We like to call ourselves collectors.

This past weekend was beautiful. The weather was absolutely heaven-sent. Doug and I had no idea how much we missed the sun until we finally saw it and felt alive again. We felt so alive, in fact, that we decided to start cleaning out our garage.

If you haven't been privileged enough to go into our garage or see our garage with the door open, then you've really been missing out. Because our garage was definitely a sight to be seen. In just a little more than eighteen months we had managed to fill, just about completely fill, the garage with junk. Four shovels, three rakes, a random air compressor, several axes, a couple of lawn mowers, two coolers, some saws, lawn chairs, a broken vacuum cleaner, one of those green things that you push and it drops fertilizer, I have no idea exactly how many gnomes and garden ornaments and planters... but the real find was the cardboard. Maybe we thought that there was someday going to be a Cash for Cardboard campaign and that we'd strike it rich, but we had so much cardboard in there. I don't think we threw out a cardboard box since we moved in. All of the boxes we used for moving were in there, along with every box from everything we purchased since then. I even found a couple of shoe boxes in there. Most of the cardboard was damp and I saw more than my fair share of spiders. And some kind of little animal, likely a mouse based on the type of turds we found in several of the boxes, made himself quite the home in there this winter. We felt good about providing enough birdseed and shelter for the little creature(s) during the cold months, but we did not feel good about being junior hoarders.

So, the first, and really the only thing, we tackled was the cardboard. We ripped it into small bits and filled up our 96-gallon recyling toter. The toter is packed with cardboard, no room for anything else in there this week!, thanks to Doug's fancy footwork.That was the one day that I wished we were heavier. We probably could have packed some more in, but half of the cardboard will be recycled this week and then the other half, still sitting in our garage, but now broken into little bits to make it easier to toss into the toter, will be disposed of next week. And then we can take on the other stuff. So, if you're wondering if we need anything for our yard, like tools, or gear, or equipment, or anything like that, we might, but wait until we take inventory of what we have. I ranted and raved to Doug about not having any windshield wiper fluid a few weeks ago. How could we not have any windshield wiper fluid? What kind of responsible people were we? What kind of prepared car-owners would not have windshield wiper fluid? Well, we have it. Have a full container. But it's hard to know what we have when it's buried deep into the spider-laden garage. One more nice weekend like the one we had this weekend, though, and we'll have a full inventory all ready to go.