{"id":20931,"date":"2025-07-23T19:09:29","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T18:09:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/?p=20931"},"modified":"2025-07-31T19:34:59","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T18:34:59","slug":"daily_3795_-_basement_day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2025\/07\/23\/daily_3795_-_basement_day\/","title":{"rendered":"Daily: 3795 – basement day"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my plans for this vacation (of which I have nearly two weeks left) is to bring some order to the basement.<\/p>\n

The basement is a mess. There are corners I have never looked into so I don’t even know what all is there. The things I do know should be there somewhere are hard to find and\/or hard to reach. There’s plenty of junk that should be thrown out.<\/p>\n

Yesterday was a basement day, and today is another one. I’ve found that it’s easier for me to make progress, and to feel that I have made progress, when I spend a large chunk of time focusing on a single “theme”. If I do a bunch of unrelated small tasks and cross them off my list, then I don’t get the same satisfying feeling. So instead of doing a dash of basement-clearing, a pinch of gardening and a smidgen of sewing, I am focusing on the basement only.<\/p>\n

I’m clearing out so much stuff. Old inflatable swimming pools. (Plural.) Boxes of pool chemicals. A dusty foam mattress. A saggy foldable bed. Swathes of geotextile that I will never use. Buckets and buckets of old paint from when we renovated the house in 2011. Decades-old snorkelling equipment. A sleeping bag from the 1970s.<\/p>\n

Things that I still have entirely excessive amounts of:<\/p>\n

1. Terracotta plant pot saucers – several dozen. I don’t even like the terracotta pot + saucer combo.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

2. Screws. Boxes and boxes of them. Deck screws, drywall screws, wood screws, floor screws, cabinet screws, roof nails, general-purpose nails – you name it, I’ve got it. Some of them literally in the hundreds. I am most unlikely to need this amount of screws in the next few decades.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

3. Jam. I counted, I have 95 jars of jam\/marmalade\/chutney. These might literally last me until I retire (unless they go bad first.) I don’t eat much jam. Neither does Ingrid, and when she does, she prefers low-sugar versions, which these are definitely not. Adrian only likes raspberry jam and blueberry jam, whereas this is mostly funky stuff – cherry jam is the only “normal” kind here, and the rest is more odd things like gooseberry, rhubarb with ginger, redcurrant, spicy plum chutney, etc. Still, I won’t be getting rid of any of these. They’ve been made with love, and I will do my best to eat my way through them.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my plans for this vacation (of which I have nearly two weeks left) is to bring some order to the basement. The basement is a mess. There are corners I have never looked into so I don’t even know what all is there. The things I do know should be there somewhere are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,22,4,768],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dailies","category-house_and_garden","category-observing_the_self","category-photography-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20931"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20931\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20935,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20931\/revisions\/20935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}