A Place To Hang My Hat...Or Hats

 I'm a collector...sort of. I think of collectors as people who amass certain things, like stamps, or coins, or cars, or tennis shoes. I don't think having lots of baseball hats makes me a collector, but when you consider the definition of "collector," I definitely qualify.

I have a lot of baseball hats.

For me, if I'm not going to church, I'm wearing a hat. I do this, not necessarily for fashion reasons, but more for practical reasons. Having no hair (thanks, genetics...) on my head, I wear a hat in the summer to prevent sunburns, and I wear a hat in the winter to keep my head warm, and to prevent sunburns. To me, hats are as important as wearing shirts, or other necessary articles of clothing.

Now, after wearing hats almost everyday of my life for almost four years, I know you can't have just one hat. You need several. I have several. When you have several hats, you need a place to keep several hats until you're wearing one hat. For the past couple of years, I hung my hats on my wife's antique bookshelf that we used to house DVDs. We re-arranged the front room and the bookshelf had to go downstairs. 

What to do with the hats?

In our laundry room I saw several wreath hangers we used during the holidays purchased at Dollar Tree. I had an idea and what you see in the photo is that idea. My new place to hang my hats.

So for...so good. I have seven hats I can choose from, two work hats, three red hats (two U of U hats and a Lagoon hat...), a Bear River Bears baseball hat and a US Army hat. Pretty much a hat for all occasions, or...

A hat for all seasons.

Yeah...I like that.

Untangling Yarn...Untangling Life

 It was something on my "To Do" list for a while. The box sat in our bedroom waiting for attention for several months. But, it wasn't completely ignored. I brought up a big plastic tote to transfer the yarn from the big cardboard box to the big plastic tote. That counts for something.

I decided today was the day to tackle the project.

It wasn't until I dug into the box that I discovered it was a tangled mess--not as bad as it could have been, but bad enough that I almost shelved the task for another day.

I think it was the college football game I had playing on the TV that helped me make the decision. The game was good (Michigan/Ohio State...) and I thought I could try and see how much decluttering I could do.

I jumped in. Most of the skeins and balls were not tangled. That helped. I dug into the box, separated those unattached from those attached, then sat down and went to work. Several times I seriously considered taking a pair of scissors to the mass of entwined yarn and calling it a day. Sure, several feet of yarn would be sacrificed, but if that's the cost of saving time, so be it.

Funny, that didn't happen. I decided to try and work it out. I took one ball of yarn and pulled to see if I came loose. Not all did, but a few separated themselves from the tangled mess. If I met resistance, I stopped and tried another. Soon, I had freed several balls of yarn leaving only the most tangled left. 

One by one, I separated another ball from the others until only three remained...then two...then finally none of the yarn connected to another.

Freedom!

It reminded me about life. I know it's a simplistic way of looking at things, but it works, in a round-a-bout way. I thought about destroying something to make quick work of the problem. If I positively had to have everything separated in a few minutes, I would have done that. Since I had the time, I sat down and took things step-by-step. I cleared the easier things first, then when I got to the tough ones, I had a much easier go of it.

Currently all the yarn is jammed into the tote waiting for the day when the lid is lifted and crafts can begin. Maybe, when I need to lift the lid on my life's tote, things will be a slightly organized. 

One can hope.