Weekend

[pegkerr]

I'm a little slow getting started this morning. Short on sleep. It was a quiet weekend, but pleasant. Rob and I went to his brother's fiftieth birthday party on Saturday night. We had our family picture taken for Christmas cards and the girls' annual picture taken together yesterday. They turned out really well, and I'll post them later this week when we get them back from the photographer.

By myself, I worked on cleaning up the house last night. Well, just the living room, really. It is just so frustrating: what happens is that Rob starts piling up stuff. If the piles of papers gets too high, he gets a box and shoves them in, and then sticks them in a corner. And then another box gets piled on top, and then another, and then another.

Rob just doesn't see the point of putting things away or throwing things away. He just stacks them, one on top of another. And he brings more stuff into the house that we have no use for, just because it theoretically might be useful to someone, somewhere, someday.

It's a continual state of battling entropy. We don't need that. Don't bring it into the house. Put it away.

He is an inexhaustible source of chaos.

Comments

[jbru.livejournal.com]

Ironically, he likely sees himself as a source of order and the collecting and stacking of things is his way to control the chaos in his own mind.

[mayakda.livejournal.com]

He'd probably make a good antique & curio dealer, in another life.

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

At least it's in boxes? We've just spent several months (on and off, not continuously!) excavating the back bedroom, where it was stacked willy-nilly on bookshelves that were straining from the weight. And Meg has started to become an explosion of paper, thanks to preschool and her love of drawing pictures. (But only on clean sheets of paper; not on the piles of leftover pages I've printed for work but no longer need. ::eyeroll::)

Despite my best intentions to get rid of all extraneous paper -- and we did ditch a lot of it -- I STILL have a laundry basket full of papers sitting next to my desk. I think I'll be battling paper forever. *sigh*

In any case, battle on, brave Peg!

tangential

[redbird]

Oh, dear.

I see the point of putting things away, and throwing away some other things, but I'm not very good at it. There are some practical/logistical aspects to this, to do with two people in 600 square feet for 20 years, but it's also true that I really am not good at it. But I do see the point, and am pleased when I or cattitude manage some of it.

A large part of why I've been mostly getting library books lately is that they have a defined place to be put away: they go back in my bag, and the library finds a place to put them, rather than me having to do so.

[msavi.livejournal.com]

You have just described my husband as well. And I used to think that I am a packrat. I think one is disqualified for that label when one prefers to be able to walk through a room without stepping on something to having a room full of groovy somethings.

[irinaauthor.livejournal.com]

Steve is the same way. I just throw it all out. He had this tremendous pile of mail that started on the table, and then had to move to the desk, and finally to the floor because it just kept getting bigger. Every now and then I'd say, "You know...that pile of your mail..." and he'd snap, "I know! I will take care of it!" But did he? Of course not. Finally, when he was out one day, I got a trash bag and just threw the whole gigantic pile away. I didn't even sort through it; I just figured that, if he hadn't had to dig through it by now, there wasn't anything in there that he needed to keep.

That was four months ago, and he still hasn't noticed that the mountain of old mail that had been on the floor next to his desk isn't there anymore.

[littlecatfeet.livejournal.com]

My dad does the same thing, bringing in things that we might theoretically have a use for someday. We have boxes of old wires, although I can't remember the last time he did a wiring project, mountains of dead hard drives that he had been going to melt down (which, as it turns out, you can't do), and piles of metal casting paraphernalia everywhere. It's been there for years, and that's just in the house itself, not the garage or the shed.

And then he gets mad at his mom for not throwing away things that no longer have any use, failing to see that he is exactly the same way.