Thomas Cook news

I do not do package tours. However, I recognize that for a lot of people, they make sense: they simplify things, make it easier for large groups to travel together, ensure a minimum standard that can be difficult to manage at the same price independently, etc. But wow, Thomas Cook going under and leaving a lot of people stranded is a helluva thing. There is insurance (ATOL, I know nothing about it), so that is something.

But I cannot help but wonder what it all means. Is this the first of a wave of Brexit related collapses? Is this another in a line of travel companies suffering from global competition? Is this what happens when the government says, we will not help you out with emergency funding (even tho perhaps that would have been cheaper than NOT helping out? We will not really know until later, if ever)? I expect a tsunami of coverage in the next few days.

Monday: error check, cleaning, decluttering

I got rid of the obvious errors on the taxes; waiting on R. for the next bit (state return has elements he has the paperwork for).

I cleaned the popcorn machine, and vacuumed the dining room. There were crumbs all over the place. I probably should have just run roomba, but I sort of backed into that project while cleaning the popcorn machine.

I thought about various projects around the house I could tackle, and opted to do some very low effort things: I pulled a binder full of old school stuff (construction art projects type stuff, mostly) and sorted it. This translated into throwing about 90% of it away. That was very satisfying. I did pull out a nice looking Thanksgiving turkey coloring project and a couple pumpkin coloring projects to post around the house for those holidays coming up. The ones I had been using from previous years were getting old. It will be a little retro.

After the binder, I pulled out a box from two years ago, and worked on the same. It is much lighter, but still surprisingly full. Hmmmm. But I do not like to be working on this when the kids are at home, because they start asking a lot of questions and the next thing you know you are not allowed to throw away the addition worksheets and at that point, there is not any point at all in continuing.

Net recovery of space in the basement was nothing. However, a lot of decisions of what to get rid of happened, enough to make me feel a little tired of deciding whether to get rid of things or not. This would be a good thing to do for a few days and see how far it gets me.