fancy at a party

 
Oof. What a long, funny day. All dining room boxes have now been moved into the blue room, but to do so involved some tag-team sister action on the "mom boxes." Which is to say we spent the better part of the afternoon looking through elementary school papers.

First, The Sister was inspired to start work on her own box-room-project, to make room for her dining room boxes of crap.

say hello to the internet, Amy

Snippet of conversation you would have overheard, had you been lurking outside our house today:

Amy: The green one is mine; he's the one with the penis.
Jen: The blue one is mine? He's the one with the butthole?
Amy: Yes.

(In response to a query on which Doodle Dinosaur belongs to whom. Don't trust a roomful of dudes alone with your Doodle Dinosaur or you risk an NC-17 rating.)

With two bouncy girls and one tiny chihuahua (rolling his tiny chihuahua balls at us as we passed) roaming the halls with full hands and decreased vision, it's amazing no one was seriously injured. Some things were broken, yes, but no one bled. Our dining room box adventure yielded:

• One early-80's Cookie Monster costume (the plastic dress / plastic mask combo kind).

• One newspaper dated January 26, 1987: no indication why we saved it.

• One giant plastic trunk that holds every sappy, sentimental, boy-related object I've ever owned (1976 - 2000), to be opened and reviewed at a later date.

• Four folding chairs and one folding step-stool.

• A bunch of crap that wasn't mine. Woo!

• Three garbage bags of Tupperware, now semi-neatly packed into two boxes, waiting to be washed and stored. Note to self: remedies for "sticky tupperware" include baking soda paste, bleach water, and oven cleaner.

• Two boxes of books, mostly of the elf / magic / fantasy variety. It was a phase, ok? But if you've been searching for the collected works of Terry Brooks, I can make you a sweet deal...

• A box of video tapes, to be consolidated with the other VHS relics at a later date.

• A pile of mom's writing, letters, cards, and etc. We'll present her with it on Wednesday when we see her. I plan to let her know that she can't start dumping her crap on us until after she's dead. She gets to decide what's worth keeping, though Amy and I are considering stealing and framing the Valentine's Day card she signed "ho(r)ney."

• And, of course, the aforementioned boxes of elementary school papers, some of which prove that Amy has been a compulsive liar since preschool (we've never gone fishing and she'd never seen snow before 1991). She won't let me scan the incriminating documents, but here are some things of mine I found and enjoyed:

amazingly cool valentine from "Joshua"
featuring the Green Arrow and the Black Canary

the saddest book report ever



no caption can explain this



cigarette ash was the official story.
remember when you could smoke in your kid's classroom?
yeah, me neither.



it's a personal letter from Clifford the Big Red Dog;
aren't you jealous?



a duck hatched in my hand
(it was probably the greatest day of my life)



the scratch-and-sniff sticker still smells like
black licorice 27 years later



I always knew I was cool; here's proof



mating season? wtf?



some things never change
(well, no one calls me Jenna anymore)

I especially enjoyed rifling through all the purple mimeographed pages. Sometimes I tell people that I went to high school before the internet existed, or that I remember life before ranch dressing. But the fact that Xerox technology wasn't yet in effect in my elementary school? Cheers to you, Mrs. Robinson.

However, I wish I had been the middle or youngest child so I would have had less crap to sort and throw away.

And though I feared spiders would assault us at every poke and prod, the only arachnids we encountered today were in the kitchen. And at least two of them were the same spider, crawling back up the drain with his superspider powers just to piss us off.