Opening Litany

We only bought the farm a few months ago, but there have been occurrences that deserve to be documented. We have not bought animals or purchased cheese making equipment, we have not broke ground for a new house, and we have not put up any new fences. What we have done is throw out a whole lot of stuff. For example:

Stacks of photos, boxes full of travel brochures, seemingly endless bottles, jars, jugs and tubes of soaps, ointments, shampoos and every other toiletry imaginable, a salt and pepper shaker collection, miscellaneous balls of fur and poop, pieces of rotten wood, boxes of goat and sheep medication, along with the syringes to administer them, all of the fur and feces ridden linoleum and carpet on the first floor, all of the fur and feces ridden rugs and flooring on the second floor (thrown out the window to avoid carrying them through the house), the dishwasher, the freezer, the other freezer with 80 pounds of rotten meat in it, the stove, the fridge, the two dead cats behind the fridge.

But some of it was good enough for the thrift shop:

A set of wedding china, about a dozen garbage bags of linens, a box full of shoes and boots, an upright vacuum, a drip coffee maker, several lamps.

Even more shocking, there are several things we decided to keep or at least have not yet decided to get rid of:

Assorted tools, a wood stove, a Singer sewing table, a sleigh bed, a desk, a wood stove, a chair eerily similar to one Alanna and I bought at a yard sale on Long Island, a metal ammo box complete with ammo, a copper fire extinguisher, a small antique post office window, and a hot pink flapper hat.

At this point I must confess that Alanna and I avoided the worst of the cleanup by being in France. But the pictures Normandy took made it feel as if we were there. I won't post the most graphic images, but what follows suggests the scope of the mess.

-Garth