Tag Storage

Aw, Quit Your Wining

Michael 8 Comments

You can pretty much always find a bottle of white wine and one of Prosecco in my refrigerator. Which is really a shame when you think about it because not only should they not be committed to the same temperature, neither temperature that either should be chilled to is what a kitchen refrigerator is kept at. I used to have that handled by way of a stand-alone wine refrigerator that could handle different temperatures in different zones for different wines. Two refrigerators in fact. But those days are over.

Some of you let that pass right on by. Some noticed but didn’t notice. Some are just now wondering in almost 700 posts I’ve never given any indication of being a garden variety sot. Why so much wine? It actually isn’t a mystery of so much wine as so many refrigerators. Let me explain. If I can.

Many years ago I saw this really nice counter top wine refrigerator for some ridiculously cheap price in a remainder store. (Tuesday Morning actually if you have one of them near you. You can check them out or not. I get nothing for mentioning them. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure why I mentioned them. Anyway…) I looked it over and decided it would sit nicely on the bar in the family room of my old house.

This was all going on during my wine phase. I would go to the local winery every other week and always would bring something back. There were trips to the Erie and Niagara wine trails. I would explore the neighborhood wine shop for an interesting find. (By the way, one of my favorite methods for selecting new wines was the look of the label. I said I was in a wine phase, not that I had become a wine expert.) (Wait. What was I saying? Oh, right. Labels. It was by that very method that I discovered Plungerhead Lodi, a respectable old vine zinfandel.) (I don’t get anything from them either.) (Don’t worry, that didn’t go into the refrigerator. I’m not that much of a Neanderthal!)

Since I was also in a phase where I had to go overboard with everything, I had to have a separate refrigerator for wine. It couldn’t go in the beer refrigerator. The optimal temperatures for beer and wine are nothing alike. And I was in a wine phase. I needed that wine chiller. And by all that was alcoholic, I got that wine chiller. So shortly after I spotted it, the countertop wine cooler was in the back of the car and we were heading home.

Now that worked well for a time then I noticed a problem. The bar and its counter, upon which sat the countertop refrigerator, were in the family room in the lower level of the house. A reasonable place to watch hockey and drink beer. But not wine. Wine was had with dinner, after dinner, in the evening on the patio, and occasionally in the hot tub, all upper level activities.  I decided that if I drank wine upstairs I had to store it upstairs. Suddenly the cute little wine refrigerator sitting so neatly on the corner of the bar was inconvenient. I had to correct that. And since I was making more money than sense, I couldn’t just move the one I had.

WineCoolerSo it was back on the hunt. In fact, it was back to Tuesday Morning (who still isn’t giving me anything for mentioning them, the nerve!), where I found an upright wine refrigerator with two zones, each one’s temperature individually controlled so you could keep different wines at their own optimal temps. (I was getting better in this wine phase thingy.) Of course I had to have it, so it came home with me and went into the sun room on the upper level where after dinner drinking and near where during dinner drinking and on patio drinking and drunken hot tubing drinking happened. Yet all the while the cute little counter top wine cooler continued to cool wine on top of the counter on the bar just in case I had the urge to raise a Riesling while watching hockey on the big screen. And all was right with the world. For several years actually.

But then I moved and the new place doesn’t have an upstairs or a downstairs or a dining room or even a hot tub. I really wanted somebody in the family to take custody of one or the other of the wine refrigerators but my sisters already had their version and my daughter didn’t have room.  So both refrigerators were sold and less was right with the world for now I have to keep my Prosecco chilling next to the orange juice.

But that really isn’t such a bad thing since most Sunday mornings they get together anyway. Well, I still have a patio.

Oh Balls!

Michael 7 Comments

I was watching the Father of the Bride last night. The original with Spencer Tracy and Elizabeth Taylor as father and bride. If you haven’t seen it or the 1991 remake with Steve Martin and Kimberly Williams-Paisley reprising those roles, the premise is that fathers go a little wacky when their daughters and wives plan that most father-unfriendly affair, a wedding.

I bring up that it was the 1950 production I saw because a scene in it made me sit up and say, “Now that’s blog-worthy!” If by the time you’ve finished reading this you don’t agree with me, well, that’s ok, not all of what I think is blog-worthy is blog-worthy but then, isn’t that the fun of it?

Anyway, there is a scene when Spencer Tracey in his attempt to either maintain a little control or save a few dollars decides he will wear his own formal attire, presumably from his wedding 20 some years earlier, rather than buy or rent a new tuxedo. It wasn’t that even formal styles a couple of decades apart are going to be different or that almost everybody’s body a couple of decades apart is going to be different that particularly tickled my questioning brain. Those aren’t blog worthy. Sort of ticklish and predictably funny yes, but blog worthy? It was when he pulled his cutaway from its storage box and a cascade of moth balls poured out across the floor that I sat up and said to myself, “Whatever happened to moth balls!?”

MothballsWe know moth balls still exist. You can find them in Amazon so they are still real. And we still say when something isn’t used anymore that it is mothballed. Is that because we used to use mothballs when we stored things we aren’t using anymore? Or is it because we don’t use moth balls anymore? Or do we? Just because I don’t have a closet hanger filled with moth balls doesn’t mean all my neighbors don’t.

So I did a little search. That’s when I discovered that Amazon carries moth balls. I also found out that hanging them in closets, tossing them in dresser drawers, and adding one or two or twenty to your vacuum cleaner bag (all things I remember my mother doing about the time Spencer was trying on a 29 year old formal jacket) aren’t top search results for “moth balls.” Instead I found recommendations for keeping houseplants pest free, attics bat free, and backyard sheds mouse free.

I don’t have an attic or a backyard shed and my houseplants are already critter free. On a more traditional note I’ve had real wool sweaters in my closet for more years than I probably should have and still they are not moth eaten and I’m not sure what moth balls do, or did for a vacuum cleaner and see no reason to discover what now. So I don’t think I’m going to jump on a moth ball bandwagon and order a pack or case. Sorry Amazon. But if you have a can’t miss use for those little white waxy spheres, please let me know. Maybe I’ll change my mind.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a twenty year old tux in that closet I’d like to try on. Just in case.

 

And to Aunt Shirley I Leave My Blog

Michael Leave a comment

The Uniform Law Commission made a monumental decision this week.  It released information to the general public letting everyone know it exists and what it does.  No, we’re just kidding!  That’s not it.  We still have no idea who belongs to this group and what they actually do.  But very recently we read that the Uniform Law Commission (ULC to its closest friends) has published legal guidelines for what to do with all of your electronic accounts once you are no longer you.  All that has to happen now for this to become law and close a gap that has been widening like a pothole on the information highway is for every state legislature to adopt it as law.

Apparently people have actually sued on-line providers for access to accounts held by deceased relatives.  On-line files at e-mail, file storage, and social media sites are being compared to records kept in vaults, safes, and shoeboxes from another era.  Banking, insurance, and ownership records are just some of the items kept in today’s on-line shoeboxes.  These are things that would be of much interest to the executor of an estate and importance to the estate.

The way the proposed law addresses the release of information is that a designated person, presumably the executor, would be able to access the files but not act on the files.  He or she could read the posts on a social media site but could not post to the site, could read the files at a cloud storage site but could not copy the files from that site, could read e-mails but not send e-mails from that account.  Does that help?  We’re not sure.  It seems that still leaves a lot of room for someone to commit identity theft.  That room might be made smaller if the law gave the designee the power of action.  We may not want someone to read every e-mail we’ve ever saved over years (nor may they want to) but we certainly want someone to purge our banking information before the bad guys get to it and clean out our accounts.

In the spirit of excess, people are already reading more than the practical applications into the proposed rules.  In reporting on the ULC’s actions, the Associated Press said “Imagine the trove of digital files…and what those files might fetch on an auction block.”  Now the AP was specifically referring to Bill Clinton and Bob Dylan and their electronic writings which would fetch an attractive sum at auction.  They might fetch even more than The Real Reality Show Blog posts will.  (Don’t you just love the use of “fetch” regarding high prices returned of sold items?  Come on fella, go fetch those millions of dollars!  But we digress.)

Do we need a law to make this happen?  Not really.  Just like you can put into your will who gets access to your safe deposit box, you can put into your will who gets access to your electronic storage areas.  It might sound funny today but in a few years it could be routine to read at the opening of a will, “And I release all my Instagram pictures to my friend John Doe,” or more likely, “And I allow full access to and disposition of accounts held at the First National Bank on-line banking service by the Executor by way of the user name and password found in the addendum to this will.”

Of course, Aunt Shirley will get control of all the posts to this blog and whatever they fetch at auction or the garage sale, whichever is greater.

Now that’s what we think. Really. How ‘bout you.

 

Self Storage Wars

Michael Leave a comment

As spring progresses we’ve been finding ourselves in our garages and basements digging out the rakes,  shovels, hoses, and other outdoor implements that have worked their ways behind last winter’s accumulations of “stuff.”   Every season some items move closer to the doors, less used items are packed closer to the walls.  The things that haven’t been used in a couple of years are grouped by the spring three-way sort of “trash, donate, sell.”   At least in our houses.  Maybe not in the 10.8 million households that rent storage units.

There is a pretty big chunk of people who are renting a pretty big chunk of real estate for a pretty big chunk of money to hold a pretty big chunk of junk.  According to the trade group the Self Storage Association, over 50,000 storage facilities house over 2.2 billion square feet of storage space.  The average unit goes for about $120 per month and holds…we’re not sure.

It’s not like we are running out of space at home.  In the last forty years, new home construction in the US went from an average of about 1,400 square feet to about 2,400 square feet.  In those same forty years self-storage units went from almost none (the first units starting cropping up in the late 1960’s), to enough to fill up Manhattan three times over.  Again, what’s in those spaces?

Does anybody hand anything down any more?  We all grew up on our older siblings’ cribs and high chairs, their tricycles and bikes.  When families ran out of younger children those items got passed on to cousins, neighbors, and co-workers.  What we couldn’t sell ourselves at garage sales we brought to church for rummage sales.  Without the stuff we don’t use anymore, thrift stores would be out of business.  But people do hand things down and there are still rummage sales, and thrift stores are booming.  So what is in all those storage units? 

Maybe what gets handed down the “handed to” group doesn’t want to use but are too embarrassed to tell the “handed from” group.  Maybe they keep the extra dining room set in their storage unit and tell Mom that as soon as they paint the dining room those old table and chairs will look great in there.  Maybe people are getting married so late in life they already have everything they need.  But it’s a wedding.  They still have to register somewhere and get newer stuff.  Then when the gifts are opened they can’t discard the old toaster because it’s been so good to one (or both) of them for so long it gets a special place in mini-storage. 

Or maybe it’s just junk in those garage-looking units and once it is there for a couple years the owners stop paying rent and someone can bid $5 on Door Number 3.  Then they can figure out what to do with an Atari 64 game system.

We don’t know what’s behind Door Number 113,433 but whatever it is it better be pretty important.  The average American family is spending about $1500 a year to store it.  That’s about $500 more than the average American family gives to charity.  We’re not sure if there’s a connection there but we thought we’d mention it.   

Now, that’s what we think.  Really.  How ‘bout you?