Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for September 07, 2023

I haven’t opened my emergency first aid kit in years, Arlo, but I still need what’s inside.

Kind of cute the way Arlo thinks he’s in charge.

But that box is where you put valuable antiques for checking out later.

Tempting, but always look in the box.

Im suspicious. It seems he doesn’t want her to see what’s in some of these boxes.

Maybe from time to time you did need what’s inside the box, but you couldn’t remember where you put it.

Didn’t Arlo retired?

If they end up throwing away Gene’s baby clothes or early art projects, they’ll never get over it.

Efficiency is ruthless or it’s not efficient.

Keeping things is a luxury for the strong. You have to have money, space and backbone. That stuff you can still get on eBay wasn’t saved by the faint of heart.

Both of our parents passed on within a year or two. Fortunately, I had just added an outbuilding. I rented a giant “y’all haul” and consolidated everything, Then…..we bought a bigger house.

Ominous . .

“Ruthless efficiency” didn’t work too well for Monty Python’s Spanish Inquisition. (somebody has to comment with the follow up)

I was always a proponent of the significant pile method of filing. If you haven’t touched a pile on your desk in 6 months then throw it out, because nobody cares.

Maybe it’s the box with the home made VCR movies in it. You better check it out Arlo!

Helped a friend move; he put a bunch of boxes in the garage, wrote dates on them. Why? “If I haven’t opened them in five years I’ll get rid of them!” I asked him five years later what happened to the boxes. “I opened them, looked at what was inside, closed them and wrote a new date.”

Really? I don’t recall the last time I’ve seen that phrase. Someday, I’ll need to follow Arlo’s advice, but I guess as long as I still have the space and don’t need it…

uh oh…one of those boxes has old comics worth 10s of thousands $$$$

I predict that he will regret no opening the box(es). Stay safe and well my friends.

One man’s junk is another man’s treasure. Put everything in the yard sale, give it a chance to find a new home.

If you haven’t looked at what’s in the box in years, don’t start now because you’ll decide you really “need” to keep it. Arlo is on the right track. To the curb…

Why isn’t the box labled?

I still have my daughter’s rocking horse. She wanted me to keep it for her til she had her own children. She doesn’t, and says she never will. Now what?

A big box buried in my parent’s garage turned out to contain 12 smaller boxes of family photos, some a century old.

Taken to its logical conclusion, we would all be living in giant warehouses with mountains of our ancestors posessions.

Ruthless efficiency should have started years ago…….

So, who’s Ruth? And, why are things more efficient when she’s not there?

Good attitude but there could be later regrets…..

My friend’s rule was if a box was still unopened from a previous move when he was doing it again, it got tossed. Or 25 years, whichever came first.

Don’t chuck the box marked d b cooper

Ruthless efficiency is usually associated with layoffs. In 1995 the plant where I worked reduced staff from 1100 to 497 in a day based on some idiot who claimed that the number of workers should be determined by the number of megawatts a plant produced. The fact that a “smaller” plant has the same number of components to maintain (just scaled down) didn’t factor into it. It took a few years before the reduced maintenance started causing issues but management refused to believe it until a catastrophic failure occurred that cost millions.

You have to look in each box because you just don’t know..

My question is why isn’t Janis up in the attic sorting things out?

Too bad those sealed boxes contained all grandma’s accumulated silver place settings and candlesticks now worth 10’s of thousands in silver value.

Momentos from my childhood that my Mom saved; my Mom’s artwork from when she was in high school; all these things have great importance to me. But when I’m gone, their importance falls off a cliff. Slightly interesting to my kids, perhaps, but after them: value = zero. Unless your ancestor is Herman Melville and those are all his letters, give that box the heave-ho.

I don’t know anyone named Ruth. I guess I’m always Ruthless.

“So that’s where I left all my gold coins. Maybe we should go through the boxes first.”

How long before they peek at the box and Arlo changes his mind?

Neither will I. Oh, the horror.

I did that once when clearing out for divorce. Regretted it a few years later when i figured out what was in those two boxes. The worst was that one of my daughter’s gifts from her grandpa was gone forever. Bad show.

When cleaning out my parents’ home and getting it ready to sell, I opened up hundreds of boxes that they had in their basement. Some of the boxes hadn’t been opened in 20 or 30 years. Inside the boxes? All kinds of stuff from the 1940’s and 50’s. I sold it to an antique store and made thousand dollars.

The big question: Are they truly preparing to move, or are they preparing for the inevitable and trying to reduce what Gene will have to endure?

As a real estate lawyer, I once represented a couple in a house purchase who moved every two years due to work relocation. They had a rule that if a box was still unopened since the last move, they threw it out without even looking inside.

Once again, Arlo is trying to prevent Ruth from influencing their decisions.

Never just toss, always look. I found several thousands of dollars worth of US Government bonds in my parents boxes. Took a while, but I was able to have them cashed out to their estate.

Which box has Janis’s fabled yellow bikini?

Uh, word of advice. Check them to be on the safe side. I’m having a habit of leaving money in envelopes then leaving the envelopes alone for months end, soon forgetting what I put in them.