Hillis Vassilas

Clearing the Crap!
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A day of great success
February 20, 2024 in the United States ⋅ ☁️ 6 °C
Oh lordie today was a good day.

It started with us finishing the clean out of unit 54 and doing a bit of 64 too and sorting through some things. (We found our mascot!)
We then dropped it off and got to chatting with one of the volunteers and had a long chat about multiculturalism and a lot of really random topics.

Anyway we ended up getting home at 2:30pm and had a lovely salad medley made by heather Howie. Furthermore having collected a good few boxes of jewelry in the Airbnb that needed sorting, we decided to take the afternoon off and spend it sorting! Heather did all of this work and she dwindled it down to just one box from 6 separate boxes.

In the evening I had a call with a potential host! For those that don't know I'm planning a road trip across Canada in which I plan to work on different organic farms as I cross the country with my partner Ellie, and today we had a call with a potential host in BC, right at the base of the Rockies (pictures attached). They seemed lovely and accepted us for the dates we requested, so I was on cloud 9! And to celebrate we drove down to our nearest five guys and gobbled down some well deserved burgers.

Tomorrow we go back to the grind and keep working on clearing 64 which we will hopefully be done with by Friday.

Much love,
H & HRead more
Traveler Heaven!!!
2/21/24Reply
Traveler SHUT UP 😜
2/21/24Reply
Traveler These are all so beautiful 🤩
2/21/24Reply
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Clearing the Crap!
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Day 2
February 19, 2024 in the United States ⋅ 🌙 0 °C
Okay! So today our plan was to keep working on unit 54, and look at the progress we made! So the second and third pictures are what it looked like in the morning and what it looked like by the end of the day. (The boxes at the back are completely empty!). We brought it down to just 9 boxes left to look through and we have saved those for tomorrow morning and should be done emptying unit 54 by 1pm tomorrow.

Along the way we found some gems:
- a picture of me from great grandma Eleanor's dining area, giving my best picture smile
- another butterfly deco
- and a pair of sunglasses, modelled by yours truly

With a full car, we headed back home really satisfied with the amount we had gotten done and had a lovely dinner of brown rice, lentil stew and fried zucchini. We ended the night by watching a couple John Oliver segments and having mint chocolate chip ice cream, which put us soundly to sleep.

Tomorrow we venture to finish unit 54 and begin sorting through 38 and 64. It all feels possible now and our '10 minute break every hour' tactic helped us manage our stamina and segment our time more efficiently and effectively (thank god she has a Personal Assistant here to help her with her time management am I right people?)

I can't wait to see how much we can do by Friday when we plan to go to Evanston for the weekend to see Grandpa Hillis, Margaret and Stephanie.

Much love,
H & HRead more
TravelerInteresting consistency of the butterflies. Those sun glasses suit you very well Hillis, you should keep them.
2/20/24Reply
Traveler ❤️
2/20/24Reply
❤ [Anna]
2/20/24Reply
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Clearing the Crap!
Day 1!
February 18, 2024 in the United States ⋅ 🌙 -3 °C
The breakdown is there are 8 storage units overall (unincluding one in new jersey):
2 in downers grove
6 in Winfield (where our Airbnb is) FYI: of the 6 in Winfield:
- one we don't have keys to
- And one is mega full so...
- we are only gonna interact with 4 of them.

Our plan is to make the 4 Winfield units into 1 so that we half the overall amount of Winfield units, and if we can do that we will try and empty out the 2 in downers grove. So we would get it down from 9 to 4 units. So far, it seems feasible!

Today was the first day of cleaning out and aren't we lucky it was a Sunday. It meant only the goodwill was open, so our first stop of the day was the storage units in downers grove where mum knew a lot of it was clothes (easy wins). We emptied out a 1/4 of one of them and then had lunch at the library. We then dropped off our goods at the goodwill, who just took everything, which blew my tiny mind; and moved on to the next storage units. We did a second re-filling of the car, jigged some things around, moved some shelves and called it a day. Then I cooked us a lovely lentil and rice stew and I ended the day with a yoga.

I hope it's gonna get easier every day, and we are gonna make sure we are maintaining good stamina by taking 10 minute breaks every hour. There's an ocean of stuff that we could just sit and go through, but it's important we keep ourselves rested because the work can get fatiguing (both emotionally and physically).

As long as we keep our routine of packing the car twice a day with crap, I think we should be able to reach our goals.

These posts are gonna be a mix of random shit we find, and pictures of storage units (hopefully getting emptier!) and maybe some food and sunsets along the way.

Love,
H & HRead more
TravelerFantastic! Great work. So glad you are also taking care of yourselves. Hopefully not too cold. Yikes. hang in there!
2/19/24Reply
TravelerIt's really cold in the mornings, but by 3pm it gets to about 6-9 degrees, so we are enjoying the sunshine during our lunch breaks and wrapping up in the mornings.
2/19/24Reply
TravelerTell me about the tupawear though! What is that deliciousness?? Also, I love all the patterns on the items. It’s a good thing I’m not there or I’d be coming home with 15 coin purses and half a dozen other containers covered in paisley. 😍
2/19/24Reply
TravelerHahahaha, yes it was a struggle not to take stuff home at first, but god, we must have gone through atleast 80 purses and bags in just the first storage room!
2/19/24Reply
TravelerYou, me, Ellie, and Macklemore - we love poppin tags
2/19/24Reply
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