Friday

Husband's at a conference and has been since Wednesday night. I am sitting on the couch with a cup of coffee (made from the expensive espresso beans I promised myself I'd only use in small quantities to make...well, to make espresso.) I just ran downstairs to take the laundry out, yelling in the empty house "wait! Wait! No, stop!" I thought I had left the extra rinse knob turned on--a waste of water and a tremendous waste of time. Whenever I accidentally do that, all my laundry momentum just dissipates in the most pathetic way. I hate doing laundry. I hate that you have to do it and then walk away and wait and then do it some more right when you were in the middle of something else. And then you have to wait again. And then do more laundry! I don't really go in for housework of any kind, but I can stay on top of dishes and even vacuuming. Those are tasks that get started and finished in the same burst of energy. You start them, you do them, you finish them. No intermissions. For that matter, there's no folding and putting-away of clothes involved.
Our closet/dresser space is negligible. And we rent, with no intention to stay here for more than eleven months from today. We are not rich people, and neither of us have lost that ascetic peculiarity of youth: spending large sums of money on things that are not fun feels like getting punched in the face. The prospect of doing so paralyzes us, and if there is any way we can rationalize doing without said un-fun object (usually a piece of furniture, sometimes items of work-appropriate clothing), rationalize we will.
In a lot of ways, I'm kind of proud of us for this frugal streak. It certainly helps to keep expenses down. And the truth is, our little house is crammed with furniture as it is. Except for our bedroom, which is really lacking storage space for my clothes. Husband uses the two closets in the guest room, plus half of our bedroom closet, to hang his enormous tall-person clothes. He has a serviceable dresser and manages to fit all his socks and underwear, plus a few sweaters, into it. That leaves me with the following: one tiny dresser, two of whose four drawers are crammed with lingerie (we are not stingy with that stuff!), one drawer for socks and one for bras and everyday underwear; one shelf for all my folding clothes; the other half of our bedroom closet and its floor for my shoes.
The fact is that this is enough space. I don't have a lot of clothes, and I only wear half of what I own. BUT the setup does not take into consideration my extreme laziness and hatred for maintenance. I loathe putting clothes away in the first place, but when doing so means carefully placing tiny shirts atop a teetering pile of other tiny shirts, I will turn my back on the precarious stack and simply live out of a laundry basket in the basement. This, of course, causes problems because eventually I am living out of every laundry basket we own and Husband at some point, in loving exasperation, has carried all those baskets into our bedroom and nothing I own is folded and only I know the secret of which basket contains clean clothing and which dirty and which has the designation of holding the elusive I-could-wear-this-again-one-more-time-if-all-else-fails jeans and bra and cute shirt.
This is why our bedroom door is always closed to outsiders, even if I have managed to scour the entire rest of the house from top to bottom. Even if our living room, kitchen, attic, guest room, bathroom and dining room are absolutely gleaming, there is a fair chance that our bedroom looks like someone ransacked it. And there is a good chance our bedroom looks ransacked because I have spent the last several weeks, well, ransacking our bedroom. It's hard to find clothes when you're me.
So every once in a while I try to convince Husband we should invest in a dresser. He wisely tells me 1) we don't want to do that because we might not need it in our next, more permanent residence 2) he won't buy another cheap dresser because they are crap and a waste of money. And being cheapskates, we are also terrible shoppers both. Therefore, our chances of happening upon the perfect, high-quality, deeply-discounted, beautiful, antique, appealing-to-our-vastly-different-design-sensibilities, dresser one day while we're out antiquing with the rest of the white people our age and demographic--well, the chances of that happening are rather slim.
So we go through this cycle, wherein I purge everything one day in an ambitious fit of determination to keep the laundry-basket-ransacked-bedroom thing at bay. I spend about three weeks staying true to the organized piles on the shelf, putting away clean clothes within mere days of their removal from the dryer. Then I slip up a little and stop matching my socks to each other. I keep them in a laundry basket or on top of the dryer. When I need them, I sort frantically through said mismatched pile, often ending up with mismatched socks on my sad feet. Thus begins the slipping-down period, wherein I stop putting clothes away. This is a vague phase--our room isn't clean, but the clutter could easily have been caused by something other than an attempted kidnapping or successful burglary. But unless I am blessed by another fit of ambition (and these are like bi-yearly at best), the ransacked phase is inevitable.
But let's not think of that now. We are currently living in a blissful state of afterglow from a happy purge I made last weekend. I even invested in a big plastic bin for sheets (bedding used to have four designated places: the bed; the floor of the laundry room; the dryer; atop the dryer). So I'm nailing it. The slipping-down was only apparent in the huge pile of laundry on our bedroom floor (baskets and hampers are never there when you need them), but I took care of that first thing this morning.
Truly, these are the halcyon days of my new, clean regime. If only I could stop yammering to the middle distance of nobody and stand up and start cleaning the rest of the house. My friend is coming to stay with me tonight. We are going to watch the first season of Buffy and maybe play that drinking game where you take a sip each time you see Buffy's bra strap. My friend's house is always immaculate, so that will be the standard to which I aspire. I will probably fall short, but at least the couch will be vacuumed.
Am working on a birthday gift for my nephew. It involves fabric, so maybe next time there will be a blog post from me that has something to do with the title of my blog. The gift might be a train wreck, but we shall see!