This Is How You Get Yourself Banned From Part Of Your Own House

We're quickly closing in on the two-year anniversary of moving into our current house. Thinking about that has pretty much lit a fire under my ass and made me want to hurry up and finish some projects. Very high on that list is that thing where I haven't hung much on any of the walls. There are lots of reasons for the delay, but probably #1 on that list is the fact that I'm scared to death of stepping foot in our storage room.

Our storage room is a room in the basement. It used to be a nice little space, as you can see. However, that photo is from before we moved in because there is no way I'm about to take a photo of it now. That would be like taking a photo of yourself that day you wake up with a horrible case of pinkeye, a raging zit in the middle of your forehead, and a cold sore screaming at the world from your bottom lip. You just don't immortalize that nonsense.

Which is all to say that room is TRASHED. It's filled to the ceiling with crap and more crap. About half of it is Christmas decorations, for which I ACCEPT FULL RESPONSIBILITY. It's marvelous being able to store a fully decorated and assembled Christmas tree, so I do. Many times over. And I have tubs and tubs of lights and yard ornaments and blah, blah, blah. I have a lot of Christmas decorations. True story.

The other half of the stuff, however, is mostly a mystery to me. It's boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff that has been packed up for as long as I can remember. Our previous houses were all very small, so at some point we started renting a storage shed. Mr. Husband started making things disappear from the itty bitty house. We moved a few times and more stuff wound up in storage. Then we had a baby and more stuff wound up in storage. Continuously, for fifteen years, he took more and more stuff over to storage. At the time that we bought this house, we had two storage sheds big enough to hold two cars, so somehow a LOT of stuff had wound up over there.

It all got dumped into that room when we moved here.

By the way, have I mentioned that I married a hoarder? Because I did. He would rather move a box back and forth, up and down, and all around than open up that box and figure out if he actually needs the contents. Even more fun, the issue of whether or not the contents are needed is very much so up for debate.

People, my husband saves EVERYTHING. And I do mean E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G.

Need some notes from Freshman Biology that were written in 1997? I bet he has them. Looking for the t-shirt that I gave him for his birthday in 1994? It's in his closet. Want a receipt for a cup of coffee that he paid cash for two years ago? It's in a drawer in the dining room.

I'm not exaggerating. Not even a little bit.

So, in my quest to get some art hung on the walls around the house, I had to go into the storage room. I knew that the pictures I wanted were leaning against the wall back in the corner, but in order to get to them, I had to move a few boxes.

I screwed up.

I opened the boxes.

People, 20 minutes later, I had four boxes of trash out in the garage and a very pissed off look on my face. I can't even tell you how ridiculous some of the stuff I found is, except that YES, I CAN. I took photos of a couple of things before I threw them out.

I know. I'm evil. AND?

I would tell you the last time we lived near a Blockbuster, except that I can't actually remember when it was. I think they all closed in Pittsburgh five years ago? Maybe more? I have no clue, but if VHS tapes ever make another run at popularity, I'll be ready to rent them!

While I'm out wandering around looking for a Blockbuster, maybe I'll make a stop at Weirton Steel and walk the halls. It only closed . . . um . . . right after I finished the project that landed me that ID badge. Why was the ID badge shoved in a box and moved around several times over the course of ten years? I couldn't tell you. It certainly wasn't because of the quality of that photograph.

I found DOZENS of those little guys. If you don't know what they are, GET OFF MY LAWN, WHIPPERSNAPPER. I'm sure that's 1.44 MB of really important data, but I'll never know because I don't have a way to open up that disk and find out.

Anybody having a flashback right now? AOL! 6.0! Free download disk! From Target! I don't know why we EVER had it, and I *really* don't know why we've held onto it all of these years. Even more fascinating to me, the sleeve was empty. No CD. Just the sleeve. Maybe I should frame it and try to convince the world that it's some really cool retro art?

I literally threw away four huge boxes of stuff crammed full of crap that was every bit as useful as the things in the photos above. Dried up ink pens, broken lamps, piles of receipts, unidentifiable hunks of plastic, coupons that expired in 2001 (NOT EXAGGERATING--2001) . . . an amazing amount of useless stuff.

And, of course, there was this:

Mr. Husband says that he has had Krusher since 1979. Throwing him away would be grounds for divorce, so he's still in the basement, creepily watching over the boxes and boxes of garbage that I have yet to send to the landfill (which, WAAAAH! but what else is there to do with math textbooks from 1996?). Now, Mr. Husband will try to swear to you that Krusher is worth some money, but I already checked ebay. $20 for one that works perfectly. The Krusher in my basement has been broken since before half the people reading this were born.

When Mr. Husband sees this post, he's going to ban me permanently from the storage room. I'm totally OK with that. I don't want to be the one to find the box containing his iguana that died eight years ago.

(The iguana thing might be an exaggeration. Maybe. But, how can I really be sure? He has kept everything else.)

How Quickly They Learn

"How was camp today?" I asked.

"It was fine," Alexis replied. AS ALWAYS.

"Did you get to go into the big gym at all?" I continued. It only took me approximately forever plus three days to figure out I have to ask specific questions if I actually want to have a conversation with the kid about what she does all day long.

"Yeah, but only once," Alexis replied. "It was super boring."

"Why was it boring?" I asked. I was assuming they played some sort of team sports, which would be boring for her. Her camp is kindergarten through sixth grade, so I would guess that team sports end up with the littlest kids sort of pushed off to the side after a few minutes.

"The Americans were boring," she said.

I had to think for a minute, but I figured out what craziness she was spewing. A couple of times per week, the camp brings in someone to do a presentation or lead an activity or whatever. There had been a Native American themed event that morning.

"Do you mean the Native Americans?" I asked.

"Yeah, the Native Americans." she said. "They were really boring." She yawned as she answered, as if to pound a few more nails in the BORING BORING BORING. Did I mention that she said it was boring? She said it was boring.

"Why was it boring?" I was surprised by her assessment. As a North Dakotan, I attended approximately a crap-ton of Native American presentations as a kid, and never particularly found them to be painful. Annoying, sure. But not THAT bad. 

"All they did was dance around and make noises," Alexis reported. "And they wore hats that were really dumb."

Things were starting to get interesting. Here was the short person being highly critical of a group of people, totally not realizing that SHE IS ONE. Mr. Husband is part Native American and while you won't catch him wearing a headdress or anything, I thought it was funny that she was all, "THEY ARE SO BORING."

I filled the kid in on her family history. She fell silent.

"I guess the rain dance was kind of cool," she finally muttered minutes later.

As we sat gathered around the kitchen table, I urged Alexis to tell her dad about the Native American presentation she had seen that morning. I was REALLY looking forward to her droning on and on about how boring it was.

"Dad! We saw Native Americans at camp and it was SOOOO cool!" she said.

There's probably some deep moral I could pull from the story, but I'm too busy being annoyed by the fact that the kid already knows to change her words to make sure she keeps her dad happy. That's going to be a pain in my ass for a loooooong time.

 

You Can Call Them "Banana Boats" If You Want. I Just Call Them AMAZING.

Campfire Bananas have definitely become A Thing around our house. Ever since I introduced the husband and short person to them, one of them has been asking me to make them at least three times per week and the other one has been walking out of the grocery store with an obscene quantity of bananas in hand a few times each week. I'll let you go ahead and figure out which is which.

Whenever I end up making the same time several times in a short period of time, I have a habit of digging through the pantry and seeing what variations I can make of that thing. My theory is that if something is good, you can't really screw it up by substituting an ingredient or two. In fact, it often leads to a lot of improvements on things that I didn't know could be improved.

Campfire Bananas.

Improved.

YES. REALLY.

Go review the original post about them if you need a reminder of how they are made and then go dig through your pantry and try some twists on the original idea:

Nutella and marshmallow. I mentioned the idea of throwing Nutella in there on the original post, and it turned out to be just as amazing as I imagined. And then some.

Rolos and marshmallows. Yes, ROLOS. I don't monkey around with Campfire Bananas, people. I cut the Rolos in half and then shoved them in that banana along with some marshmallows. It only took three Rolos to do it, and those three Rolos sang the Hallelujah Chorus when I first tried them.

And my absolute favorite . . .

This one started with me making Pineapple Upside Down Cake Dip, and ended with me stealing a bit of the crushed pineapple before I started that recipe. I tossed the spoonful of crushed pineapple, some chocolate chips, and some coconut into the banana. And then I died. Happy.

I need to make about ten more of that one so I can make banana splits with them. Oh, yes, I do.