What am I doing hangin' 'round?

Friday evening was a lovely good time with the mate and I reaffirming our bond of love and just in general having a nice dinner, a movie and a great time later. It's the proper way to prepare for just one of us leaving for a couple days.

We sold a motorcycle on Ebay and the shipping was going to be outrageous so the mate worked up a price and we loaded on the little truck. He left VERY early on Saturday. I kissed him bye and started tearing apart the back porch.

Enclosed porches are funny places. Now a porch with 3 sides open usually has a few kids toys and a couple chairs or a swing on them. The bikes might get locked to the posts. That's it. But the minute you put screens and storms on it and call it a three seasons room or an enclosed porch it starts to accumulate things. It's out of the house, technically, and it's closer than the garage in the winter. It usually has a table and a couple chairs or a swing on it to start off with.

But they are insidious! Magnetic! Complusive! Those porches will grow an accumulation of stuff faster than Jack can grow a magic bean stalk! You move the first little pile it gets on it's table out to the garage one nice day and the next day you find a bag with all the empty pop bottles lurking behind the chair in the corner. You toss those in the trunk of the car to cash in the next time you are in town. Day after that you find 3 flower pots, a bag of marbles, a large bag of potting soil and 6 seed packets are sitting behind the door to outside, on a chair seat and on the table.

Thinking to outwit the porch, you go get your hand trowel and rake as well as your gardening gloves. You put on the gloves, use the marbles for drainage in the pots, add the dirt, plant the 6 packs of seeds in the nice new dirt with the trowel and rake. There! All gone as the plants went on the patio!

But the porch has half a bag of dirt behind the door, your garden trowel laid on top under your gloves, half a bag of marbles leaned against the big bag, a paper bag in the corner with the empty seed packets in it and your hand rake hung on a nail on the wall. But now it's time for dinner and that's when you slip.

You go to prepare a hot, healthy meal for your family and the porch goes to work. You did NOT remove every single item when you were done with it. It's power to collect items is multiplied and squared by every object you left behind.

The family comes in for dinner. The porch snags a jacket with the back of a chair and a cap on the same nail you hung the hand rake on, (which is why you can't find it tomorrow!). A pair of tennis shoes get tumbled by the door into the house. The skate board and roller blades cuddle up next to them. It wickedly grasps a stack of school books for the table and lets the wind in to blow the ONE page of homework that MUST be turned in tomorrow into the new trash bag in the corner with the seed packets. As your mate sets his wrench down on the window ledge when he walks in the porch closes the blind over it. Gone forever!

Wicked, evil porches! Give them three days and your home will all be in one room!

With the mate going to be gone for 3 or so days I decide I will TAKE BACK the back porch - AGAIN! I do this about twice a year. I didn't do so badly this time. After 10 hours of finding stuff and putting it where it belonged the porch was short three large bags, four boxes and a crate of books. It only got my vacuume cleaner and a broom back.

But I was about half dead. What I didn't have places for I put in the front yard for free. I hope some other poor fool with a porch comes along to pick it up. It's already porch sensitized so I feel sorry for them.

But the porch looks great!