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Monday, November 7, 2005

With the major outdoor areas cleared, we began tackling the master bedroom. Unfortunately, my father's adjustable bed mattress had some mold on it. But the mattress covers on my mother's mattress saved it from a similar fate. Both her closet and my father's closet has mold, but, in my father's case, stuff had been growing on his clothes since the '70s.

Much to my delight, contractors for the long-rumored FEMA pickup arrived and began hauling off the huge pile of garbage that had accumulated on the curb. Also to my surprise, most of it compressed very nicely and fit in a single trailer. The only things they refused to haul off were old tires and toxic chemicals.

They could not come more than 10' into a yard and because the piles extended somewhat further than that, our next-door neighbor volunteered to bring his tractor and box blade over to scrape the remains over for a later load.

After the folks left for the evening, I began tackling a pile of old equipment in my former bedroom. At some point in the '80s, my father acquired an old computer table from the early '70s. Remember that computers at that time were massive beasts that took up entire rooms. This table could have held an elephant and weighed almost as much as one. In high school I had collected vacuum tube electronic equipment and made some feeble attempts at becoming an amateur radio operator (KA5AKX) - complicated by my use of dilapidated vacuum equipment at a time when it had just been outmoded by transistor equipment. Sometime in the '90s, I began piling that old, useless equipment on top of dad's computer table with the intention of hauling it all off someday. That day was November 7, 2005.

Next: Tuesday, November 8, 2005