Skirmishes

You may have been wondering how our ongoing battle against the forces of Entropy and Chaos has been going. Then again, you might just not care. Well, either way, I'm going to tell some stories, and you can read or not as you wish.

We've had a lot of skirmishes here in the house and the nearby environs. DH won a major battle in the garage, but ever since then, we have had some painful setbacks and have had to retreat from the front in several rooms in order to regroup. I've recently begun to suspect that there is an alliance between the forces of E and C and the gremlins that keep taking my portable DVD player. I wish I knew the terms of that agreement, because I think I can offer better to get the gremlins back on our side ... or just to be neutral at least.

While Toddler and I were at the funeral, DH made huge strides in cleaning up the garage. We could put a car in it now ... if the door worked. He even cleaned up part of the piles of clothes from last October when we tried our experiment with the "Clean Sweep" method of cleaning a closet. (For those of you who never watched the show, that means taking everything out at once and not putting anything back until you have decided that you absolutely need it. Of course, in this house, that means trying everything on first.) It's been almost a year since we started this exercise. I still have next to nothing in my closet, and since we added the dressers, I have very little in the drawers, either! I lost one of my best pairs of shorts at the bottom of the pile for the entire summer until uncovered by DH during the grand clean-a-thon.

On the "regroup and retreat" front, there has been an attack of the business suit on our vanity. At first the vanity got buried under bags of stuff from our now defunct craft business that I am planning on sending to friends or storing for my own future use, but that seemed okay because the stuff was all in neat boxes and bags. Then, gradually, the boxes and bags disappeared under a week's worth of business clothing. Everyone denies putting them there.

We scored a small triumph by sending a box of outgrown Toddler clothing to my sister and her littlest, but she retaliated by sending back 4 boxes of maternity clothes and 3 boxes of baby clothes. The irony is I swear I only sent her one box of baby clothes. They grew and multiplied in her house. Toddler and I bravely set out to sort all the clothing and combine it with the things that we still had in the attic. I believe it ended up being 9 or 10 boxes being stored in the attic in total. In the process of bringing some of them down to be filled, Toddler spotted a box of toys we had stored a few months ago and reclaimed each and every toy in the box (all 4 of them). Grrrr. Well, I did what I could, and in the process I managed to ship out another box to Sister via our mother. I'm sure when it comes back to me it will be at least 3 boxes. I just don't know how that happened that I ended up the grand repository of all things baby and maternity. If you know me, you understand how weird that really is.

Yesterday I decided that I had had enough of this retreating, and I lashed out first thing in the morning and had the vacuumed and the kitchen floor wiped up (yes, on my knees), before Toddler's appointment at 10 AM. Promptly after the appointment, Toddler dumped a full 8 ounces of milk and pediasure mix on the kitchen floor. One step forward, two steps back.

Yesterday the diaper box arrived from diapers.com in the nick of time. We were down to our last handful of diapers, and I couldn't figure out how we had gone through them in such a short time. I went to put them away in the closet, and, mysteriously, a whole half pack reappeared in the top of the closet. Ok, gremlins, what do you need with diapers?

I could go on and on, but I think you get the drift. We are making good progress in many areas, but Entropy and Chaos are pushing back hard. I have to confess, we are stalemated at the moment.

I have sorted much of the old craft business stuff for donation and shipping, which is good, but the storage of these "sorted" items is more than the "unsorted" volume. I know we will make dramatic strides when I start getting them all to their destination on Monday. Then we will have real progress. I shudder to think what the backlash will be at that time, though. Oh, well. I know I'll have at least a few moments of blissful un-clutter before E and C has time to strike back.

Now ... to finish sorting all the loose pieces in the toybox and matching them with the correct toys ... and to steal back those refugees from the attic that Toddler swiped from the box!