When I got up to investigate, and looked in there, it looked like Santa's elves had an explosive bodily-function accident inside the house. There were boxes and junk everywhere. My dragons had bows and ribbons on their heads and looked like a roomful of kindergarten girls had a "dress up" competition with them. Tinsel was getting whipped around by the ceiling fan. Snowmen and women, reindeer, candles, wrapping paper, tape, tissue paper, and an assortment of other festive finery were strewn about.
Blinking at the carnage, I decided it was best to crawl back into the office, close the door quietly, and lock it. Before I could execute my escape, Dudette simply looked up and curled her lips back to bare teeth and said, "I'm tired of having 7 gillion boxes of unmarked Holiday stuff. So I'm going through it, organizing it, and throwing away stuff we haven't used in the past 75 years."
Now, I'm not going to even try and pretend I was interested in helping. I know better. Her definition of junk and mine, are on two separate pages in the dictionary. This is like asking if it's safe to poke a hungry bear in the eye with your finger. You might do it once, but it will be the last time too. I just nodded and ducked back into the safety of my locked office.
And I won't even attempt to describe the noises that followed over the course of the next hour or two. But lets just say Hollywood wants a copy of them for their next explosive action/blow-em up/worldly disaster film for the grand finale.
Once she was finished, I lugged about 30 pounds of "stuff" to the trash, CK has another 30 pounds she can claim as her own (if she wants it), everything else was consolidated into about half the number of boxes. AND...EVERYTHING was labeled. She even took it all back to the basement for storage.
She then sent an e-mail to CK and let her know NOT to buy any more wrapping paper, ribbon, tape, bows, boxes, or gift bags for the next 20 years.
What got trashed, stashed, or given away? Dunno. Don't care. There was enough stuff tossed around at the beginning, I was thinking we could open our own store. We had enough stuff to do decorations twice over in AND on the house. We could have earned the title of "Freak 3" in the neighborhood. But I figured if I haven't looked for it or used it in enough time that I don't even know what we have, then I won't miss it.
And I am confident that the really good stuff, sentimental stuff, and valuable stuff is still there. So I'm good.
Crazy cleaning happens.
ah yes, it's always good when someone else goes through it for you :-)
Posted by: bod | December 19, 2009 at 02:47 PM