My outsides are covered in dust and my innards are marinating in grumpiness. I am continuing the battle against entropy, friends, and right at this moment my progress is feeling like a Pyrrhic victory. But you would still like to hear about it, wouldn't you? I thought you might.
Yesterday I took down all of the question-mark outerwear items from their hooks and piled them up in the office floor. Question-mark coats are the ones that people wear occasionally, like if they're going on the Boy Scout ski trip, or maybe they aren't quite the right fit or the right material or maybe they have a broken zipper or maybe their SOLE REASON for EXISTENCE is to taunt you with the first-worldliness of your problems. The question-mark coats sat there in the floor for a day, while rising discontent flowed through my innards like a mephitic and corrosive variety of lava.
Tonight I went through them with Elwood and we divvied them up: this pile should live on the coat hooks for easy access, this pile should live in the basement for occasional use, this pile should be donated, this last one requires repair before it can meet its destiny. Elwood and I had a disagreement about donating coats; he says that they are most likely to get cut up for rags or wind up in a landfill. I think, myself, that this is an excellent time of year to be donating clean and functional coats in the frozen Midwest. But I don't have any hard data about the eventual destinies of Goodwill coats. Any thoughts or links? And does anyone else with multiple older children find that coats have a weird tendency to multiply? It's perplexing.
Another lingering office issue: the printers. Today after much gnashing of teeth I got the all-in-one printer functioning again. Unfortunately, it isn't happy on the circuit where it used to live. Every time it gets jiggled, it seems to reset the circuit. Which is also where the modem/router are plugged in. Which means that using the printer usually results in the disruption of internet service. Which is problematic for wireless printing, and which also makes me wonder if it's, like, a warning of a massive electrical fire waiting to happen. Next step: find a new home for the printer. It's too bad I can't hang it from a coat hook, now that I have some extra space there.
Because I did not have enough accumulated frustration at this point, I tackled the worst of the basement clutter next. The basement, you guys -- it's been like a slow descent into hoarder hell. The camping gear can't fit in the camping closet, but there was a lot of wishful thinking about the actual size of the camping closet -- like if things were near the camping closet, maybe that would count as fitting inside. (News flash: it does not count.) There is this appalling little nest of teenager-size hiking boots. I don't know where they all came from. It's like the footwear version of the snacking-after-midnight Gremlins, in that scene where they all jumped into the swimming pool.
No matter what criminologists say about broken-window syndrome, it is a real issue for flat surfaces in houses inhabited by large families. Once somebody leaves a thing on a previously clear coffee table or what have you, it becomes fair game for anybody to set a thing there. But as of tonight the basement table is clear. The school supplies that had mysteriously migrated from the school supply shelf are back where they belong. The comic books that live in the basement are reshelved. The sleeping pads are neatly bungeed together, standing in a corner out of the way. The Nerf guns that had been spread out across the table during involved pre-Christmas discussions about which ones to pass along to a younger cousin -- back in their bin. The climbing gear has its own shelf space now instead of living on/near the basement table. This last was an Undertaking that left me with cobwebby hair and eyelashes and a less-than-sunny* disposition, but it's a past-tense Undertaking now.
*what's the opposite of sunny? thunderhead-y? typhoon-y?
OKAY, thanks for reading if you made it this far. I feel better having written it down. Does it say something about my priorities if I write the blog post about having cobwebs in my eyelashes before I take the shower that will remove the cobwebs from my eyelashes? It might say something about my priorities, I'm thinking.
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