Category: Untidy Heap

It does not bode well for your activity level during the day when you resort to hitting “Random Entry” on Wikipedia in hopes of reading something interesting.
Particularly sad when, upon doing so for 10 minutes, the most interesting entry you get is on a former Real World star-turned-professional-wrestler, and the other random entries include three appearances of the same small township in Germany.
After all the hubbub surrounding the wedding/New York trip/sightseeing with the family/visiting with my agent, the last few weeks have been nigh on bucolic… complete with wolf-attacks*, granted, but still… It’s been a lot of house-cleaning, donating of old stuff to charity, planting new things in the front yard and on the back deck.
In a few days, Kate and I head to Los Cabos for our honeymoon — the sort of vacation that involves very little activity and a fair number of books and margaritas — if anyone has any fun suggestions on things to do or see while lounging under the seaside sun**, please drop them in the comments.
Aside from that, I’d like to talk about this little writing project I started up, but not quite yet: I think I’m going to work on it a bit, first, and then reveal it once it picks up a bit more steam. This I will say: like Storyball, it’s a kind of writing outlet (and game, of course also a kind of game), combined with my own dependable addiction to futzing around with new web technologies.
More later: in the meantime, I’ll keep typing away and might have something fun to share in a few weeks.
* – There was no actual wolf attack, though my grandchildren might hear a far different story when and if they ever ask about the no-doubt handsome scar running along the side of my left thumb. And the back of my hand. And the ones on my feet. And big toe. Ouch.
** – Ahhh, sun. The dependable sun of a desert resort, not the inconstant and fickle Denver sun, which is blazingly uncomfortable one day, and hiding under a cloudy blanket of sleet and rain the next. The great irony of the phrase global warming is that the specific results are more shocking locally, and only involve extremes of heat about half the time.

It’s 1987, you’re a child, and your family videotapes you dancing to a then-popular song.
What do you do, 20 years later?
You dance with your childself.
Watch all the way through. Guaranteed to make you smile, even if you’re covered in bruises and lacerations from breaking up a dog fight a few days ago.

Last night, for no particular reason, I moved from ‘folding laundry and putting things away’ to ‘cleaning out the closets’ mode, and ended up putting four bags of (clean, entirely serviceable) clothes out by the front door to be donated to charity. We’ll probably drop them off tomorrow, since we’re also dropping off some old computers for specialized recycling, and donating the chairs from an dining room set that we replaced during the wedding (the old table is going to meet a circular saw and become a couple of bookshelves in the kitchen area). In addition, we’re replacing our suddenly-non-functional dishwasher this weekend, and need to figure out a way to get the old washing machine and a (regrettably) broken elliptical machine out of the basement. It’s a spring cleaning extravaganza, and has me eyeing the rest of the house with a hungry, contemplative expression.

Time to get rid of a little clutter…

Now, to be fair, neither I (nor Kate) are generally predisposed to clutter in the first place, so it’s not as though the house is that bad. Large stacks of papers don’t last very long. Counter tops stay relatively clear. Rooms themselves aren’t usually burdened with too much furniture: I’ve lived here for over half a decade and the front living room has gone entirely unfurnished for that entire time – until it came into service as a play room for my daughter. The wide, empty space suited me just fine — it was one less thing that needed straightening or organizing when people came over.
I like open space in a house, and Kate’s lived in New York apartments most of her adult life, where a walk-in closet is worth more than a bedroom the size of a walk-in closet — I think she’s still getting used to the idea that our living space has square feet measurements with four digits. (You should see her in the local supermarket; it’s like Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson.)

Not Kate.
And yet… what few knick knack shelves I have brim to overflowing with current and not-so photos of friends and family, and I definitely have problems with keeping things that I will never, ever, EVER use or interact with again in my life, but which carry some nearly-forgotten sentimental importance; while the open space in my house is pretty clear, closets and drawers often brim to overflowing.
Every so often, I give such things a stern look and start tossing.
That’s how the closet clearing came about. By rights, I shouldn’t have any more old clothes left to throw out — I’ve dropped 60 pounds in the last five years and kept it off, and have long since donated any and all clothing that old-me needed around; well over a dozen trash bags of L, XL, XXL, and even some XXXL stuff over the last half-decade — what I’m taking to Goodwill tomorrow are bags of t-shirts with logos I no longer find funny, shirts I still like but will never wear because they’re four sizes too big, gifts that I never wore and never will, and even a couple old suits and sports jackets that I kept around ‘just in case’, even though they make me look like a dressed up scarecrow in a fat man’s field. It was all just junk I didn’t really need but didn’t have the guts to throw out at the time.
Weeks like this are freeing and a bit traumatic at the same time. I really, truly, LOVE clearing junk out of the house — I love the feeling that there’s more air to breathe, thanks to the open space created — at the same time, everything we own has a memory and emotion attached to it; we like the person who gave us that shirt, even though we’ll never wear a doubleknit maroon macramé tank top. If I could look at a pile of stuff and know which things I’ll need and which I’ll never use again, things would be simple, but it almost never is.
It helps (tremendously) not to think about the STUFF itself, and focus on what you want to accomplish, but it’s still hard.
Hopefully, the pay off (a clean, shiny, junk-free -reduced living space next week) will be worth it.
Edit to add: Kate wanted me to mention a book that came in for me via Amazon this morning: It’s All Too Much, by TLC Clean Sweep guru Peter Walsh. Its arrival is a nice bit of synchronicity, but I didn’t mention it in the post because (a) I’ve only read the marginally schmaltzy introduction and (b) the book was actually purchased as research for a “working smarter” training project I’m developing at the new job.

Some of you have been scarred in the past.
It’s perfectly understandable.
Affectionate fans of the great Dr. Seuss,
Risking two long hours on a gamble.
The Grinch live action, while quite energetic
Was quite a deplorable mess.
The cat in the hat? We don’t like Seuss like that.
The f* they were thinking? Can’t guess.
So I heard about Horton, and didn’t succumb
Thought it would be either awful or dumb.
But time has gone by, and reviews have been high
and Kaylee is old enough now: “we could try…”
I crossed all my fingers, and knocked on some wood,
And went to the movies, hoping it would be good.
And?…
It was smart, it was funny, it made my cheeks ache
from all of the smiling; it’s really that great.
It got me laughing, it brought me to tears,
It’s the best children’s movie I’ve seen in six years.
Kaylee laughed, and she cowered
She cheered and she glowered
She clapped for the hero when we got to the end
And wanted to see it all over again.
What do I think? Should you go see this flick?
YES. For fun family time, this sure does the trick.
It’s crafted with love and affection and glee
with some real touching moments that sure got to me.
It’s not the same thing as the book, read aloud,
but I’d like to think Dr. Seuss would be proud.