We ordered mom a mattress today. The expense of these things still floor me, but as long as it’s better than what she has, maybe she’ll walk upright shortly after sleeping in it again. I know her back is killing her.
No go on the nightstand attempt, so she is still using an old craft wooden craft I have. I’m tempted to just sand and stain the thin if it’s going to be in there for awhile.
I had missed this thread somehow and my apologies for that. I sent a little along the way, @DoomMunky.
@Nesrie I’m so sorry to hear that about your mom’s home and I hope you are both doing as well as you can right now. My well wishes to your family, this has got to be a very difficult situation. Please hang in there.
We’re doing better, thank you. She had her freak out a come of weeks ago. I had mine on Friday.
This weekend we’re just establishing new norms and just bith hoping and praying our hit days are ending and some lasting but mild rain comes.
The fire folks I follow now are saying the oregon fires are locking good. CA not so much, including our northern neighbors.
Got it, and forwarded it along!
So Samaritan Purse went out with mom to the site today and did the sifting through the rubble/ashes thing to see if they could recover anything. I have mixed feelings about that group because she came back with a new bible (an odd one I hadn’t heard of) and this huge desire to donate a ton of money to them but… she’ s adult, only so much I can do.
Anyway, if you are curious about whether or not china can burn… it actually can. Most of this stuff was broken when the shed collapsed and the metal and plastic shelves fell apart. They did recover some things though:
The black isn’t ash, it’s super thing and we’re not really sure how to clean it. There was some jewelry and we can take those to a local place and clean it up.
The hard part are those amoeba looking things is school work, actually my sisters. I don’t’ recognize anything I made although I plan to do some digging to see if I have any more of the childhood things because of the three daughters, I’m the only one that’s had a stable house and didn’t live thousands of miles away so some things have been sort of dumped in my garage.
This was really hard for mom when she realized that some of things not on the list are things like this… hand prints from like 30 years ago, weirdo ceramics done at school… written work she saved.
My mom didn’t have parents who either cared or were even alive to keep stuff like this of hers. So I’ve assured her it’s okay. The memories are still there even if we lost these things. Also she has grandchildren and their garbage artwork can be shared, something we girls didn’t have as kids because like her parents weren’t’ around, we didn’t have grandparents either to share any of this with.
I was kind of annoyed when my parents started hauling stuff into my garages of things that weren’t mine because no one else had room but it’s now the only things likely left from the bulk of our childhood. Old books, stuffed animals, and yeah I’ve got paper bags of artwork around here somewhere.
I didn’t throw them away, but I certainly didn’t appreciate that we had them, until now.
My parents quietly dumped a bunch of this stuff out of their own enormous basement a few years ago, and I was pretty crushed about it. There’s still a big bag of the “core” stuffed animals, and a bookshelf’s worth of the old books, but afaik, a TON of the rest of it got donated. Or just recycled, with respect to my old PC gaming magazine collection, hah. In fairness, that stuff was probably molding pretty badly; the basement is crazy damp due to some malfunction in the ancient AC system we had for years.
In any case, I am glad that y’all have some of it preserved in your own basement, now especially.
I was told a few years ago that most of the donation sites won’t take the 80s, 90s toys due to lead concerns. I don’t know about the stuff animals. And the last toy drive I was part of wouldn’t take used toys… period. Because of COVID, this might be the first year I don’t have a stockpile of new toys to donate, but I still have some time to do it.
Mom’s still in that I didn’t appreciate what I had, so I deserve this mode, and on top of that, she doesn’t believe she should get any help because she is one of the ones that actually had insurance.
Out of the 2500 structures we lost, about 1500 of those were mobile homes from 4-5 mobile parks that are completely decimated. We have no place for these people to live. More than a few are literally living in tents in parks, in cars and if they’re lucky friends and family homes. Others with insurance have had to leave the area to find something to rent because we were at affordable capacity before this fire hit…
But mom is still grieving, hell so am I. And I am pretty sure the bulk of those ceramics are lil sisters because she had a teacher that was really into that and had a oven at home. I am just about 10 years older than my little sister. I was not in the home for some of these things. She was a still kind of little when I left home, so I don’t recognize all of those.
Those white Christmas trees, it was a set of three. The largest was destroyed by something falling on it most likely. They belong to my sister in NJ, but she moved it was in a car, no room for things like that. I kind of what to write on the bottom of those survived Almeda fire 2020, so if they ever get into someone else’s hands, they’ll know.
I am not sure. but I think the blue thing is a lid to something that didn’t make it.
Those white trees are hollow with a hole in the bottom, right? My grandmother had a set of 3 just like that. The big one was a LOT bigger than those two, though.
Wow, memories.
