Roots and Recycling

Country Arbors came today and planted our two new Kentucky Coffee Trees. After watching Gingko 12" saplings try to grow for five years with very minimal success (they were 18"), I was very happy to have them. Plus, with the maple borer working it's way through the neighborhood, I was happy not to have chosen a Maple. The maple in the back is taking enough of a pounding. Poor thing.

I left as they were starting to hand dig the holes. I had to pick up the book drop for Tolono Public Library and then I had a series of stops to get rid of kid crap. The first was to go pick up a coat tree that I bought and used with my Clownfish classroom last year. It's a beautiful coat tree, but I don't have much use for it at home, and I'm not going to use it in California. So I took it and X-man's Melissa and Doug kitchen that he got for his third birthday to All Things Kids in Champaign. I hadn't been there in well over a year. (The last time I was there, I was reselling the Haba push car that X-man learned to walk on. I held on to it because I was being all emotional about it. Plus, I took his diaper changer.) As it turns out, I had over $100 on my account. I always figured if something sold they'd send me a check after 60 days or something, I guess I must have shopped there more back in the day and never really got sent a check because I'd recycle my credit into new purchases. After failing to sell three things on Craigslist, I just decided the drop off method worked a lot better for me.

But if you're looking for one of these things, I dropped them off today. They're in good condition, too. Except the timer on the kitchen was broken from so much use.

Because we're getting new carpet in the basement, we needed some space in the storage room to move the basement furniture for tomorrow. KTDID came over last night and went through some boxes that have been in our house since she lived here. As it turns out, she had a lot of paper shredding to do -- and I realized that I hadn't been keeping up on my own shredding of financial documents, so she and I sat on the floor of the storage room last night shredding and shredding. 7 full dumps of a giant shredder later, we were done. She managed to get her stuff from 8 boxes to 4, and I managed to keep my financial records in a decent filing situation (each year is in a plastic tub that is labeled and on the metal shelves).

But the garbage guy probably hated me this morning. Because we had our three blue bins full (because we didn't put out garbage last week before we went to Maine), our office paper bucket next to my desk was out, a box full of papers that didn't need to be shredded was out and then the six bags of shred. And we had a full garbage can from cleaning out the basement.