thoughts on how humor is keeping me out of trouble

part of the reason this blog has been neglected of late is that we're busy emptying out my parents house

they have lived in this house for almost 60 years

my dad is now in assisted living, my mother is living with my sister, and the bank wants it's money for the reverse mortgage they took out a few years ago so they could stay in their house and never move

ha!  this fell into the category of making God laugh by telling Him your plans

so, a week ago my sister and I met with movers and a real estate agent to figure out what we were looking out for making this happen --- basically we have until the end of April to have the house on the market, and it's worth doing to get them what they should clear

but I seriously was DONE doing this whole move thing a year ago when I masterminded getting my own household moved from one end of the state to the other

so why is it I'm needing humor to survive this?

and at the risk of sounding over dramatic, this post probably should have started "I'm Bev and my mother is a hoarder"

this is a picture I took in the basement after my daughter and I had spent an hour and a half bundling up trash in one stack (6 bags full) and "donate-ables" in another -- this picture was important because at this point we could actually see the floor 

and at this point my daughter will never be allowed in the house again because she had such a severe allergy attack that it required steroid eye drops to control

when the movers and the real estate agent were with us we told them there were not just dust bunnies, but there were free roaming herds of dust bison

this is a picture of the scat evidence  

see -- a little humor here!

this pile of 64 boxes are all books (and this isn't all of them)

these were originally stacked in one place in the basement, but my sister and I moved them all on Thursday so that I can have an appliance recycling company come and remove a freezer and 2 refrigerators from the space behind where they were

the big, 30 yard dumpster arrived this week

it's a good thing

I think it would have taken us at least another year to empty stuff if all we could do was fill up the trash cans available at their house plus the loads I've carried home to my house and my daughter's

this is our reward for half an hour's work with the dumpster in place

this is a storage shed next to the garage that we totally cleared out

we counted it as room #1 in the cleaning process

we have 8 more to go

I hope we survive it