Throw Away, Give Away or Sell

It's been just over two weeks since I got back from a mission trip to Haiti and just over five hours since my family and I returned from a weekend retreat with OMS (One Mission Society) in Greenwood, Indiana.  With mounds of school work to do (I STILL have not completely caught up on grading after missing a full week for my Haiti trip) and the bed calling, what am I doing?  Setting up a blog. 

I am in the habit of reading various blogs on a regular basis, but I have never written one myself.  This is all one big experiment.

So why a blog for the Gross family and why now?  Because life has been turned upside down and I need to write to make sense of it.  And it would help me to be disciplined in writing if I had an audience.  It doesn't matter if I have a real audience or not ... with an honest-to-goodness blog of my own, I can pretend I have an audience and that will be enough for me to write. (Maybe!)

The title of my first entry here is my goal over the next several months: to find something each day around the house to throw away (good idea!), to give away (even better!) or to sell (ideal!).  We need to lighten our load.  The wife and I are having serious talks about selling the house in the next few months, paying down our debts and heading to Haiti as teachers by August 2012 (although we are open to God's timetable being longer or shorter, of course!). 

Day 1 (Sunday, November 7, 2010):  After we returned from Greenwood, I went out to the garage and tackled several 8 foot tall cardboard pillars that I had used in my classroom over a year ago when we studied Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar".  They've slowly rotted in the center of our garage ever since, serving as nesting grounds for crickets and makeshift sponges for rain water.  I loaded them into the back of the van and drove around town looking for a place to recycle them.  Every recycle dumpster I found emphasized "No Cardboard!"  Well, I tried to keep Al Gore happy....  I had to bring them home.  I thoroughly enjoyed stomping them flat and forcing them into a garbage can.  They are gone.