$22.47 and a bunch of pencils

There's probably a poll somewhere to prove it, but I'd be willing to bet that more people in America went to the gym on Monday than on any day in the history of our country.
We planned a family gym night, and I predicted to Missy that it would be totally packed. But I had no idea how packed it really would be.
The obvious factor is that Monday was the first day after New Year's weekend, and the number one New Year's resolution is to lose weight. That's all I was banking on.
We go to the Earlywine Park YMCA, and anyone who's familiar with that knows it's a big gym with a massive parking lot, because in addition to the gym there's an outdoor walking trail, tennis courts, a playground, a pool, and a couple of covered areas with picnic tables.
I decided we should wait until after dark to go so that there wouldn't be as many people on the walking trail, etc., but that wasn't enough of a precaution against this madness.
The parking lot, which is generally half full, was overfilled. Several cars were illegally parked, and several others were just sitting in the middle of an aisle waiting for someone to leave. Others were circling the lot like hawks, then swooping in as soon as someone started to back out.
We pulled up alongside the building where we could see into the gym, and the inside was just as crazy as the outside. Every machine we could see was in use. So we gave up and went to Golden Corral.
OK, we didn't go to Golden Corral, but we did decide to abandon the gym for a day and insead do a little project at the house. We cleaned out our closets.
Missy and I knew we had lots of old clothes that needed to be given away, so we went through those and filled four trash bags full of them. Most of mine I'd had since high school. We also filled a bag full of old shoes.
My closet also had several random items that I had thrown into a bag and into my closet when we moved from Lawton to Oklahoma City a year and a half ago. I had never gone through that bag -- until Monday night.
It's funny the kinds of things you find when you take up a project like this. Here's some of the highlights of my random bag.
* Two rolls of quarters (ten bucks each!) and some other loose change. Why did I have two rolls of quarters? I have no idea.
* About 8 double-A batteries, not in a package but just loosely laying all over the place.
* Five pairs of headphones. One was the really old kind, with the huge circular foam pieces. The other four were earbuds, a couple of generic brands and one that came with an old MP3 player I had. No idea why I would have so many headphones, and since they were all in one place I don't know why I kept buying them.
* A couple of necklaces like guys used to wear 10 or 15 years ago. Not the gold chains from 20 years ago but the ones that came after that, with little wooden beads that fit pretty tight on your neck. I got a chuckle out of remembering that I wore those for awhile.  
* A couple of old cellphone chargers, for phones they haven't made in 7 years.
* A bottle of Motrin with an expiration date of July 2001.
* About 20 pencils, including several fancy mechanical pencils. Who even uses pencils anymore? Who ever used pencils? I'm not an architect. And I remember never having liked mechanical pencils. They break too easily and it's a pain to load them back up, kind of like a Pez dispenser.

The sad part about this project is that most of the clothes I threw out don't fit because I weigh 40 pounds more than I did when I got them. Which is why I need to go to the gym. Which must be what everyone else in Oklahoma City is thinking.