Pants macabre.

I've lost four pairs of jeans because of this move already, and if I lose anymore I will be walking around like the guy in the barrel. 

Yeah, him
again

It has become ridiculous. 

The day we left the house, after spending a full day of work getting stuff together and working with the movers to load of the truck, I had intended to take a fast shower and then head out the door, leaving New York behind. This did not happen. The day was so arduous that my wife determined that we would never make it to our new home alive if we set out then, so we just left as is and went to a local hotel (since we were required to be out of the house that night). Of course, I left my favorite pair of jeans and a shirt hanging in the bathroom, where I had intended to change into them after my shower. I did not realize this. When I showered in the hotel, I figured I had just packed them somewhere and couldn't find them. Only a day and hundreds of miles later did I realize what I'd done. 

Jeans total: -1

On arrival in our new state, we checked into another hotel. Our things were roaming the land, as I noted in my last blog entry. I was pretty sure my second-favorite pair of jeans was in one of the boxes, but as of today, a couple of weeks later, they have yet to show. 

Jeans total: -2

So I ordered a couple of pairs from JCPennney. Mock if you well, but their stuff has always fit me well. I got the notice yesterday that my package of jeans had been delivered . . . to my old address. I did not give Penney's the new address. Because I'm stunad. I have no means of contacting the owners of our new place. And I wouldn't want to bug them if I did. 

Jeans total: -4

I did buy one pair at Kohl's while we were in the hotel, because I was not going to wear shorts or sweatpants to a lawyer's office for the closing. 

Jeans total: -3

I've heard of guys losing their shirts, but this . . . !

In sum, I'm down three pairs on the enterprise, and I'm afraid to try to buy any more clothes. I seem to be losing pants on the deal each time. Love 'em or hate 'em, you just gotta have pants. It's impossible to find a good barrel these days.

Stay where you are! Or not.

Okay, sometimes you can't stay where you are. Sometimes you have to leave. Sometimes you have to move. Sometimes you can't stay in the same state because it is run by twits, thieves, highbinders, dimwits, jerks, numbskulls, crooks, communists, idiots, and assorted bastards, and you thank God the US Constitution guarantees free movement between the states. And then you sell your house and go.

not my house

But, as I have noted during my sporadic entries over the last few months, moving is a chore. I'll put it more strongly than that: moving is a 

🏠CHORE👷😫

It is the most difficult thing I have done in decades, and that's saying something. When we moved into our house in New York we were coming from an apartment, so we didn't have a lot of stuff. After more than two decades in the house, we had amassed a lot of stuff.

Here, in no set order, are the Top Twenty Things I Learned This Year About Moving. This is gonna be a big one.

１ Houses in New York tend to have cellars, and often even attics that allow for storage. Houses in the south more likely have no cellars (because they would get flooded) and if they have storage attics, the temperature in them can get high enough to spontaneously combust things. Therefore, all the lovely storage area you abused in New York will be gone, and now you have to make some Hard Choices about what you can bring.

２ I very much wanted to bring the workbench I had constructed, but in the end the mover -- who was NOT lazy about bringing things -- told me that in his experience the bench would not fit in the garage of the type of house to which we were going. This appears to be true, but I can't tell for sure, because five days after the arrival the garage is still full of boxes. I am not sure it will be empty of boxes until after the Second Coming. I'm glad I sold my car, because this may never be a two-car garage again. 

３ A decade ago, when we were first considering fleeing the Former Empire State, I bought a book called Moving Gracefully, written by Carol Miller Fradkin. As we got ready to put our house on the market I looked through the book for helpful tips. Ms. Fradkin's experience largely involved moving for work, her family uprooted many times, so she knew a lot about it -- but the problems of frequent moving are very different from the problems of moving after a long period of residence. The lesson here is that expertise is not always fungible. In any event, our moving was about as far from graceful as you can imagine. 

４ Not to belabor the topic, but if you've held on to things because "someone might need it" or "it's too good to toss" or "I'm still using this furniture but it's not coming with us" or "I'll use it again someday," you're going to find that the day you have to throw them all out will strike like lightning. I rented a 12-yard dumpster. Then I had a junkman come get stuff (fridge, crappy ol' bookshelves). Then I slowly put stuff out for regular collection so as to not overwhelm the garbagemen, over several months. Then I posted things on social media and gave them away free to the first caller -- including a huge dog kennel from the backyard. Then I had the junkman come over for round two, removing old furniture. Then the movers came. Then I needed junkman AGAIN for stuff that the movers couldn't or wouldn't move or forgot to take. 

５ A special note about books. Which are heavy and mostly worthless. As a child I loved books, not just as repositories of wisdom and adventure, but as the objects themselves. Computers have made them irrelevant. Except for a few rare editions, they are barely worth anything -- people can get the stories without lugging them around. Plus, my childhood dreams of owning a magnificent library were always undercut by my buying the cheapest version of any book I wanted -- used paperbacks, often enough. So when push came to shovel, and I mean shovel, I heaved hundreds of pounds of books into the recycling pile, week after week. I had to ask every time, Did I enjoy or at least respect this book? Might I ever read it again? If the answer was yes both times, I would save it. And now I don't know where to put them all. 

６ I thought we might have trouble getting to the house before the movers did. When we moved into the old place, the moving men went straight from the apartment to the house, fifty-odd miles away, me following in my tiny car. That's not the way it works now, or at least not on trips of 600 miles or so. By the time they got to our old house, they had already picked up a load in Massachusetts. After they left, they went to get another load in New Jersey. I grant you that the truck was enormous, but I really thought we had enough crap to fill it ourselves. Nope.  

７ And so our stuff wandered to and fro over the countryside for an entire week. We drove down the day after our stuff took off and sat in a hotel while we waited. Well, we also went to the lawyer to close on the new place and started bringing what we had in the car into the empty house, but there was no place to sleep, so we hung out at the Hampton Inn. We also went to the beach. Which was nice. 

８ Our movers were great when they got there. I was sad that all the boxes we packed were just loaded into the garage, though -- my wife had made a map with numbering on the rooms to match numerals on the boxes, and it all came to nothing. Nope, they just piled the boxes up in the garage. So that was a lesson. (They did assemble furniture that they had disassembled, so that was good.)

９ The old cable company wants you back. No, seriously. If you use cable for TV or Internet and you leave, they will come after you. I explained twice on the phone to the operators in Bangalore (or somewhere) that Optimum service was not available where we now live, so even if I wanted to continue with Altice's US company, it was impossible. I think they finally got the message. I once thought that Optimum (formerly Cablevision) would have to better after Jimmy Dolan sold the company. I was wrong. 

１０ Little red stickers. Everywhere. Every box. Every bag. Every stick of furniture. Everything that was ours that made it onto the truck got a little red sticker with a number on it. It set apart our stuff from the stuff that came from Massachusetts and Jersey, so good. But I have removed dozens of them. The highest number I've seen so far was 630, so I may be at this for the rest of my life. 

１１ When people tell you about the weather, believe them. I was dispatched to get a pizza one night and the drive turned out to be longer than I thought. And the clouds opened, and I mean opened. I got a real Carolina Baptism. The water came down so hard that on a couple of occasions I literally could not see well enough to pull off onto the shoulder. The last time I got walloped like that was 15 years ago, and on that occasion I hydroplaned and wrecked the car. Nothing like that happened this time. Thank God.

１２ Speaking of baptisms: Northerners, when someone tells you to make a turn at the Baptist church, ask them to be specific. We have very few of them in New York, and almost nothing but them here. I am happy to see evidence of strong Christian faith anywhere (although I will have to drive farther now for Mass). 

１３ The pizza I mentioned above was pretty good. Pizza, as they say, is like, uh, other things you might name*, in that even when it's not great it's still pretty good.

１４ It is typically humid enough here in the mornings for Aquaman to swim through the air. My fuzzy canine does not like this. He has had one decent walk, where we explored the local park on an afternoon when there was a breeze and the temps were in the eighties. My worry is, will we ever acclimate, or just huddle in the A/C? While taking out the trash this morning I saw a young woman walking two well-trained dogs at a brisk pace -- one of them appeared to be a Bernese mountain dog, a snow-obsessed hairball that Nature intended for cold climes -- and they all appeared to be very happy and active and comfortable. I hated all three on sight. Not just the fitness and happiness, but also the fact that when I had two dogs, walking them together was like being pulled by hyperactive morons driving scooters in different directions. Still, it gave me a little hope that Izzy might get used to this weather. 

１５ Speaking of garbage, they only do one trash pickup per week here. Is that typical across the nation? I believe that in the City and outside the City, every town in New York state does two, and a third pickup for the recycling boondoggle. 

１６ And on that note, problems you don't think about are: What am I going to do with all these damn cardboard boxes? They take them for recycling, but everything has to fit in a big green bin, so at the rate I'm going I will have gotten rid of unneeded boxes in 2028 sometime. There is a dump, but I will have to establish residency first, which means . . .

１７ . . . we gotta go to the nearest city worthy of the name to use the DMV. Not an unexpected chore, but since the car's registration is good in New York state until 2027 and the insurance is paid until November, I'd hoped to avoid doing anything for a few months. Alas, I will need that ID, and anyway we would like to vote this year. The DMV does not let you print out forms and fill them out in advance, as far as I can tell; everything has to be done on the spot. In California I think you can send any old border jumper to get a Class A Commercial Driver's License as long as he doesn't speak English, but here in Normal World they want to make sure you are who you say you are. Which is, frankly, as it ought to be. 

１８ The dog was an absolute champ on the drive south -- the longest car ride he has ever taken (eight hours over the previous record) and the longest drive I have ever made. He caused no trouble except for necessary bathroom/water breaks, and on that score he was no worse than the driver (ahem). He has, though, been having difficulty getting used to the new house. For some time I think he expected we would go home, to where he was comfortable and where his favorite sofa was. But the sofa was old and it was among the junkman's haul. Poor Izzy.

１９ It's going to be hard to think of myself as a Southerner, and that is absolutely not a rap on the people here. They have all been great, as friendly as advertised. But I had spent almost every day of my life prior as a citizen of New York, and damn it, for most of that time I was proud -- utterly proud -- of that state. From America's most world-class city to the natural beauty of upstate and the hard-won factory towns to the west, from its amazing history and its contributions to the nation and the world, there was no part of New York I didn't love. But in my lifetime it has chased out industry, encouraged lawlessness, pushed bleeding taxes to fund criminal activities, and let one of civilization's greatest enterprises turn to garbage. My heart is broken. When I mentioned to some people that I'm from New York, I added that I didn't break it and I couldn't fix it. And that is the sad truth.

２０ My main point in this Voyage of Stupid Discovery is that, while there were many reasons to leave New York  -- financial, cultural, professional -- I was settled in there, there were people we loved there, and (this is no small thing) I knew with dire certainty that selling the house and moving would be among the most prolonged, stressful, exhausting, and infuriating things we would ever do. I was wrong, though -- it was worse than that. And yet, this is nice place, I'm finding my way around, we are not far from the ocean, and I would do it all over again. Which is saying a lot, since I'm still surrounded by boxes and still can't find my favorite pants. Gonna check one more box . . . 

* ice cream

The spice must go!

Okay, I went with the Dune reference for the title, but I had to choose between that and several others: 

On the rack

In a Pickle

Herbs and a-whey

A Change of Seasons

Spicemaggedon

And several others. I'm sure you'll have other ideas. 

What finally made me settle on the title above is that I realized that the guy whose famous series was about a substance that made faster-than-light travel possible, a substance called Spice, was named Frank HERBert. So there. 

Sorry, I'm crazed from lack of sleep. 

 

We have a moving truck booked, and if you've ever hired house movers, you know they won't take food. Especially stuff in open containers. Why should they? Who wants to deal with that?

If we were moving locally I could bring all the open herb and spice jars and condiment bottles to the new place in the car, but we are moving hundreds of miles away, and between humans and large dog there isn't going to be a whole lot of room. Plus, while we can get to the area in less than 12 hours, the movers may take three to seven days. Even with all our crap, we can't fill up the truck ourselves. So we need suitcases and a hotel room. 

So no, no room for spices. Ironically, the thing that makes travel to the stars possible in Dune cannot travel at all here. 

And no one wants your old, open spice and pickle jars. I had a small handful that had not yet been opened, which I will donate with canned soup and the like. But the rest? Down the toilet, down the drain, or just into the trash. 

I just finished the job and I have an incredible mound of plastic and glass for recycling day on Wednesday. I also have a garbage can that smells like an amazing antipasto. 

Now the goal is not to cook anything between now and next week that will be bland because I had to do the purge. Needs coriander? Sorry, that's down the sink. A bit of rosemary? Headed for the landfill. Onion powder? Pardon the oniony scent in the loo. Hundreds of dollars' worth of flavors, gone. 

Can't be helped, I guess. I've already had to part with so much -- sentimental items, books a-plenty, money like there's no tomorrow -- so what's a recently opened jar of dried bay leaves compared to that? 

On the bright side, some of those seasonings looked a little too seasoned. I think my bottle of dried savory had a Durkee label from two or three iterations ago. Never had a lot of call for savory .. . .

Live white man's clothes.

Over the weekend I completed a chore I've been dreading for years. 

When preparing to move, it's important to identify the things that should not move with you, to cut down on the waste of lugging things that you didn't use and won't use. That meant, among other things, trying on every single article of my clothing, discarding the worn-out ones, and donating the ones that don't fit anymore.  

It's time.

I've done some weeding before, but this is the first wholesale clearance I've done in twenty-plus years. So you know a LOT of things have been hanging around, waiting for me to lose those excess pounds I put on over Christmas/New Year's/Easter/the Giants winning Super Bowl XLII. And it's time to say, well, if I ever accomplish the weight loss, I can buy some new duds. 

Meanwhile, I had to try on everything. 

The upshot: two lawn bags full of trash, for starters. Old painting clothes, beloved tees with holes, socks and sweatpants with weak elastic, suspect underwear. Out out out. Then: FOUR lawn bags with clothes in good shape that either don't fit at all or just make me look like a potato. That's a pretty good load that won't make the moving truck. 

For the first time in decades I can wear every article of clothing that I own.

The trash men got the garbage and the good stuff was broken down into smaller bags and dropped off at the church clothing collection box. 

Now, about that: I understand that so-called "fast fashion" is polluting the Third World:

Dead White Man's Clothes: It’s the dirty secret behind the world’s fashion addiction. Many of the clothes we donate to charity end up dumped in landfill, creating an environmental catastrophe on the other side of the world.

In short, 15 million garments show up in Ghana a week; no one will wear most of them again, and it's all turned into a tremendous landfill. And that's just one African country. Our donations are also said to have collapsed the local clothing industry.

It's depressing, and I have plenty of reason to accept the Australian Broadcasting Company's report. However, I have to ask: If the clothing collection boxes we see everywhere are just essentially collecting garbage, why is there money in it? Who's paying for them? Most of them are not for local thrift stores or charity drives. When you see them in a parking lot, that means someone is paying rent for those boxes to be there. Who's spending money to collect clothing no one wants?

There's more to all this than I know. 

But in my personal defense, I am not a buyer of fast fashion. I have very little fashion sense of any kind. If I have a shirt that is not obviously stained or ripped and is comfortable, I will wear it until it becomes embarrassing. 

Unless I get too fat for it. 

What I'm saying is that I get quality clothing, not stuff meant to be worn once and discarded. So I have reason to hope that the things I've donated will find a better user along the line. There's still a lot of life in that suit I had to give up. 

Or maybe that suit will be picked up by a funeral home. The jacket will be split up the back for ease of use and put on suitless corpse so he looks nice at the wake. And then my good suit will be interned, not in a landfill, but a human landfill -- the cemetery. 

And who knows? When the final trump is blown and the dead emerge from their tombs, there will be one guy who looks at himself in his resurrected body and say, "Hey, this suit isn't mine! But -- it looks fabulous!"

And: "Why'd they have to slice up the back?"

The nose has it.

All our dogs have had different ways of going for a walk. I think it's because they had or have different values. Some dogs are really into running, and thank heaven none of our have been, because the humans in this house were never fleet of foot and are not likely to become so soon. But there are other differences to note. For example: 

1) Large Guard Dog (Tralfaz): The late Tralfaz was by breed a farm dog, meant to tow small carts and protect the herd--making him a guard dog, not a watch dog. His walking habits reflected this: straight line, watch everything, be suspicious of deer and squirrels and any other critter but not immediately aggressive. Walks with him were usually brisk, of varying length.

2) Medium Retriever (Nipper): Nipper was a fuzzy, fun-loving chap, the kind who would love to go on a hunt and retrieve things. Not having been trained as a hunting dog, though, he would probably freak out at the gun and grab the dead duck and eat it. Walks were very brisk, but with long stops to smell what there was to smell, and could be quite long. 

3) Medium Retriever Redux (Izzy): Izzy is a sweet mush for the most part, with protective instincts but a scientific interest in smelling every blade of grass along the sidewalk. Walks are slow and include many stops. 

The fact is, Izzy's walks are not great exercise because he stops constantly. Ants outpace us. Every walk is a snurffin' sniffari. I mean, it's better than nothing for me (who leads the majority of his walks), but it's not taking excess weight off either of us. 

But it doesn't much matter to me about the exercise. Since I work at home, any day that isn't tempting by its pleasantness would probably be a day I stayed in and gathered dust. Having a canine companion guarantees I am going to be outside however lousy the weather is, and I think on the whole that has done me a lot of good. Not that it always felt good, mind you. 

So thanks, fuzzy friends, for keeping me moving, not letting me become a potted ficus. But seriously, can we move someplace warmer?  

Cellar dweller.

It's been very cold for several weeks now -- really, since winter began. Usually we get a few warm spells in the winter here in the Hudson Valley. We'll have a couple of wind-blasted days of misery, ice and snow, the usual, but then a few days in the forties to kind of reset, melt some of the snirt, and wash off some salt with a little rain, before it's back to the cooler. Not this winter. One below-freezing day after another. Regularly colder here than in Anchorage. 

So my basement, which I never finished nor cared to, remains chilly. 

Unfortunately I have a lot to do down there. 

Artist's depiction of my cellar

As the Great Lileks is doing, we are aiming to get the house ready to show. This has meant a number of steps, all challenging, like:

• Paint the porch -- a frantic job done in late October before winter hit
• Spray wash the siding -- reluctantly accepted this recommendation, but it made the house look like new
• Dumpster rental -- frantic tossing of decades of old stuff
• Large item removal -- old fridge in cellar, book shelves
• New carpeting -- another great idea, painfully expensive, and made for one exceptionally stressful day for us and the dog
• Professional deep clean -- this also was nice, but I'm not used to strangers cleaning up after me
• Prepare for real estate photographer -- frantic removal of all personal effects and making rooms look like hotel rooms

And now:

YOU ARE HERE →🞋←

And here means getting ready for showtime. 

The problem is that all those other steps resulted in box after box of things going into the cellar, with no time to arrange them. That was okay to this point, as the photographer wasn't going to bother with pictures of the basement or garage. But NOW, we have to make the clutter neat. And this is where I am today. 

It's all for the good, but man, I am tired, and I am cold down in the cellar. I hear it's warmer down south, and they don't bother putting cellars in houses. I think that's where we'll go. Any suggestions? 

Keeping tabs, Christmas style.

People around here move a lot. What would you expect? It's New York, a state that actively hates its elderly. People retire, they flee. The kids move out, they flee. Or they just flee. This state is run by criminals, stupid heads, and criminal stupid heads. 

It's still a hot market here in the lower Hudson Valley, because as lousy as it is here it's worse the closer you get to the city. So it can be hard to tell from one month to the next if the occupants are the same as they were a month earlier. Sometimes there are indicators of a change. 

Way back in 2016, while walking the dog, I noticed the Christmas tree in one family's picture window. It was there through December, of course, and into January 2017. Way into January. ALL the way into January. Way into February. It became a topic of some conjecture on this blog. Was there a family member who has volunteered to take the tree down and was just lazy? Did someone die and the house just fell into chaos? Or was it a bone of contention between warring factions of children? ("I'll take the decorations down but BILLY has to help me." "No way! That's YOUR job!") I never knew. But one day as spring was peeping over winter's transom, we saw the tree was gone. 

Whatever caused the tree to stay up so long, the incident was not repeated in subsequent years.

But this year, the moment I saw the house decked out in lights, I knew it had new owners. 

Not that the previous owners did no outdoors decor -- they were just more reserved. Once your house lights require ladders, your reservations are out the window. The new people went game.

And indeed, I was right. I checked in Zillow, and the house had been sold over the summer. Fast, too -- I don't go that way every day, but I never saw a For Sale sign out front. 

So welcome to the new folks, and thanks for bringing some light into a darkened world. Especially in New York, where our governing class has dark hearts and occluded brains. We need all the hope we can get. 

🎄🎄🎄

Lingo-Fact! The phrase "keeping tabs" goes back to tabs as in bar and restaurant tabs, and is believed to have come from the tablets upon which one would write the debt. But that's not certain; in fact, the origin of tab as a noun is simply unknown, according to Merriam-Webster.

Moving and rudeness.

Anyone who has been reading this blog -- extraordinarily smart and good-looking that you are -- probably knows that among my many characteristics, I dislike unrequired rudeness and I admire the men who provide the basics of sanitation in our lives: clean water and trash collection. 

If one were to go back in Earth's history to any of the cities of the past, even 150 years ago, the first thing one would probably notice is how horribly filthy everything is. We are naturally repelled by filth, as nature's way of telling us to back off, but since we discovered the microscopic causes behind disease, we are more repelled than ever. Go back to New York c. 1840 and your nose would probably be the first thing that alerted you that you were not in 2023 anymore. (Not that it's exactly a bouquet of roses these days either, granted.) There are still plenty of places on the planet where clean water is a luxury, not a given, and trash collection is little other than wherever you can dump it; places where cholera and dysentery are still common. "Public health" is an oxymoron there.

So we ought to be as respectful of our garbagemen as we are of any service provider who performs an important function in a clean and peaceful polity. Which means stuff like this is a no-no. 

This family is in the process of selling their house, and this is the third huge dump they put out for the trashmen. I'm wondering if they're bringing anything at all with them, because it seems like everything in the house must be going in the garbage. They even had a set of tires -- with rims -- out there at one point -- and it's illegal to throw away tires with the trash. (The trash pros left the tires the first go-round, but they disappeared later.)  

The town says you can put out one large item (like a piece of furniture) per week. They flew past that limit a while ago. Old tires, of course, were mentioned as something you can never throw away, but state law says you can bring them to any place that sells tires and they have to take them (a small fee may apply). 

The county says you can bring your crap to the dump for about $130 per ton. In my experience they usually don't even bother charging if you don't bring a dump truck full of debris in with you, as long as you can prove you're a county resident.  

And it doesn't seem like very many of us are aware that these guidelines exist. This crazy thing called the Internet, where you can look things up instantly, is getting to be a thing. These people ought to check it out.

The best and most efficient option if you have a lot or junk is to rent your own dumpster and throw your garbage away yourself. Just chucking everything on the curb is inefficient. 

It also is the height of rudeness -- taking your problem and making it someone else's problem without asking. Like littering, drunk driving, useless mask mandates, and silly games involving personal pronouns, taking one's own problems and shoving them onto someone else's back is at the very least showing no consideration for one's fellows. 

Well, the trash legends did not take all that junk on the Tuesday run. The scene this morning:

Will they be willing to cart it away Friday? Will the slobs add to the pile by then? Will they ever learn? The drama continues unabated. 

Am I being nosy? Is that rude? Yes and maybe, but rudeness is A-OK in our neighborhood now.

I know the feeling.

Welcome to the new place.

Come in, sit down, make yourself at home. Yes, I had to move the ol' bloggeroo. Why? Because my previous host sucks harder than a nuclear powered Dyson, that's why. Six days ago they severed my sign-on from the blog itself, so I could log in, but not access my blog. That's helpful! Every day I sent an e-mail (no other way to contact them) and every day there was no reply. So, the hell with it.

Not that I want to name names. Okay, it was Blog.com; you beat it out of me.

I really, really wanted to like Blog.com because they seemed to be small and plucky and personable compared to the big boys, but their ability to keep the site afloat was, shall we say, lacking, and their customer service was virtually nonexistent. So, here I am, Google!

If you're new to the wonder that is Fred, just note that I have been writing and editing for a long time, and had I known it was going to be like this, I might have gone into a real job. Well, it's too late now. I have novels, available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble, available at quite reasonable rates. I also have grit and determination. I also have a pounding headache, but that's not important right now.

I solemnly promise: No cat videos.

On this page you will continue to get daily updates on all things Fred. I will probably retire some of the features of the old blog, like the dollar store reviews -- I think I've bought about as many different things from the dollar store as I ever need to. We'll see about the others.

The old blog will be up for a while, but remember to change your bookmarks, all of you! (Looking at you, Mr. Philbin.) Meanwhile, I hope to see you around here.

I hate moving, I really do. Everything is in boxes and I can't find anything. And who put the toilet brush in the kitchen box? It clearly says KITCHEN on the side. Come on, people, work with me.