Clutter!

Today, as I was reaching over a wastebasket and a bin of magazines, through the small space between the cat climber and the end table, and nearly cutting off the circulation in my hand as I wedged the cord I was holding into the outlet behind the end table, I realized something:

I live in an obstacle course.

Mind you, Iwanski and I are not the messiest people in the world. But we do tend to collect clutter. And that clutter tends to accumulate and accumulate until one day, in a fit of frenzied housecleaning, I try to go through everything and straighten it all out.

Recently, I was going through a large folder that holds all our receipts and user guides from various electronic items we had purchased. I found receipts from items we had bought in the year 1999. I kid you not. I also found user guides for a boombox that we got rid of three years ago, and one for our old vacuum. Yeah, I really needed to keep those. Why would I need a user guide for a vacuum, anyway? Step 1: Turn on vacuum. Step 2: Suck things into vacuum. Yeah, that’s pretty complicated.

Anyway, it was a relief to go through all that stuff and toss out all the old receipts and user manuals.

The only problem was that the stack of papers that I’d accumulated for recycling was so large, it didn’t fit into our recycling bin. So I stacked them up next the recycling bin, where the pile grew and grew with more and more paper items for the next couple of weeks—while we stepped over it every day on our way in and out of the front door.

Are you beginning to see a problem here?

What I really need to do is take a week off work, go through all our clutter and organize it, and bring any garbage and recycling down to the dumpsters in our 1st floor garbage room.

It’s either that, or keep climbing over stuff.

Hmm, I really do like obstacle courses…