Moderate recovery

We have most of the basement cleaned up now.

We still need to go to the Christmas stuff, which we partially did on Friday. There's not that much left to do, so we are being lazy today.

Here's the big pile o'garbage in front of our house, that runs almost 50 feet, the width of our property (it hurts my heart to call it garbage--there is good stuff we had to throw away):

And a view of the neighborhood:

Doesn't look like much, but that's way more stuff on the curb than on garbage day.

We're getting tired of living in plastic box land--this is our front porch.

Speaking of plastic boxes, we here at Chez Paulette and Sara recommend Sterilite plastic boxes should you need to protect your stuff in the basement. They're on sale at Target right now. The stuff we had in them suffered the least amount of damage--in a lot of cases, no damage. Rubbermaid, not so much.

Look at the icky silt left on stuff in the yard:

Here's the new water heater in all it's glory:

I should have taken a picture of Phil the plumber while he was installing it. Silly me.

Look what I found in one of my untouched Sterilite boxes:

It's from 1984. I put this in there with the intention that Paulette make me this. I will be knitting it for myself now. It's sport weight yarn. There are a couple of other good patterns in the booklet as well. Apparently it's a gift from the knitting gods to me.

The garden is celebrating--it's really looking pretty now!

Well, better go now. The basement is calling me.....