FIT, SLIM AND CALM

Needless to say, the ride to ballet class didn't work out. Oh and of today one more kid gets to tag along for rides. As he has to be dropped of 15 min before ballet class starts it's no big deal to have to go to ballet by myself.

I wish life could just be normal for one day. Puking kids for 6 days gets kind of old. I am fit, slim and calm. I had to adapt my mantra. Telling myself I am full of energy is simply too much.

Well. I will quit my rant and make you groan with one more shredder detail. The shredded stuff. No.It doesn't got into the trash. Or recycling for that matter. My parents have decided that it is the perfect stuff to start the fire. They put it into little paper bags, the ones you get at the bakery. So the shredded paper is put into carefully kept little paper bags and then lit under small pieces of wood. I have shredded about 1/10 of the bank accounts and ended up with medium size trash bag (squished in tightly) full of shreds. Well. As my friend Nicole put it: "Better hope for a long, cold winter." This might just be the reason my Mom hasn't shredded the stuff yet. In it's original form it takes a lot less space to store!

SHREDDER TROUBLE

If you think shredding stuff was clear sailing once my Mom's unvoiced concerns were ignored, you are mistaken. There is more than just one soul in this family that has trouble throwing things away. My Dad's issue is keeping record. He once explained to me that it obviously is a thing that affects men more than women and gets worse the older you become. He has kept a journal most of his live. 2 lines every day was sufficient for him. The stuff he records? The weather, his weight, what he ate. The last category was added more recently.

Now here is an example to show you how far he takes his record keeping. He has a plum tree in the garden that he loves dearly. When he added a garage to the house the tree was in the way. Someone else might have just cut it down, but my Dad dug it up, had it pulled down by a farmer friend with his tractor, and had about 10 men over that helped him carry the tree to the front of the property where he had dug a hole for it. It wasn't a small tree. It was at least 12-15 feet high. Yes, he cut back a lot to transfer it. The tree still is in it's "new spot". I vividly remeber that day altough I was only 5 years old. But I disgress. My Dad loves that tree. It usually bears a lot of fruit every second year. For reasons only known to my Dad he wants to know how many plums he eats off the tree every year. So he has a bucket into which he throws the stones after he has eaten a plum. Rumors about a raging fit when my Mom tossed the content of the bucket before he was able to count it one year are most likely true.

So here I am happily shredding away when the following conversation took place.

Dad:"What kind of documents are you shredding?"

Me:"Bank statments."

Dad:"Whose?"

Me:"Yours."

Dad has a concerned look on his face.

Me:"They are old.Very old."

Dad's look gets a little more concerned.

Me, acting innocent:"Is there a problem?"

Dad getting a little fidgety:"You need to keep some, don't throw them all away."

I happily handed some over while I kept shredding like mad. I handed over even more to give the appearance that I was not determined to destroy them all. I made sure to get him one that I thought would be interesting. All of a sudden I realized that it wasn't his bank statement but my Mom's. So I did hand over some other financial statement with his name on it, just to keep him happy. Once he secured stuff for the records to  be placed in a museum one day he was just fine and ignored my shredding. Problem solved. I'm an expert. Can you tell?

Oh, and by the way. Today's shredded statements where from nineteenseventyone. YUP.1971.

HAPPILY SHREDDING AWAY

Last night I was sitting in my Mom's office with her. My brother was there, too. My Mom was all excited how much better her room looked, but had to admit, that only my brother might see the difference. I was mean enough to say, the only difference I see is that the stuff on her second desk is stacked twice as high as the last time I was there a couple of months ago. Of course she got all defensive about it and then showed me a box that was sitting next to the shredder. She said:"Look. I threw away all of this. I just have to shred it still." What is it and why haven't you shredded it yet," I wondered. "Bank statements," was the answer and she kind of made it obvious that she changed her mind and might just keep them. I asked her how old they were. "Older then 7 years."

UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE MONTH! I offered for the kids to help shred it. She didn't look all that convinced but I kind of made her feel she would be doing the kids a favor. I brought it up over dinner again and even though she still didn't seem to excited about it she didn't say no. So I happily ran off to shred the stuff with the kids. The oldest bank statement I came across was from 1972. Yup. Nineteenseventytwo. As in 42 years ago. It was way too much to shred it all at once. The shredder my Mom has is for home offices and not made for heavy duty.

Cruel me knows how hoarders tick. So I decided too make sure that if she changes her mind to make it as hard as possible to keep the stuff. I took all the statements out of the paper folders and shredded those first. This way they cannot be reused for anything plus if you want to keep the stuff now you have to find something to file them in first. Evil. I know. I restacked them neatly into the box, but in random order. I know I know. Downright vicious. Our output was a trashbag (medium size) full of shreds. I am quite happy with myself. Too bad I didn't know about this sooner. I could be done by now!