Diaspora in Reverse: Finding Slivers of Silver Lining

Behind-the-door bookcase contraption located this afternoon.  Of course it was located this afternoon, because last night I organized the kids' books on the assumption that it would never be found.  THIS IS HOW MY LIFE WORKS. 

Also located:  the Dish Network receivers.  Somehow, they mysteriously ended up in the "garage sale" section of the carriage house.  Glad we found those suckers . . . so that we can immtediately turn them back in to Dish and tell them to kiss our collective hindquarters.  Nitwits refuse to restore our service without making a house call (no doubt to try to sell us additional stuff), and it appears that their prices went up while we were in exile.  We really, REALLY became fond of U-verse while we were living in the apartment, but U-verse continues to play chicken with us:  when we left, they were offering services on the other side of the middle school football field, but not on our side.  Now they are offering Internet only on our side - no cable.  Ugh.

That leaves us with three options:

1.  Suck it up and continue to deal with Dish.
2.  Sign up with Direct TV and immediately switch back over to Dish, taking advantage of "new customer discounts" that you would think they would just go ahead and give us when we explain to them the end game.  I mean, cell phone providers understand that you occasionally have to sweeten the pot to keep folks coming back, right?  Add Dish to the "playing chicken with the McGlincheys" contingent.
3.  Sign up with Direct TV and stay with Direct TV.

Number three is the current frontrunner.  And it will that much easier/more satisfying to give Dish the heave-ho if we don't have to mumble at the end of the conversation, "Oh, um, by the way, we seem to have misplaced our receivers.  Do we owe you anything for those?"

So we are slowly finding tangible things, and with them, snippets of the intangible (I'm referring here to our sanity).

Also in the silver lining category:  we are practically running a daily shuttle to local charitable resale shops.  Spouse drives the Goodwill/YWCA route.  The really nice stuff I take to Double Exposure, the Junior League's resale boutique.  First day to drop off quotas for the 2012-2013 League year was June 1st, and I think I deserve props for showing restraint and waiting until the 5th to vomit treasures all over them.  Fairly sure that today's haul satisfied my annual quota about three times over  (no, it won't carry forward to future years - dang-nab-it), although I'm sure that there will be much more to come.  Nice thing about being a League member is that someone else assigns a resale value to your stuff, which gets posted to your computer profile, which makes things really easy come tax time.  And here's some more silver lining:  

• DE goes through crystal hangers (the clear plastic kind) like crazy.  (I emptied out an entire rack of the kid-sized one on this donation alone.)  
• It appears that while we were in exile, our crystal hangers (many of which got left behind in the master walk-in closet) got busy and multiplied. 
• Spouse has declared jihad against crystal hangers (he likes the huggable kind - no, he doesn't actually hug them, but they do hang things nicely, and they have a much thinner profile, so the closet doesn't get as cluttered).
• Spouse actually packed a box of crystal hangers of his own accord for me to take to DE.  I was quite impressed by this show of initiative.  Certainly, it augmented today's DE experience:  I got to get rid of clothes we didn't need, PLUS UNWANTED HANGERS, all in one fell swoop.  Doesn't get much better than that.