Preparing for Summer Visitors

When I had sabbatical in 2003-2004 we rented our house and made one downstairs room into a storage room for a lot of our stuff. It never completely reverted back into a real room and it was still a storage room when we had house sitters while we were in Thailand earlier this year.



But the son of a good friend and colleague from Beijing will be visiting us for a month beginning Wednesday. Thursday both our daughter and son will arrive, one for two weeks and one for the weekend. We have some birthdays on Friday. And a week later my college roommate and his wife will stop by for two days before they cruise back home. All good fun. So the long slow rehabilitation of that downstairs room has been speeded up.



At this point, I could just put all the miscellaneous stuff into boxes and sort them out later, but we've been postponing the inevitable too long. My mother's garage is a model of what I don't want to do. So I've been going through stuff that's accumulated and putting things where they belong, in the trash, or in a donate box.

Eventually I want to clear the room out completely and make it into more usable space, but for now it will hold a mattress on the floor for the weekend. And maybe while the kids are here, they will find some things that they are now ready to take, trash, or give away.