*become citizens. Not “be once”.

Is your stomach thinking that they’re going to figure out a way to invite a bunch of people to a “naturalization ceremony” for folks about to be once citizens, only to entrap them and throw them into a detention center? Because that’s what I’m thinking is going to happen.

Way too early for Whamageddon.

Right about now is when I wish I had that thing where you can’t form images in your head. My cousin has that. I am jealous. 🥴

Our guy said we also didn’t have to remove staples or paper clips. Which was nice because a lot of the really old stuff suffered from my mom’s organizing by stapling, and then paper clipping by year. The newer stuff was mountains of unopened crap that dad didn’t shred so it built up.

Your time has a price. We made it through 2 grocery bags of crap before we stopped. The noise, the jamming (even with a decent home shredder) etc. it took half the afternoon to just get the two bags done.

Big commercial shredders: you don’t have to open all the unopened junk mail & lie it flat.

And some shredding services will provide a locked rolling bin like a trash/recycling bin that you can keep for a few weeks till pickup. So you can just keep dumping into that till you’re done with the sort.

I’m now down two 2 smaller boxes of crap that was fucking hidden in what I thought was boxes of photo albums. And 1 tiny bin of shit that we kept (because we still have an estate account with about 15 bucks in it in case we ever succeed in getting the couple thousand in “unclaimed funds” dispersed.)

We still had a few more bins after that just hidden in my garage so then I went through all our own stuff, the rest of my parent’s stuff, and did it again a year later. It was so freeing.
It would’ve been cheaper for me to take it there, or have them just pickup and take to their facility.

My sister and I inherited over 40 years of that shit. The worst was the 15+ years of bills etc in bags/ shoeboxes. We spent a couple days being ruthless and then I called a local co to bring their shredder truck and dumped over a dozen legal boxes of crap to be shredded. Best $125 ever spent.

from the “been there done that” files:

Highly recommend doing the sort first. Into boxes/bins, whatever. Stuff that has to be saved- organize according to your needs.

But save the rest in a bin and search for shredding services. It’s worth the $ if you can swing it.

OMG that color is perfection!!!

My own personal WMD…

Beautiful 😍

I don’t want to enable you (yes I do 🤣) but there are soooooo many varieties. I have so many seeds. I didn’t end up planting any this year but next year I’m hoping to have the pollinator bed done. There will be a dedicated cosmos section.

Good gawd I love those flowers so much.

Sounds perfect.