January 4, 2020: Garage & Attic Day

Saturday.

Slept in a little, but at ten the Spectrum sales guys rang the doorbell and no one heard them. Then they knocked. So I jumped from bed, got dressed, and raced to the door to see what was wrong just to find out it was peddlers who had been told not to come here in the past. So not only were they rude, but were in violation of Carrollton’s peddling laws. I was not happy and told them to get lost in no uncertain terms.

I did a little work this morning. Maybe forty five minutes. Then it was time for me to be working in the garage. I did moving of boxes while Dominica took down the Christmas decorations. Once that was done, the real work began.

Before noon Paul and I were out to the garage and starting to bring down boxes and stuff from the attic. So many empty boxes, so much stuff to donate. Before long Dominica came out to go through things, too.

We spent two hours or more bringing down all kinds of stuff from the attic and then moving all kinds of stuff from the garage up to the attic. The CDs, LaserDiscs, old computers are all up there now. So much of what we brought down was Liesl baby and toddler stuff. She was the right age when we first lived here and then moved that loads and loads of her young childhood stuff went up into the attic when we moved back to New York, never to be seen again. Luciana missed out on some of it because it was up there when we weren’t here. Very little of Luciana’s stuff went up there because she was still so little when we moved to New York that she was still using it, or we knew that we would never need it again because she was done with it, or because she had been using stuff that had been Liesl’s.

We took two loads of things to Goodwill! We have a number of things set aside to take down to Houston. And the back driveway is full of boxes and stuff to have hauled away. Plus we took a decent load of stuff over to Rachel’s as we found a bit of her stuff in the attic like her box of china, a Christmas tree, her decorations, etc. Suddenly we have so much free space.

Beat Saber on the Oculus Rift S continued to be super popular all day. Mostly it was Paul and Liesl playing, but Dominica played some as well. I have not even put on the headset in a few days. It is in continuous demand and nothing is really pulling me in too much.

Between all of us working on it, we figured out how to download additional songs into Beat Saber and now suddenly there is so much content for us to play on it. No need to buy add on songs now, the mod community makes hundreds available and they work really well. Paul, Dominica, and Liesl played that a lot this evening.

Paul make pan friend tilapia for dinner tonight, with rice and broccoli. It was quite good. Both girls ate all of their fish. Ciana doesn’t really like fried fish, but she ate it without complaining. Liesl said that it was decent and ate it all. All of the adults really liked it. While we ate dinner we watched a double length Star Trek: Voyager special, the one where Seven of Nine gets retaken by the Borg. We’ve been slowly working our way through this series for well over a year, feels like almost two years. Paul has still not seen the entire series!

After dinner, Luciana played just a little Beat Saber, then she tried playing Along Together which is a cute 3D platformer that we got for the VR. I had tested it a few days ago and thought that it looked like it would be fun, but I am not into platformers and have no time to use the VR so was just making sure that it worked before the girls tried to get into it. It looks like exactly Luciana’s kind of game.

Jeremy and I got on the phone to get to work on Vetastic around nine thirty.

I am taking Rachel to the airport on Monday afternoon. She is flying to Miami where she is catching a cruise. It is one of those band concert cruises like Dominica and Katie did together back around 2014. Wow, can that really have been over half a decade ago? That seems so recent. This one is a heavy metal cruise and Rachel’s favourite band, Haggard, is going to be playing on it. She turns the big Three Oh next month, so this is her last big hurrah to her twenties. She tried to convince both Dominica and I in turn to go on the cruise with her, but these things are not cheap, and we don’t have the time. So she is going alone.

Now that the garage has so much space cleared out, I am able to finally do some cleaning in my office, too. My office has been a huge mess for quite some time now. We really need to do something. In reality what we need to do is to buy a larger house, this one is just not meeting our needs.

Later on Luciana tried playing Rime which is one of our new games that we got in our Christmas shopping bundles.

At one thirty, Rachel stopped by for maybe half an hour to just hang out on her way home from having gone out dancing at S4.