When your professional life comes home to roost… by SW Hubbard

LUCY BURDETTE: I'm delighted to bring back my pal and fellow author SW (aka Susan) Hubbard with her latest installment of household politics...

SW HUBBARD: Are we drawn to our profession because of our disposition, or does our disposition morph after years in the same profession?

As with any chicken-or-egg question, the answer is a little of both.

Most nurses are naturally compassionate, and I’ve never yet met a happy-go-lucky lawyer unconcerned with details.



But spending many years in one profession changes the way you view your personal life, and the skills you use in the office tend to come home with you to be rolled out on the home front.

Take my husband.

Kevin spent forty years in international supply chain management and lean manufacturing, retiring right before Covid, the crisis that made “supply chain” a household term. Having just missed what would have been the career challenge of his lifetime, Kevin now runs logistics at our house.

If I overbuy at Costco, he informs me that I’m violating the first principal of lean manufacturing: Just In Time inventory. That means we’re only supposed to have enough on hand to meet our immediate needs. But if he wakes up to find the Cheerios box empty—the dreaded stock out!—I’ve violated the KanBan Two-Bin Replenishment System. In other words, if I kept two boxes of cereal, and bought a new one every time one was used up (always rotating my stock to use the older box first), I’d never run out. This, of course, assumes that I maintain a shopping list, which I don’t. And after 37 years of marriage, that’s unlikely to change.

Every January, we hold a Kaizen Event, aka, an improvement project. This involves purging anything we haven’t used in four years. Surplus material moves into the Red-Tag Area for disposition to donation sites or the trash. Now, when I put something of Kevin’s into the Red Tag Area--say, a 25-year-old printed road atlas of our county which doesn’t show several interstate extensions—he edges it out into what I call the Pink Tag Purgatory, where he performs extended farewells and a little mourning ritual. However, disposition of my unused items is short and brutal. As some of you who follow me on Facebook know, I recently had to bake a large lemon bundt cake to save my bundt pan from the Red Tag Zone.

But Kevin’s professional life skills and mine as a mystery author intersect when it comes time to find new homes for all the stuff we purge. Ten years of researching and writing the Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series has given me a very solid knowledge of what common objects have increased in value (1970s and 80s lunch boxes, Corning Ware, Bakelite jewelry) and what once valuable items are, sadly, worthless today (large china cabinets, fur coats, silver-plated anything). “I can sell that!” is my rallying cry as I save stuff from the dump and sell it on Facebook Marketplace or Craig’s List. My heroine, Audrey Nealon, of Another Man’s Treasure Estate Sales, would be proud of me!

Do you see traces of your professional life showing up at home? Tell me about it in the comments.

Click here for more information on my Palmyrton Estate Sale Mystery Series, including the pre-order for Book 10, Unholy Treasure, coming in December.

The Heartbreak of TMS - Too Much Stuff

ROSEMARY HARRIS: Happily neither of these pictures depicts my home - but...like a lot of people I occasionally wonder, why the heck do I have all this STUFF?

I know I have a lot less than my my friend's wife (the hoarder.)

Or my other friend's wife (the shopaholic.) 

But every closet, chest and trunk is filled to the max.

My house has no attic, no basement and very few closets (lots of glass...great for plants, not so great for stuff.)

So I'm requiresd to make periodic purges.





Right now I have a Bagster in my driveway. Have you seen them? They're very large, tarp-like bags which can hold a couple of tons of debris. 

They cost about 30 bucks and when they're filled you just call Waste Management and someone brings a truck and hauls it away. It's one of new favorite things. And for the past few weeks I've derived an enormous amount of pleasure filling it. Broken chairs that I've never gotten around to fixing. Falling apart willow fencing. The tag sale shutters I never used in the whimsical garden I never made. The broken window pane that I never got crafty with.


So explain to me how, with a clear conscience, I went to not one, but two estate sales yesterday. What if I really liked something? Where would it go??

The scary thing is that I own a bunch of stuff that looks very much like the items in the generic tag sale pic below. (I used to collect vintage radios.)

Mercifully I resisted the charms of the outdoor furniture sets, the stone planters, the vintage rattan sunroom furniture, and the ubiquitous floral prints which seem to be at every estate sale I've ever gone to.

That said, I came home with three very large resin planters, a black wrought iron coffee table, wicker footstool/table, two small ceramic planters and about 20 books - history, vintage Peter Rabbit and a copy of Anne of Green Gables, which I've never read and someone on JR rhapsodized about.

And a Stangl vase ($8) that gets my vote for deal of the day.

 Is this schizo behavior? Like ordering diet soda with an order of french fries?

(I'm counting on the JRs to say "no Ro! This is perfectly normal....")
 

What's in the box?

ROSEMARY: The other day I went to an estate sale. A perfectly normal thing to do on a summer afternoon except I was not in my home state and the chances of my succumbing to the charms of the life-size plaster camel or the set of mid-century garden furniture were severely reduced by the fact that I couldn't possibly fit either in my carryon luggage.

I looked for something small. Something interesting that wouldn't carry with it a tremendous burden of ownership. I decided against the matching pearl necklace and bracelet but one thing did catch my eye - a small wooden box in the kitchen which held the recipes of the 80-something year old woman who had just moved into an assisted living facility.

The box wasn't particularly pretty, in fact it's kind of ugly, but inside was a lifetime of parties, birthdays, family get-togethers, and holiday celebrations in the sheets of paper where one Myrtle Cross wrote down her recipes for Lady Baltimore Cake, Red Velvet Cake, Chocolate Chip Pound Cake, Japanese Fruit Cake (!) and dozens of other treats which I'm assuming she made for her family over the years. Some of them are handwritten, others typed, many have notes like Good!, From Mary Ann, and DO NOT OVERBEAT.

They are almost all desserts. Either the Crosses never ate real food or Mrs Cross knew all of those recipes by heart. The Cross house was the place to go for golf ball cookies, pecan pie, pear preserves and coconut cake. (Mr. Cross was in the chicken processing business so maybe she was just sick of animal protein.)

Myrtle was not a great speller and some of the ingredients may be hard to find on any supermarket shelves these days, but I had to have the box. In my WIP a character finds her mother's old cookbook and starts to bake many of the treats she enjoyed as a child. And here's this old box of recipes. I took it as a sign and bought the box. It will doubtless make an appearance in my next book.

What storyline would you come up with a 60 year old box of recipes to start you off?