I Should Start A Business

Ask my husband about my abilities and talents, and he may prattle on for a few minutes. I'm a good mom. I'm on hell of a writer (I'm not tooting my own horn, he's been telling me this since 2002). I can play piano. I one baaaaaad crossword puzzle-solver. But at the tippy-top of this list, beyond diaper-changing and bottle-making, above whipping up a peanut butter sandwich, is this: throwing things away.

I've thrown it all away...old registration cards that we ended up needing to get out of a ticket that wasn't our fault (another story for another time), silverware, flyers for affairs we were invited to, magazines we were supposed to keep (don't ask), greeting cards, just everything. I don't mean to throw away important stuff, I just get hasty about getting things done, I [oddly enough] hate clutter, and I hate having unneeded things. At the top of this list is paper. It's unsightly, unstackackable, and a general waste of space.

My husband is my polar opposite. He. Keeps. Everything. And I do mean everything. He keeps magazines. He must have 500 magazines in our house. They're in our entertainment center, in boxes in the closet, in the bathroom, in his locker at work, in the car. He says he keeps them "just in case I need to know how to do something in the future."

Isn't that what the internet and library are for?


AT ANY RATE....

I have a habit of letting my cleaning and paperwork get away from me. I let it pile up until we start getting late notices running out of room for all of it and then I have to spend a week digging through it. It really sucks and you'd think I'd come up with a better system to manage it, but I just don't have that ambition yet.

I'm a real self-sabotager. I don't want to create the system to manage the overflowing recyle bin of a desk and countertop I have, yet I don't want to deal with it when I can't see into my kitchen because the piles of crap are in the way.

But I performed a miracle this morning. I put my ass in gear and did it. THREE MONTHS worth of paperwork and I organized it all. I also picked up most of the rest of the house! Such a relief! Here's the story in a series of pictures.

Before



After