I don't want to jinx it, but after a few months of feeling just deeply disinclined to attack any of the chaos in my house, I seem to be getting the bug again. I was waffling about whether I would try to do anything about it Sunday, so I went down to flip the laundry and then did a little bit in the basement because DID I MENTION Angus is coming home for Thanksgiving? and I thought perhaps it behooved us to fix things so he didn't have to blaze a trail through piles of stuff to get to his bed (although, to be scrupulously fair, a lot of that stuff is still baseball-related). There's a table right outside the half-walls in front of the bed that turns into a dumping ground. There is also a table beside the dryer that turns into a dumping ground. I suddenly realized that, even if I didn't have time to get down to the finer details of dealing with the pile of crap, ALL of the pile of said crap could go in the laundry room where it will not be seen by any casual visitor. I seem to have a subconscious habit of spreading the crap around so there's a little bit of crap in a lot of places, when having MOST of the crap in ONE place (laundry room, back storage room) really makes the most sense. Although I realize that 'sense' is perhaps not the best word to apply to this situation.
I did some other stuff, then came down and sorted through a pile of stuff that had collected near the coffee table in the living room, which is at the front of the house. We don't really go in there unless we have company, and Matt tends to come in from work and drop his bag on one of the chairs flanking the table, so again, stuff collects. I separated out a couple of things and photographed them and posted them on my Facebook community giving group. There was a yoga mat I bought Eve when they were doing yoga at lunchtime at her elementary school - I have since bought her a bigger, thicker one, so this one was superfluous - some stationery with roses on it that is not my style, and some clothes that seemed nice enough to see if anyone specific wanted them rather than just donating them to the thrift store.
Someone took the yoga mat almost immediately. Someone asked for the stationery, so I put it in the mailbox. She said she'd be there after 5, but it was still in there when I left for work the next day.
My mood for this kind of thing is very inconsistent. Sometimes I'm happy to leave something out for several days (it's in a bag, it's sheltered from weather, come grab it whenever). I also almost never ask for anything on the group, unless it's unbelievably perfectly something I need that it would therefore be dumb to spend money on, because I have trouble enough remembering to brush my teeth and breathe these days, never mind making any additional stops. Sometimes it annoys me inordinately when someone says definitively they will come by a certain time and they do not.
When we first started, I left a pair of kids' snowpants on my front step for MONTHS. My parents are coming over this weekend, so subconsciously I was probably thinking of my mom saying "why is something hanging out of your mailbox?' when I messages the person and politely asked when she was planning to come.
The usual response when you remind someone that they forgot to pick up something is that they breathlessly detail some crazy emergency that just happened - their child broke a tooth! their mom tripped over a feral hog and needed emergency surgery! a meteorite crashed through their roof and started a fire! And like, I get it. I do. But this person said "Oh, I'm so sorry, I completely forgot, I will come today".
I was deep into a paragraph about how refreshing it was to have someone just admitting to have forgotten rather than making up some story fit for this year's Guinness World Records when I realized that I do not know this woman and my effusive thanks would probably terrify her to the point where she wouldn't want to come within a hundred metres of my house, so I erased it and gave it to you instead.
Although this Facebook memory because funny Eve is funny, pretty much from her first word on.
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