Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for September 12, 2023

More Polaroids? Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

Treasure hunt…..

After my husband died five years ago, I went through all the boxes in the basement. The further I got, the older the boxes. The last box I went through was from our apartment. We moved in 1980. The only thing I kept from that box… our 1976 marriage certificate.

Man, can I identify with this after a lifetime of moves. At least the boxes were labeled: College textbooks, et al.

Archeological trail of their past lives?

Still don’t want them to move…

Yesterday I threw out an electric powered grindstone which was on the attic since 2012… a non functioning electric grindstone. Probably just a minor fix to repair it but if you haven’t used that thing since a decade… chuck it out

Reminds me of George Carlin’s “Stuff”.

Yep, Janis is really “moving it along” by opening up that fresh can of stop-and-reminisce.

That’s an ugly jug he has in Panel 1. Very collectable – I have one in my collecton.

You have to at least go through the boxes, even if most of it is trash.

And that really old box, half hidden in the back? That’s from Arlo’s childhood home. God knows what’s in there!

Sell them online. You never know what people will pay for “junk”

This is great. That jug(?) with the face, boxes unopened from the last move, even the move before that — yup, time to dump the junk. But, yes, fun to go through it first. People say, “the memories are enough,” but at least save those old photo albums (or save the photos digitally), upgrade the films to the latest technology. Stuff like that doesn’t take up much space (nowadays some space on a multi-terabyte hard drive, big deal) and go through it once in a while, for example, at Christmas or New Year’s Day, with the family — it may stir up memories you’d forgotten you had and give the next generation some roots.

The key to every move is a very large dumpster

If you haven’t used something in two years you don’t need it.

Inadvertent time capsule.

I bet there’s a bong in one of the boxes…

Ya know, just leave them and let the heirs deal…

Wow! That’s crazy!

“After three moves, just burn the house down.” Bohemian proverb.

How long have Arlo and Janis been married???

Time capsule!

been there, done that, wondered about my sanity

Boxes full of forgotten memories……

There is more than one way to travel in time.

Ok. Now I KNOW Jimmy has been watching us. We had the exact same boxes in our attic, only they were from 24 years ago, not 27.

If that’s a face jug, those can be valuable. It’s time for Arlo to discover EBay collectors who will pay good money for their old things.

I’ve read that if you haven’t looked at, worn, or used something in the last year, get rid of it. So, I make sure to pull my photo albums out at least once a year to look through the pages. I actually enjoy spending that time turning the pages and being reminded of faces and places in the past. A moment captured in time and committed to print is timeless. A printed photograph can vividly bring forgotten memories to mind. Now we all take, literally, thousands of digital photos, a total of trillions, which are posted online to be viewed in a nano-glance and then disappear into the ether. We are in the generation of now, not looking at back then. I need to go through my digital photo storage, pick and choose the most important ones to me to print out and put into albums. No one else will value my photos, not now nor when I’m dead and gone. They will be thrown away. But while I live, they are treasures I have gathered along the way.

Do tell, or are they too graphic in nature?

34 years in our house, I think we’ve only unpacked housewares and (some since repacked) knickknacks and artwork my wife put in storage 37 years ago.

Once again JJ must have a spy in my house.

Opening one of the old apartment boxes,Well stumbles across Janis’ forty year old crocheted bikini and begins egging his spouse with a dare to try it on for him.

Some of those grotesque jugs are worth quite a bit!

Which supports his theory that the boxes aren’t worth opening

Kinda like a time capsule!

We moved here – about 5 blocks from the apartment we moved into as newly weds 10 years before – 40+ years ago. Everything was unpacked as we did not have (relatively) much stuff. Each moved stuff of ours from parents houses where same had been left. Most stuff has been used over the decades & much has been donated to get rid of it.

The house has an attic. It is NOT easy to access – one has to empty out a closet in the second bedroom (aka our office) & remove the front half of the shelf, use the special folding ladder we bought to do this with as it fits into the closet, climb up, lift the square in the ceiling to open up the space and then crawl into the attic. One cannot stand up even at the tallest part of the attic even if one is only 5’1" tall. When we moved in we figured (since we each grew up in a house with a usable attic) that this was a great place to store prior year’s financial records – so 3 years worth went into the attic – along with some prior year Playboy magazines – for storage. I climbed back up the next couple of years to store the prior year’s financial records & remove the oldest year each time to shred & get rid of. Then I switched to much of our records being on the computer and forgot about the records in the attic.

Late last year I found out that I had a hidden memory of some medical procedure done in late 1980s when we storing in the attic. Chances are it would not actually help – but it occurred to me if I climbed up there and took out the old records I might find the answer. However – we have had mice (which an exterminator got rid of for us) and there is about 30 years of dust up there. Add to that I was never very spry – even less so now – plus grossed out by the thought of crawling through that dust and what might be in it – so I have not done so and have left those time capsule financial records up there and hope that one of I, my husband, or my sister and her husband remember the details for me.

Those face jugs could be valuable.