tobacco can of penny rolls

So this weekend I've spent another time of sorting out my grandmother's possessions. This suites me fine since "stacking like items together" is how I define cleaning.
Sometimes I think I'm the only person on the planet that finds this fascinating. Like these pennies for instance. I found them in some 1950 something tin of tobacco. There are 22 rolls of pennies, so maybe 11$ total. Where did it come from? Why did she keep it? What should we do with it? Seeing how my grandmother placed items, what she placed, is really a bit of window into what she was thinking about and how she thought. Last work weekend, I was digging through the dementia. Knowing her as I did, you could see how things were not clicking as they should any more. This trip has all been about the strata of the nana I knew. Very crafty, very tied to family. Unfortunately she was also very tied to cute little do-dads and shiny things.

The one rule of thumb I've tried to stick to is that I can't "rescue" anything and bring it home -- mainly because I hope to be packing things up in a few months to move to Singapore. My aim has been to give away anything that could still be used by someone that is still hygienic. She took very good care of her clothing (except when she was "fixing" it). Nana was such a creator with her hands. She was also the queen of unfinished projects. She was also a stuffer and a bit of a magpie if you look at the number of jelly jars with broken strings of beads in them.

The room is for the most part now empty of all that she hauled in her wake. It will still take another trip to be completely sorted, but i hope it is a little more bearable for my family. I have not done anything with the complete drawer of junk jewelry. I am after all also a little bit magpie.

And I have to admit I did rescue a few skeins of yarn and a needle or two.

*scrub scrub* said cat's little rag. dust bunnies flee in terror

There are sometimes when I get it in my head/gut to really scrub down the kitchen. This time was sparked off by seeing a little silverfish dart for cover while I was thinking about getting lunch. Well, no longer. Two hours later the kitchen if not sparkling it is at least close to being in the state I found it in when we moved in here. That was the last time professional cleaners were brought in. This is a really stupid thing, but as I scrub my burner dishes(?) from the stove, I think that at least in this way I've done my dutch hertiage proud. I have no reason to believe dutch folk are more a)clensely (read:anal) or b)thrifty (read:cheap) than anyone else. I believe it has to do with this advertisment.

The good news is that silverfish and ants are about the worse pests I've seen in the 3 years we have been here. High altitude means there are no roaches (and oddly no fireflies) which are the worse apt critter. We also don't have those awful (and stupid) many legged creepy-crawlies you get in pgh. Over all we are very lucky. I still find my self taking precautions (stuffing things into the fridge instead of leaving them out. Sealing up my flour and bake supplies up in air-sealed ziplock or tupperware) just in case we discover some "friends". Old habits die hard.

I also spent most of the morning going over the housing thing and came to the conclusion that, though we can only afford a small piece, it is better for us to own it than to never have owned anything at all. Housing in Denver really begins around $170,000 and then just goes up. Houses here are outrageously priced for what you get. We also have I think one of the highest rates of foreclosure, mainly because there wasn't any oversight of lenders until just this year (or something like that) so *anyone* could get a bad loan, buy a house and then file for bankrupcy.

Our target range is significantly lower than $170,000. But we can afford a townhouse/condo AND that still would be more economic for us in 5 years than paying rent. Rent, btw, starts at around $800 for the space we are looking for (2 bedroom). Guru, the farmboy, is a bit depressed about condos, but I don't actually mind them, especially since colorado built most of them recently with a tendency to put cathedral ceilings in them. Thye like their views here. So we contacted the realtor who was highly recommended and started talking about options, or the lack there of. We expect more of them to come on the market this spring as people realize they can't keep prices high since its now flipped over to being a buyers market.

The downside on all this is I don't think I'm going to make the one big purchase I was hoping for this year: a new bed. I was crunching some numbers and I think I could replace our current bed with a queen-size memory foam mattress on either this or this frame. It would take some time, but I could in theory save for it, which would be an amazing act of restraint on my part. Our bed then would turn into a guest bed and we could actually put people up if we have enough room or, it would go to someone who could use it from acme intl. But, if we are going to need every dime to swing a down payment this year, I think I might just have to stick with our current setup.

Well off to make a sandwich in my fresh-smelling kitchen.