Knormal
Joined: Nov 11,
2001
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Edit:
Pictures down in like 5 minutes
Edit2: Restored, thanks
n0tqu1tesane
My mother is insane. Like, one of those
ladies you see on the local news insane. Since it's inevitably
going to come up I'll get out of the way that I am too, but at
least I take a full dose of my medication. I've been meaning
to make this thread for about the last year, but the longer I
waited the more interesting the situation became. Also, I'm
incredibly lazy. Case in point, these pictures are about three
weeks old. Anyway, lets take a tour of our house.
Here's the
house from the outside. Looks a bit overgrown, but fairly
normal. Come inside, won't you?
Okay, about here's
where things start to look a little off.
Behind the door is
one of many piles of boxes. At the bottom of that pile is a
chair that used to be for sitting down to put on shoes, now
it's just structual support. Note that you can't actually open
the door all the way anymore, it hits that box with the Target
bag on it about 2/3s of the way.
A look into the
living room. There's no way to get over to any of that stuff
on the far wall, so when that light bulb burns out we're
screwed. That wood on top of that birdcage is so my mom
doesn't have to spend money on sticks for the birds. And yes
that first cage is empty. But we'll visit the birds
later.
Have a seat on the couch- Oh, there seems to be a
few things on it, sorry. That Christmas stuff in the forground
is from at least last year.
A look out into the
living room. My mom likes to buy old glass crap, and also
other old crap that's not made of glass, off of eBay. In fact
most of the stuff you can see is from eBay. That chair in
front of the desk and most of the drawers can't be pulled out,
as they are blocked by boxes.
The couch, a.k.a.
one of only three places to sit down outside of my room. The
footstool is always on the couch, since there's no room for it
elsewhere. All those books on the ground are old boring coffee
table books from eBay. You've probably noticed the wall of
boxes in the background. This was built specifically to
prevent people from being able to tell if the kitchen light
was on, enabling my mom to hide out from anyone who might stop
by. No, I don't know what's in any of the boxes.
The
twenty-year old TV and the ten-year old VCR. The picture tube
on the TV is dying, and the image is dark, blurry, and tinted.
That pile of US Mail boxes with the "fragile" box on top can
be pivoted to the left to allow a wider viewing arc. You can
see some of my 3rd-grade artwork on display there above the
TV.
The birds. My mom has five parakeets, and is
looking for a sixth. Only the first two cages have birds in
them. The third was bought about a year ago and was never set
up. Notice that even the inside of the bird cages are
crowded.
A view behind the wall of boxes, at what used to
be the coffee table. You usually can't see back here, I had to
hold the camera at arm's length around the edge. As you can
see, she saves empty birdseed containers.
The other side of
the living room. My mom was big into glass paperweights for a
while, though usually bottles and dishes are here thing. You
see the disruption in the layer of dust on the chair there?
That's where she fell a while ago when trying to climb over
stuff to open the window just off the left of the picture.
There's also at least two broken bottles back there somewhere
that have fallen but there's no way to get back there to clean
them up. I'm assured all this stuff in quite valuable, by the
way.
A full view of that wall. You can see the
dangerous window here. Those plants on top of the bookshelf
died because there was to way to water them. They've been
sitting there decomposing for a few years now.
Under the
tables is full too. In the front are a bunch of old Popular
Sciences she bought off eBay a while ago. The rest of the
floor space is filled with more dishes.
The other
bookshelves. More books, more bottles, and assorted small
toys. Most of these books are outdated old college textbooks
from the 70's.
The hallway to my
mom's bedroom and the bathroom. The two opposing doors are
closets that you can't get to without spending half an hour
moving all those boxes. Behind that chair and flag is the
water heater. Hopefully we'll never need to get to
it.
And here's my mom's bedroom. You were probably
expecting a bed or something. It's there, somewhere underneath
all those boxes. My mom decided storing this stuff is more
important that having a place to sleep. So where does my mom
sleep? Remember that 2/3rds of a couch back in the living
room? Yep, every night. No I don't know what's in any of these
boxes either. Most of them are from eBay and have never been
opened, just put straight on the pile.
The view from the
other door of the bathroom.
A view from the
back of the room, down that little path visible two pictures
up.
My mom's shirt pile. There's no accessable
drawers in the room, so this is where she keeps her clothes.
Now that I think about it, I don't know where she keeps the
rest of her clothes, since that's just shirts. I'm guessing
they're in a box somewhere.
The bathroom. It's
only remarkable in that it's the widest open space outside of
my room. It's the only place you could actually stick your
arms out and spin around. You know, if you wanted
to.
Back out of the hallway, a shot back towards the
front door. That's an old mink hat sticking on the left there,
not a random wild animal.
Into the kitchen.
Underneath the center pile is the dining room table, and
underneath the dining room table is more boxes. A bunch of the
food in here is several years old, and from a dollar store,
but my mom still won't throw it away.
The magnet
collection. At least this is kind of normal, in things to
collect. I probably should have taken a picture of the inside
of the refridgerator, but you can imagine it. It looks just
like the rest of the house, but with food.
The other side of
the pile. That one box is full of cereal, all of it expired
except the Frankenberry. In fact, everything in that front box
is expired too. I don't eat any of this expired stuff by the
way, it's all hers.
The sliding glass
door is right to the left there, about two-thirds blocked by
boxes. The boxes are placed specifically to allow just enough
room to let the curtains open and close. That chair in front
of the computer is the second of three places to
sit.
My mom's computer. From here she buys all this
shit. The tower's the current computer, there's just nowhere
else to put the desktop. That TV's a little black and white
one that cost $20 on clearance at Target. It broke after about
a month, and only the sound works. It's still there though.
Those buttplug looking things on the monitor are old glass
insulators they used to use on telegraph and telephone lines.
I'm assured they also are quite valuable.
Under the table is
just enough room for her feet. I guess she has to move that
boxlid every time she sits down, I don't know.
The calendar
wall. You might have noticed a bunch of calendars all around
the house. Early this year they put a calendar store in the
factory outlets by our house, selling out all the old current
calendars. My mom bought several hundred of them, because they
were cheap. Some went up, a few were given out as gifts, a
bunch are still around in boxes somewhere. No, she won't throw
them away when the year's over. Also notice they're all on
different months.
A sink with a bunch
of crap on it. There's cups full of hotel pens, old postcards,
a bowl full of old fortune cookie papers, and I don't know
what else. I see some corn holders in there. That yellow
bucket on the end has candy from two Easters ago.
Down there's
my mom's "desk". Most of those boxes on the right are filled
with old newspapers and magazines. Fortunatly we don't get any
newspapers or magazines anymore, so that collection's
stagnant.
The third place to sit. That's all old mail on
the left. She also stole my SA mug and filled it with pens.
Not like I drink anything from mugs anyway I guess. On
somewhat of a tangent, we live in Folsom, CA, home of the
famous Folsom Prison. One of the perks of living in a prison
city is we don't have to seperate out recycleables from our
garbage. We just throw everything away, and they drive it up
to the Prison and make the prisoners dig through it. As a
result of this, my mom will never throw anything away with her
name on it, since she's convinced one of the prisoners will
steal her identity. I try to explain to her that not only are
the odds of someone choosing her identity to steal are slim on
their own, if someone is going to try to steal an identity
they're probably not going to pick someone in the lower middle
class. Still, she insists on cutting up everything, down to
the address tags on every piece of mail we get. So most of
those pieces of paper there are old pieces of junk mail she
won't throw away. She originally used to go through and cut it
up every couple of weeks, but now I think we have a few years
built up.
The dishwasher. That jack-o-lantern bucket's a
recent addition, but I don't expect it to be going anywhere
anytime soon. Note the phone has a cord, and the answering
machine uses tapes.
This is the
washer/dryer nook. Whenever she does wash she has to spend
about an hour disassembling this pile and moving it to the
middle of the hallway. She won't let me do my own wash,
because she's convinced I'm going to break this stuff in the
process of setting it five feet to the left.
Photographic
proof of a washer/dryer. I don't know what that thing on the
right is. I think it's a roll-up blanket or
something.
Turning around from the hallway is the bubblewrap
pile. This is all taken from incoming eBay packages. She keeps
it for packing in the event she ever actually gets rid of
anything. She never does. That Scooby-Doo's again from at
least last Christmas. That's a Lego Darth Vader fighting a
Lego Obi-wan Kenobi on the back of Lego dinosaurs in the
middle there. That part's pretty cool. That plastic thing
above the gay plush lizard is an old candy tray mom's keeping
because she thinks it looks pretty.
Okay, before we
head into my room let me explain a few things. I moved back
down here from Seattle a few years ago to go to college. It
was decided I would get the master bedroom, since it had cable
and phone lines. My mom, who only has the one TV and never
talked on the phone in her room anyway, moved into the other
bedroom. You saw what happened there. Right before I moved
down she assured me the bedroom was cleared out. So imagine my
surpise when I get down here only to find there were still
three dressers in the room, still full of her clothes. Not
only that, but there was no room in the garage to put any of
my boxes, so everything I owned had to go into this one room.
She said she'd clear out some room in the garage, but as you
can guess that didn't happen...
So here's my room.
That pile of boxes right in front of the door is some of her
stuff that has been creeping in. That bubble wrap above it is
covering the "displayed" part of my Transformer collection,
since anything that's not covered gets coated with a thick
layer of dust in a few weeks. The bed was hers, but would have
been too much trouble to move. That thing I agreed to have
left in the room.
More of my room.
Most of my boxes are all full of old schoolwork, childhood
toys, and electronics that in a normal house would be in the
garage, but not here. I get to live with them every day. Also
I have a large fuzzy mushroom with a pillow on
top.
This is something you might have seen in some
other parts of the house but it's most visible here. In
addition to closing the curtains, my mom covers the small
windows with cardboard to "keep the heat in/out", depending on
season. I'm not sure how that's supposed to create any
measureable affect on the total temperature, but she got mad
whenever I took them down so now I just live with
them.
The other side of my room, leading to the
bathroom.
The closets are still full of her old clothes,
since I don't need closet space. The thing is they're both
just as full as this all the way down their length, and I'm
pretty sure she doesn't fit in most of these clothes anymore.
A lot of these clothes are from the 70's and 80's.
My bathroom.
The exercise bike showed up while I was gone one summer, then
the vacuum a little later. The bike is useful as a clothes
rack. Time for a bathroom story. One time I ran out of
toothpaste or floss or something, so I opened the medicine
cabinet looking for more. Instead, I found the bathroom
cabinet full of my old prescription bottles. I then realized
I'd never thrown a prescription bottle away, I'd get new ones,
and the old ones had just disappeared. I'd never thought about
it. I confronted my mom, and she told me she was keeping hers
too, and was saving them to cut the labels off so the
prisoners wouldn't know what medications we were on. I told
her that was crazy, and that I was going to throw mine away. A
few days later I went to do that, only to find they were all
gone. Mom took them all, and hid them in a box somewhere so I
couldn't throw them away. They were out of my way, so I didn't
pursue it any further. I make sure to throw my old bottles
away now though.
The master
bathroom's shower. Since the door when opened would drip onto
carpet, my mom decided not to use this shower. So she did the
only natural thing and filled it with boxes. We use the
shower/bath in the other bathroom.
On the way back out
of my bedroom, just a quick look at a small fraction of the
crappy books gotten from eBay.
Okay, into the
backyard. A house down the street was having a moving sale,
and gave my mom that table for free because they didn't want
to move it. It's solid oak, and two people can barely lift it.
She put it there to keep it out of the rain, which is also why
there's a piece of cardboard on top. It didn't work, and now
it's spliting. You can see some more saved birdseed jars on it
there.
The backyard. My mom didn't have it landscaped to
save money, and now it grows wild. Normally it's all brown,
but there was rain a few days ago. That clump in the middle is
the compost pile, and the stuff off to the right is the
remains of her garden. Those are old fence boards proping up
tomato baskets, if you're wondering. She also used old fence
boards to surround the strawberry patch, for some
reason.
This is some of the neighbor's groundcover she's
letting grow into the yard. I don't know why. In the summer
it's full of bees.
There's pallets
along the back of the house, because in winter that part turns
into a mud pit.
The garage. This
thing has looked pretty much the same for the last couple of
years, since there's no room for anything to be added to
it.
More of the garage stuff. That used to be a path
to the back, but now it's too narrow to fit
through.
Chairs in the rafters.
Behind our garage
is part of a streetlamp post stolen from a demolition site. It
was going to be a support for the gate across our driveway,
but proved to be unsuitable. Now we don't know how to get rid
of it. That bush back there is some kind of giant weed, by the
way. There's a couple of them in the yard.
So that's my
mom's house. As for why I'm still living here, I'm a full time
student who's too lazy to move. I'm getting pretty close to
moving in with my grandma though, since these boxes keep
creeping further and further into my room. And since it was on
the same card as all of those house pictures, here's a picture
of a sculpture at my campus that looks like a
butt.
I will now open the floor to questions.
Knormal fucked
around with this message at Dec 15, 2003 around
09:07 |
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