Today I got a wild hair and cleaned out our "shop," the part of the basement where we keep all our woodworking stuff. I don’t know if it’s a guy thing (as in Tim the "Toolman" of Home Improvement fame), but James has a tendency to <ahem> lose control of that area of the house. Our shop was completely coated in wood and plastic.
We have a pellet stove, which is sort of like a wood stove, except it burns wood pellets, which are made out of sawdust. Pellets come in plastic bags. (Here’s where the mess comes in.) When it’s cold, every day the pellet stove uses a bag of pellets. James opens the bag, dumps the pellets into the stove, and then throws the pellet bag into the shop. After a few months, pellet bags are *everywhere* draped over the table saw, on the workbenches, etc.
Adding to this motif, are many thousands of pieces of bark. We’ve also been building a lot of fires, and the wood we are currently using has really thick bark. So James has been going down to the shop and chopping the bark off the wood he’s putting into the wood stove and fireplace. More mess.
And then my Mom shipped us a huge box of presents. The presents were fantastic, but she shipped the stuff with about 7,000 evil packing peanuts, which naturally dispersed themselves all over the shop. (As an aside, I hate packing peanuts and donate them to our local Mailboxes Etc. who are very nice about taking them off my hands.)
Sometimes cleaning up a REALLY big mess is somewhat therapeutic. The shop is still the great dumping ground of our house, but for at least the next day or so, we’ll still be able to see the table saw.
And with that…I realize that this is the last CC-Tips of 2001, so a very happy 2002 to all!