ohbloodyhell8

If only cleaning my home were as easy as cleaning the fish bowls.  Granted, by writing this post, I’m delaying the cleaning of Captain Jack Sparrow’s bowl and Cretaceous’ bowl, but the point is still valid.  It’s a simple process and the results are immediate and bring happiness to the residents.

The problem remains that we have too much stuff.  We’re not hoarders-yet.  We’re pack rats.  We just hang on to stuff that we do not need.  This Christmas, hubby got a new coffee maker.  He actually wanted to keep the old one…just in case.  We have a lot of just in case items.  Two televisions down in the family room-that no one ever watches.  To be fair, there are other issues with the family room.  Two of our senior (read-lots of accidents) pets live down there so we don’t do much with the room.  The pets are old, they can’t help it.  But I digress…we are the proud owners of only one coffee maker.

Stuff.  How did we get this much stuff?  Why do we keep acquiring more?  I just don’t know.  Broken typewriters…really?  Do we need it?  Why don’t I simply bring it to the drop off place?  Part of it is time.  In the evenings, I want to be with my boys.  The trick would be to do the cleaning with the boys.  It would help them learn to let go of stuff that you don’t need or that is broken.

But even beyond the stuff that should actually be easy to get rid of, we have a lot of stuff.  I can’t decide about all of the stuff, because a lot of it is my hubby’s stuff.  The boys have purged toys, yet they could get rid of even more.  Now some might say I don’t need every Stephen King book in hard cover and paperback, but we can keep some things.  I feel like my Uncle Stevie books balance out the 40+ Concentration games my hubby has in his collection.

Bit by bit…foot by foot…inch by inch…simplicity will be mine.  We just painted the bathroom.  Ironically, that’s the second time since we’ve moved into our home that we’ve decorated the bathroom.  This time we let the boys pick the theme-dinosaurs.  I know, you’re shocked.  It looks good.  I want to repaint most of the house and rip down the paneling in the stairway (yep, house built in the late 60s/early 70s-you should see my golden harvest kitchen appliances!).  I have told myself that I can’t do any of the “fun” stuff till I do the icky stuff-the fun stuff will be my reward.

But tonight I clean fish bowls.