playing rubik’s cube with my garage

I hate putting stuff away.  At least until it starts falling over on me.  My garage was starting to look like the aisles in Warehouse 13.  Stuff flowing over until it threatens to topple on an unwary passer-by.  I have been working on getting the clutter under control.  I started on Monday and it is still unfinished.  I have thrown away and consolidated and re-arranged and put in smaller boxes and put the smaller boxes in larger boxes and emptied boxes into plastic drawers and thrown the plastic drawers into the trash.  Then I turn around and look and the blasted stuff has multiplied.

My favorite wizard, Harry Dresden, uses pizza to bribe little faeries (like Tinkerbell)  to guard him and made a deal with some other magical folk to clean his apartment.  I would gladly even put aside my moral qualms and have a house-elf around to help me.  Part of my issue is that someone decided that we could live in a house while it was being remodeled.  And move two houses worth of possessions into one house.  I’ve probably told y’all this story, so I won’t go into that again.  But, really, why can’t we have little Tinkerbells or brownies or house-elves or even a robot to do our hated household chores.  I will draw the line at getting higher primates to help, I’ve seen the old Plant of the Apes movies and I know how that goes.

How did I get here?  I keep all those little screws and nails and extra pieces from some piece of put-together furniture I no longer own, why?  And why do companies give you those little baby plastic inserts to put up stuff on the wall?  They don’t even have the tapered ones anymore.  You get one chance to drill the right sized hole and then the insert spins around and you lose it and have to go out to the garage and look for some leftover ones from that old put-together shelf you broke last year.  Oh, that’s why I keep all those extra pieces.

I am the same way about washing the dishes.  I HATE washing dishes, but it is my lot in life to have to do them cause I am a kept man and that is part of my life now.  If I would just do them every day, how bad could it be?  But, no, I wait for 5 days and then everything smells bad and the grits are caked on the pan and the baked on cheese from the nachos on the cookie sheet is now like dried superglue and I just scream (inwardly) and berate myself for letting things get this far.  (And NO I won’t write shorter sentences  I hate having to stop and put in a comma or a period and start a new sentence, so there.)   Same with my garage.  I get tired from working on the house and just lay my tools and extra materials, well, wherever.  Then they go hide.  I know that Toy Story is true because the same things happen with tools.  I mean, how else can you explain a tool you know you left on the workbench yesterday ending up underneath a box I re-re-packed last month?

I’m a mess.  I admit it, I have no self-discipline.  Well, unless I will myself to eat half a cheesecake.  Man, that takes some discipline.  Why can’t I apply that same discipline to keeping my tools picked up?  Or use my new super-self-discipline to throw extra parts away?!  Or keep them for a week, and then throw then away.  Okay, I have officially gone off the raving-lunatic-crazy-former-IT-guy deep end of the pool.

Thanks for all the nice comments.  If you wish to get in touch with me outside of the comments section, send me an email at:  geek@purposefulgeek.com or purposefulgeek@gmail.com.  I gotta go now and see how much one of those new Japanese household robots cost.  Maybe I can just make one for myself with spare parts from an old bubblegum machine and a broken orange juice squeezer.