Yeah, it can get lonely too.

My basement is fully above ground, with lots of light, carpeted, TV, stereo . . . so I have no excuse.

You are going to feel good when this is all done . . . and so will he.

Cherie

I'm supposed to get it DONE?? I thought it was like laundry, or milking cows!

Frank, what I like best about retirement so far is NOT having an outline of what I want to get done the next day! I decided to give myself at least until the first of February with everything on my list having "if I feel like it" in parentheses.

Men love to use shredders.

Might keep him occupied, so he doesn't notice the same box going up and down...up and down.

Kind of like rolling a rock up and down a hill for eternity, eh??? I loved the Sisyphus refererence - hadn't thought about that dude for years.

I hear ya on the sorting and going through handed down boxes of memories. My problem is the sentimental thoughts that go through my head as I look through my Gram's or my Mother's belongings. I know some of the items are antiques and some are just momento's, but I sit and recall warm fuzzy memories of those ''items'' being in their homes years ago.

I also know that someday, my DD will not know what to do w/this stuff in my basement, but it's hard to know what to do with it. Right now, it's all in boxes on shelves in the storage area down there. DH wants me to go through it, but I'm just not ready to purge those items yet. Maybe I'm just being lazy!!! That's probably it.

(LMAO at the the milking cows and laundry comment, B2!!!! Now, that's funny, but soooo true!)

That's the hard part for me too, DM. Weeding out old phone bills and magazine articles I don't need any more is time-consuming, but easy.

My Mom's diaries, from the time she was eleven? My Dad's old 4-H books? My ticket stub from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band concert? My grandmother's recipes? Grandpa's cereal bowls? The letters Mom and Dad wrote back and forth during WWII? My great-grandmother's quilt blocks?

Now that stuff is hard. Plus, after 10 years for Dad and almost 9 for Mom, I still have a hard time with anything that was theirs. Little by little, I am letting things go. Little by little.

Here is what I would do with the paper stuff (ticket stubs, letters, etc.): Scan them into the computer and store them electronically. The paper will eventually degrade, but you could scan them into the computer and store them on CD's or even have them printed out and bound in a book (Ritz Camera does things like that pretty cheap).

Question for ya's??? B2, I too, have my Mother's journals from the past 15-20 yrs. I actually have them in a box under my bed. I can't look through them, as it doesn't feel right, and maybe subconciously, I don't want to relive her pain when my Father was so ill, as she wrote in them every day.

What to do w/them is the question?? The only one I glanced at was the last few months of her life entries. I wanted to see if she was in pain longer than I realized or if she had been keeping her illness from me. She never wrote a word about it.

Sure didn't mean to hijack~~~ my bad!