of odd things for unknown reasons. These weren't really treasures since they didn't give me any real joy or happy memories, they were just things I couldn't part with since they chronicled my life.

My parents have recently started cleaning out the attic in their house. As all things in our family, it was left until it became an absolute crisis. My parents' roof has been in disrepair for years now and was beginning to leak. In order to get a new roof, some of the boards needed to be replaced as well as a few rafters. But to get to all of that, the entire attic had to be emptied. Instant crisis.

My parents took several truck loads of stuff to the dump and very few things were saved. Some were damaged from water or time, some were not worth keeping, a few were genuine treasures. About two weeks ago, my father called me and started off with, "you remember your stove and your other stove ... well, they're in the attic and I didn't know if you wanted them." I told him I at least wanted a picture so he could deliver them to my garage and I would dispose of them.

For context, these are the play kitchen pieces I got for the Christmas of 1981 when I was 4 years old. You can actually listen to that Christmas morning recording in a post from three years ago. It's fun, you should go listen just to hear my incredible Southern accent. If you're pressed for time, you can fast forward to 3:40 in the recording just to hear me scream "A STOVE!"

I asked Rich to drag in my play kitchen so I could photograph it. They were quite dusty but in much better condition than I would have expected. As I started washing them and sorting the contents, I was having a harder time parting with them. At first, I assumed they would be so gross they should just be thrown away. Then I thought maybe I would give them to the thrift store, but worried that with them being a bit worn they might get thrown away. No, these need to go to a good home. I kept scrubbing and sorting fake food products and realized that for now, that "good home" was still here.

I can't say that if the house were on fire, I would run back in to retrieve my stove and other stove and fridge. I didn't really find anything that I would run back in the house for. But going back and listening to that old recording and playing with my kitchen this afternoon has brought me so much joy, I can't imagine throwing them away quite yet. Maybe our little baby will eventually want to do some cooking and washing of his own in a few years.

Click the image to view the entire kitchen collection on Flickr

I'm requiring a common sense test for any future tenants

There's a joke that talks about a farmer that won the lottery. As he's holding his giant check they ask him what he's going to do with all his new found fortune. The farmer just shrugs and says, "well, I guess I'll just keep farmin' 'til I run outta money." When we bought our new house, we decided to rent out our old house. My parents have several rental properties they have accrued over the last 30 years, so I'm well-versed in the property management world. In fact, I'm familiar enough with it to know it's a giant pain in the ass. So it didn't take much to convince me to have a rental agency handle everything for our own rental property.

We pay 10% of the rent toward the agency for them to manage it and the rest is direct deposited to our bank account. The typical contract states that they can spend up to $250 on any maintenance issues before contacting us for approval. I would have sworn we told them we wanted to be contacted for any maintenance issues, but I don't think it was put in writing.

Imagine my surprise to open a letter stating that they performed maintenance on the HVAC system in the rental house. Specifically, it says that a maintenance person was called out because the air conditioning wasn't working at all. The maintenance person came out, discovered that the emergency switch (which is out of the way and at chest height) had been turned OFF, turned it back to ON and left. We were then charged $112.50 for that service.

I read this and was livid. Stomping around the house, tossing dishes into the cubbard and cramming them into the dishwasher while occasionally pausing to yell and scream kind of livid. I told Rich that I need him to call them on Tuesday and find out why they rented to stupid people or why their TURNING OFF THE AC means we need to pay $112.50 for it. I asked him to call because I know if I call, there will be more yelling and I may end up in jail and I don't want to have this baby behind bars.

This pretty much ruined my afternoon. I spent about an hour stomping around the house, then an hour playing WoW and grumping at the stupid people in Alterac Valley, then an hour crying and napping. Eventually, I got to the point where I was okay if I didn't look at the mail or think about our checking account or walk past our own thermostat.

Rich and I went out for dinner at Tropical Smoothie Cafe and I couldn't finish my meal or smoothie. He dropped me off at my parents' house to give Mom my leftovers and we chatted while she snacked on my chicken salad and Jetty Punch with Splenda. Today is the 5th and the phone rang around 9pm. It was one of their tenants saying he had the rent money but he only had cash and he could bring it by that night or the next morning. Mom finished that phone call and then shared a few other stories of other tenants who claimed to mail a money order before the 5th only to have it arrive on the 10th and be dated on the 7th. My father is currently having to replace most of the floor joists under one of their rental properties because the tenant never reported a water leak that ruined most of the sub-floor. And then there are the tenants who can't pay their rent because they spent all their money on a summer vacation.

Sitting there listening to all of that, our HVAC ignorant tenants didn't seem so bad anymore. But whether we manage the property ourselves like my parents do or go through an agency, it is still a pain in the ass. I guess we'll just keep being landlords until we run out of money.