A long weekend and a long morning

[verin_the_brown]

This weekend I cleaned the garage. This was no small feat and involved about 800 trips up and down the stairs carrying stuff. I did it in secret while hubby was out because I knew he wouldn’t approve. I really did think that when he came back and saw the garage all clean and the work already done, he would actually be happy, but he wasn’t, he

Comments

[verin_the_brown]

SB is naturally a lot tidier than I am. I think it's safe to say that I am the only slob in our household.

And I don't think I'm a truly epic slob. I do have a clutter threshold; it's just a lot higher than his.

The disorder of my environment, even the messes I make myself and only I can clean up aren't closely related to my threshold. I probably have a medium clutter threshold. It's just that I feel like I never have enough time to keep things below my threshold.

Sometimes I get depressed when things get above my clutter threshold, but often I have the more useful reaction of wanting to attack and tidy everything.

I get the urge whenever I see the clutter, but usually I don't have any time to follow the urge. Also, there is a lot of stuff that daunts me because I really don't know what to do with it. I will attack a dirty kitchen rather quickly because I know what to do with all the stuff, but stack of mail thwarts me.

Also, the toys drive me crazy. It does make me happy to simply have them off the floor, and in a box, but there are all kinds of pieces that go with certain sets, and they really need sorting, and it would be a whole day project to sort them. Whenever I start to do a little sorting, Malcolm takes an acute interest in the toys I choose to sort and put away.

I think I balance this out by being more organized about events. I've been working on getting us on a better system to be sure all our bills are paid, and I pay most of them. I try to keep our calendar up to date, and when we moved to the Android phones, I found us a joint task list we can view from each phone, allowing us to see bill due dates and grocery shopping stuff while we're out and about and can do things about them.

Hubby is like you in this way.

BUT, I really do appreciate the reduced clutter. I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to cultivate a spontaneous desire to tidy things up, but I am back to working on building better routines to help keep things from getting quite so cluttered to begin with.

Even if I had the time, I could implement such a thing because hubby would pile stuff all over our common areas, and complain if I hid it away somewhere. But he doesn't seem to realize that if he had his way, we couldn't eat a meal in our home.