Welcome to a new week at AnchoredScraps.com!  If you find yourself doing any kind of decluttering in getting ready for the Holidays ahead – I wanted to share with you the expression ‘moving the cannonballs’.  

Think about the expression after reading today’s blog post and see if you don’t smile when faced with decluttering.

In our family and with our friends in time you will hear the expression ‘moving the cannonballs’ – it is used to denote having activity but not making any real progress; it is in reference to an episode from the 1960’s television series: “The Wild Wild West“.   The television series ran on “CBS for four seasons (104 episodes) from September 17, 1965 to April 4, 1969. Two television movies were made with the original cast in 1979 and 1980, and the series was adapted for a motion picture in 1999.”   One description I read said to think of it as James West in the Wild West with all of the gadgets set to that time.

For some time now I’ve been looking for the exact episode and finally came across it!    In the episode “The Night of the Pelican” our hero, James West (Robert Conrad), goes undercover, who “masquerades as a military prisoner at forbidding Ft. Alcatraz” – he keeps getting assigned to move 105 iron cannonballs – in the three pyramids of cannonballs – (each weighs forty-two pounds) all over the grounds because each time there’s ‘only one minor little problem’.

At the 14:04 minute mark, you will see one of the vignettes of the cannonballs (there are several) in this 1968 episode The Night of the Pelican from The Wild Wild West.  [<-Updated 10/26/2016 YouTube referenced video is no longer available so have removed the embedded video from here.  HR]

So there you have it – an expression to help you – see if you don’t find yourself when moving one stack of file boxes around the house and not dealing with the clutter itself that this expression fits!

Here’s to cheering us on with our decluttering and minimizing the cannonballs in our lives!