I knew we’d face certain challenges when we got married because, with just a couple of exceptions, Mr. Kewlstuff and I are polar opposites.
Most of it is harmless stuff… he eats his steak well done, I eat mine rare; I’m an early bird, he’s a night owl; he’s a white bread kind of guy, I’m a whole-grain whole-wheat kind of gal.
But some of it is more of the two-worlds-collide variety. Like the fact that I lean more towards minimalism while he’s a bit of a pack rat.
I absolutely abhor clutter. It is damn near physically painful for me to be in a cluttered room. But, being a “collector” of sorts, clutter doesn’t faze him. So, to prevent us from eventually being featured in an episode of Hoarders, I’ve had to become fairly adept at dealing with it.
It started out innocently enough. He’d empty his pockets onto the top of his dresser at the end of the day. In an attempt to contain the mess, I put a basket on his dresser to hold the contents of his pockets. Problem was, he started each day anew, and what he’d left there the night before never made it back out. It eventually overflowed to the top of the dresser anyway, at which point I realized that all I had really done was added a basket to the clutter.
Obviously I was losing ground, so the only logical solution was to install a closet organizer, eliminating the need for dressers entirely. At one point, the only furniture in the room was the bed and the armoire. It was blissfully sparse, and I didn’t have to wake up to stray sheet-metal screws and zippo lighters anymore.
Predictably, once the dressers were eliminated, he began to empty his pockets onto other flat surfaces; the kitchen table, the coffee table, the bathroom vanity. To his credit, most of it was making it’s way back into his pockets. But he recently added a new twist… when he picks up his change, he leaves the pennies behind.
Here is where I’d like to point out that 1) there is a jar on a shelf on his side of the closet for spare change and 2) while I was making every effort to ignore them, these little piles of pennies kept multiplying until they were on nearly every flat surface in the house.
Since they weren’t going to magically disappear, and life’s too short to actually argue over pennies, I finally just gathered them all up myself.
And then spent 1/2 hour redistributing them.
He will soon begin finding those missing piles of pennies… in the toes of his shoes, his boots and every single freaking pair of his clean socks.
It should take the better part of six weeks for him to find them all because (and I just realized this) he has way too many socks. Apparently, he collects those too.
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