Tonight Mr. Troutbend and I worked on cleaning out the closet in the den here and storing some of stuff in there better. He was reluctant, but eventually got shanghaied into helping.

There are boxes of stuff that we threw together in 2005 when we moved here and never opened until now, just junk, really. There are several what we call Gary’s Crap Box that is little junk from his desk at work or his desk at home there in our Denver house. He needs to go through them and put like with like and get rid of most of it.

There is a stack of boxed up commerative plates, the raptor series that he bought many years ago, I think to give to his mom after he got done giving her the owl series. We still have the raptors. I thought those boxes were empty and he was saving them for when his mom wanted to pack up the owls, but no, there’s plates in there. I said what do you want to do with these, and he said all perky, Maybe we should take them to Colorado and display them. I scoffed because that’s about the last thing I want to do, but I realized I should give his stuff more respect. Maybe he will build a plate rack for one of the rental cabins that would hold them. I’m sure nobody will steal them.

There are lots of gifts from casinos, cheap stuff made in China; manicure sets, "high quality" binoculars (it says that on the box), gym bags, pens, more cheap stuff that runs on batteries, and a pretty nice travel shoe shine kit. There are three large shoe boxes packed full of mardi gras beads and other small casino trinkets. Maybe there are some classics in there. The manicure sets might be nice to put with some hotel shampoos and donate to the homeless shelter.

One box had a whole bunch of incense in it, from his 1970s hippie days, so he took that upstairs and lit a stick. I can smell it clear down here.

There is a Marantz CD4-Disc Demodulator from the 1970s that has nothing to do with today's compact discs, it is for use with stereo records that play with 4 tracks of sound instead of two and required 4 speakers placed in the four corners of the room, like today's surround sound, but quadraphonic didn't succeed. Some of the quad records that were issued have been remastered with Dolby sound. Mr. Troutbend probably has some of the old records that require this piece of equipment, and so I suppose it would be nice if we hung onto the equipment that plays them correctly. I just now Googled it, and came up with a bunch of hits, one of the most revealing written by Quad Bob, Coordinator, Quadraphonic Preservation Society (QpS). And Quad Bob has the same piece of Marantz equipment that we do, so there we are, but he'd found a better one, a Sansui. Ours is still in the original box so maybe that will make it worth more.

Our garage is half full of boxes that we got out of storage last year. I got tired of paying $60 a month for a storage unit for his science fiction paperbacks and Beanie Babies collections. There were a lot of boxes that paper came in so now those are arranged on high plant shelves in the master bedroom. Not very aesthetic, but saving that much money makes up for it. I am working on inventorying all these boxes so if by some miracle we ever wanted to find the Disney World Norwegian Goofy plush toy, we might be able to locate it. It's a revelation to go through it all and in the process a little organizing gets done.

I told him that when we die there is going to be such an auction and people will stand around and wonder what in the heck we were thinking, acquiring all this stuff. But at least it'll be organized.