The Clothes Part Deux

Okay, a little break and now back to the projects at hand. Time to turn my attention back to the clothing and the photos…sigh. Charlie’s room is done, onto Andrew’s, this is where it’s going to get a little tougher since he’s growing like a weed and is continually getting “good” clothes from his two older cousins. Andrew is also getting to the point where he definitely has his favorite items of clothing to wear and it’s becoming a bit of a bone of contention between the two of us. My position is that you put on clean clothes every single day. He maintains that if the clothes aren’t actively trying to crawl into the hamper on their own they’re not dirty and if the item still even slightly resembles it’s original shape and color, it’s still good. We really have got to find some middle ground on this one. Or I can just seize my opportunity while he’s at school, that’s the plan at this point.

That's not going to work, dammit. He's growing so fast that clothes I bought mere weeks ago don't fit anymore. I'm going to need his actual body here before I can legitimately throw a single item away or put them in storage...shoot! This project has suddenly taken an ugly turn, up until this point, I have been able to purge items with reckless abandon. I have been the only authority, my opinion of what's tossable has been the only that mattered, it seems that time has passed. A moment to mourn my organizational autonomy. Deep sigh and off to corral the resistant boy. He's going to LOVE this project as it's going to consume PS2 time and require effort on his part...and trying on every pair of pants currently stuffed in his dresser. Threats and bribery may be my only options here. What can I offer a fourteen year old boy in exchange for repeatedly dressing and undressing over the course of an afternoon? I'm thinking the "you'll have a clean room and organized dresser" reward probably isn't as appealing to him as it is to me. The "I'm not doing your laundry until this is done" threat really doesn't seem to strike the desired amount of terror into his teenaged heart as I had hoped. I believe he was mocking me when he fell to his knees, grabbed my ankles and cried "Please mom, anything but THAT!" And once upon a time I was THRILLED he was talking...but that was long, long ago.

I have discovered recently that many 'conversations' with my son don't seem to require any talking on my part. The Playstation and this very computer are in the same room, frequently he's on the PS2 while I'm here at my trusty keyboard, he keeps a running patter going while he refights WW2 and I don't think I'm actually supposed to respond. On the rare occasions he says something I think is directed at me and respond accordingly, I get a rather withering stare and a "I was talking to the guy on the game." Silly me, I thought it was just digitally created figures on a Tv screen, ain't technology grand?

The Fruits of Labor

Now that I have paid the drug store the equivalent of the yearly operating budget of a small European country, I have retrieved all my film and am confronted with the photographic evidence of my organizational transgressions. Shame on me, I look through the envelopes at pictures of Christmas concerts, first steps and family gatherings long past and my resolve is stiffened, I will conquer my own chaos and perhaps branch out to assist others in their own personal journeys toward serenity. That could be the key to my first million! A home-based business, I come in and teach the lost and suffering souls how to achieve Nirvana by alphabetizing their CD collections and perfecting their household’s entire organizational structure. But back to me, it’s with more than a little dismay that I realize one of the envelopes of photos include a friend’s wedding and he and his delighted looking bride in the photographs have been divorced for a year and a half. I’m thinking I won’t be forwarding them the second set of prints I ordered. For now these pictures will join their neglected brethren in the teetering pile of shoeboxes currently living in the guest room. I promise, I’ll come back for you! I swear can hear them calling “Come back, Shane!” as I shut the door.

My dear friend Eden called from Miami today and announced that she saw on CNN this morning that we were eighty degrees below zero with the wind chill and that she’s roughly one hundred and sixty degrees warmer at her house and is going swimming in the back yard this afternoon. There’s really only one appropriate response to a statement like this: “Bite Me” and hang up the phone. She'll get hers, though...hurricane season isn't that far away.

My reward for sticking with this project for more than a few days arrived yesterday. The fountain for the Zen bedroom I've been bidding for on Ebay is here! It's currently filling our bedroom with the gentle murmur of water falling over rocks in a riverbed. It took some doing to get to this point as the phrase “some assembly required” came into play, and by “some” they actually meant “you might as well take a welding class, apprentice to a plumber and grow your own bamboo, it’ll be less time-consuming”, bastards. Both cats and the dog seem quite interested in the new addition to our room but they’ll leave it alone once the newness wears off, right?
Upon opening the box yesterday, I realized with a sinking heart that this was a project that would have to wait for the clear light of day before proceeding and there was no way I was getting it put together before bed last night. Looking at the list of tools needed to assemble this wonder of engineering, it called for a 6mm metric nut driver and a T9 bit Torx screwdriver. Of these, I understood the word “nut” and the word “screwdriver”, I was in over my head upon opening the box. Oh boy. The decision was made to tackle this one anew in the morning. There are certain benefits to living in a farming based area, those farm boys have tools the rest of the world couldn’t begin to imagine and hidden stores of ingenuity that can save your sanity in times like this. A couple of calls to Dan’s buddies and soon we had the resources needed to assemble the calm-inducing, inner-peace bringing bit of the Far East I found on Ebay. So the inner peace and Zen-like calm was hard won, Dan and I have decided that we can work on separate projects in the same room but never on the same project together…ever again. If he’d just do things the way I think they should be done, it would have been hunky-dory, but nooooooo, he has to be all instruction-reading, direction-following and I know he does it just to piss me off.