Lord of the flies

It has been a weird few weeks. I feel unsettled, but in some ways, I’m holding it together better than I did earlier in the year when Dale and I were down for the count. We are both improving. It is a slow slog.

Dale is not technically a hoarder, but there are signs. For 30-plus years we subscribed to The Washington Post. Hard copies in the mail. But we canceled after Jeff Bezos started stinking it up. We switched to the New York Times, which is delivered daily.

Even though we canceled, there was time left on the subscription, so the Post continued to arrive. By then, Dale was reading the Times. I said fine, let them pile up, but I draw the line at newspaper tunnels. It was a close run thing. The old Posts finally made it to the recycling bin last week, and I’m calling that a win.

Because I am not a hoarder at heart, I like to get rid of things. I purged some old clothes and decided to get rid of my cowboy boots. I bought them when we lived in Texas, but that time is gone. They are high-end boots, so I thought I would consign them. Just because I was making the trip over there anyway, I considered consigning some of my Egyptian jewelry.

But then I thought, well, they aren’t going to know anything about the value of Egyptian jewelry, so I’d better do some research. I remember buying it at a small gallery outside Cairo around 1990, and I knew the silversmith was a woman.  

It appears that woman, Azza Fahmy, went on to become very famous and now runs some sort of international jewelry empire. If authenticated, my pieces are from her early works before she made it big, and they are quite collectible. Not necessarily worth a ton of money, but some of her jewelry is in The British Museum.

Short story. I’m keeping it. The boots went to consignment.

Since I decided to keep the jewelry, I thought I’d make more of an effort to wear it. So, I got out the polishing cloth and shined it up. Being old and all that, I guess I didn’t know this was a high-risk activity, and the next day I woke up with a sprained pinky. I was not expecting a jewelry polishing injury, but there you have it. Aging is not for sissies.

I got into research mode and decided to dig a little into my father’s history. We know he dropped out of school in Cleveland in 1930. And that he registered for the draft in Palm Springs, Ca. in 1940. He was drafted in 1941, and we can pretty much piece together his life after that, but there’s a roughly 10-year period where we really aren’t sure what he was up to.

He said he left home after dropping out of school to ride the rails during the Great Depression. I believe that part, but we don’t know what he did all that time. He liked to tell stories!  I found the census record for 1940, and it turns out he was a pinsetter at the Palm Springs Bowling Academy. He would have been about 26. He used to tell us he ran a bowling alley in Palm Springs, but I think that was a bit of an embellishment.

I have his WW2 diary and spent some time exploring that. As best as I can tell, he was in the hospital in France when his unit was sent out to fight in what would become known as the Battle of the Bulge. I mean, wow, close call.

I’m kind of done with exploring that for now. It was interesting and way better than doomscrolling.

Oh, just because we haven’t had enough activity at our house this year, somehow maggots did whatever they do for sport, and our kitchen filled up with big black houseflies. We must have killed 100 of them over several days. After much deliberation, I believe the source was my sourdough discard going down the drain and getting stuck in there and becoming a tasty snack for a hungry fly.

I found empty casings or whatever it is those bastards leave behind under the trash bin and had to clean and disinfect all that.

To sanitize the garbage disposal, I took an old toothbrush and scrubbed the underside of the black flaps. Gross. I did a baking soda/vinegar mix and let that bubble up. Then I washed all that down with some Dawn dishwashing liquid and boiling water. Then I ground up ice and Kosher salt to pick up any remnants. And then another gullywasher of hot water.

It’s a pain in the ass, but I have a new process for disposing of sourdough discard. I put it all in a Ziplock and wipe down the container and any utensils with paper towels, which also go in the Ziplock. Then that sits in the freezer until full, and then into the outside trash.

No more fucking flies in this house.