Still in Minnesota

I'm still sitting in Minnesota, still working at getting the house cleared out.  I really should have taken "before" pictures, but it was just so packed it was almost unbelievable.  The problem started about 5 years ago, when I sold the little house in town that I had used for my eBay business and I hauled all that stuff out to the farm. My youngest daughter had gotten divorced and moved in with me bringing all her stuff, my mom died and I got a ton of stuff from her house, my significant other died and I got some things from his house, and I swear all this "stuff" was breeding when I wasn't looking.

A lot of what I've been doing is just going through boxes, throwing out a lot of it, reboxing the rest as either flea market, eBay or keep. So far the flea and eBay boxes are FAR outnumbering the keep boxes, so I am happy about that. I've given away several truck loads of things, and had a lot of bonfires to get rid of things that will burn. I've also displaced several mice, and I've started "feeding" the ones that are still around.  The bait was disappearing pretty quickly at first, but it's starting to slow down now. Of course, this time of year there are always mice looking to get inside for the winter, and uninhabited old farmhouses are prime real estate for them. I'll leave a lot of bait out for them when I do head south.

I didn't get much done on the house last week because my brother finally flew in from Arizona and we met in northern South Dakota so he could transfer the land to me. It's not huge, 7 lots that total perhaps an acre, but it's been in the family for over 120 years. Our great-grandfather owned the general store in what was then the town of James, SD. There's nothing left of the store, and very little left of the town, there are only 3 or 4 other households. My bit is the blue section.

Here's the view coming into town from the east. Quite the metropolis, isn't it?  lol

 Two views from the northeast corner, the first looking straight south and the other looking southwest.

In the second photo, and also in the Google photo you can see a bit of junk, mainly along the property line and along the road on the north side where my land juts out to the west. There is an old camper and a semi trailer that belong to the neighbor parked there, and a few piles of junk on the southern end of the property. My brother had problems a few years ago with this guy, he's a hoarder and had filled up his land so he started piling stuff on ours. After getting the sheriff and attorneys involved most of the junk was removed, and hopefully next spring I can get him to clean up the rest of it without having to get lawyers and law enforcement after him again.

I had hoped to use this as my permanent address in South Dakota instead of the mail forwarding service I use currently, and after talking to the gals at the post office in Groton it sounded like it would work. I headed back to Aberdeen to buy a mail box, and while I was in the store the post mistress called and left a message on my phone saying that she had been informed by Sioux Falls that there had to be a structure on the land in order to get mail. I am going to have to talk to the person in charge in Sioux Falls about this, since I would be living there in the camper (the gal in Groton said she thought a camper was a qualifying structure) in the summer and forwarding my mail south in the winter but since I live in the camper full time I obviously won't be leaving it there over the winter. So at this point I still don't know if I'm going to be a South Dakotan or a Texan. This has to get cleared up pretty soon, since my vehicle tags all are due in November, open enrollment for health insurance is Nov 15, and the 65-70 degree weather we've been experiencing won't last much longer.