Dead man walking

Jess is going to kill me. In cold blood. And it is fully justified.

I've never been able to handle clutter.  (Not even mental or emotional.) That isn't to say I don't create clutter; only that it grates away at me, and I can only ignore for a very short period before I have to deal with it. That doesn't mean hide it, I mean taking care of it, putting it away, getting rid of it, whatever needs to be done. (If you really want to drive me nuts, put stuff away where it doesn't belong and watch what happens.)

So we moved a week ago, and Jess and I were pretty good about going through the boxes and putting everything away – there were only a few boxes left, and those were primarily books as we don't have any bookshelves yet. But then last Friday, I cleared out the storage unit. This is where all of my stuff has been sitting for the past seven months, plus quite a bit of Jess' stuff she had squirreled away. It all got put into the third bedroom where it was completely out of the way, and you could close the door and not even see it.

Except I knew it was there, and when Jess left for a three-day work conference, I waited all of 15 minutes before I emptied all of the boxes.

Imagine how much stuff was in a 150 cubic foot storage locker. Now imagine it spread from one end of the house to the other. If I thought a room full of boxes was bad, obviously I hadn't considered the alternative. But I went through it, all of it, and put what I thought was worthwhile away, and put the rest back in boxes (albeit organized boxes) for Jess to review.

The problem is, most of it was Jessica's, and she doesn't like me touching any of her stuff. I touched all of it. I moved it around. And I even made judgment calls on what should be kept and what should be gotten rid of (although obviously I didn't get rid of anything).

So I know I'm a dead man, but that's actually quite comforting.  It means I won't be there when she finds the giant hole I made in the living room wall.