A term I heard at a meeting this morning. It perfectly describes our cleaning up, and sometimes out, situation.
I’m trying to slow down, but not stop, take smaller bites when I should ask for input. My first area of stuff planned to go through is old cassette tapes and some homemade CDs. It’s only 4 medium boxes, and I know some will be easy to say it can leave the house.
One fun bit from today was taking the 2025 Filthy Lucre Funds to the winner. We allow each person in a household to enter a guess, and their house had 4 guesses. She described the different methods behind the guesses.
- Used AI with the 2 pictures of the money provided as input. $81.00
- Trying to estimate a value per inch based on what they could see, and then expanding to the whole jar. $48.15
- 6-7 twice from a teenager. $67.67
- Used the 2024 actual total. $75.69
As it turned out 2024 = $75.69 and 2025 = $75.40 were very close, but this is not the norm, so it might not work in 2026.
On the outdoor front, a mix of hard rain and partly sunny. So we went out for a medium walk. There are several lawns, including our parking strip, that are being torn apart by crows.
According to the article in the Seattle Times today, they are eating European Chafer grubs, who would kill the lawn themselves if left alone.
I’m not sure what we’re going to do. Maybe find a ground cover that will fare better.
Raincharm's Weblog 
January 4, 2026 at 3:03 pm |
I have decision fatigue on so many fronts! I’ve seen lawns torn up in my neighborhood too; how do the crows decide which ones to attack? Some of my neighbors say that it’s voles. I’m not sure we even have them!
January 4, 2026 at 4:59 pm |
We managed to get through the cassette tapes today. Except I still need to see if a local used record store will take the cassettes that were not taped by us.
I found a greencycle outfit who will part out and recycle the other tapes, and CDs too. They charge by weight.