I have two questions—no, three questions.

The first question is: How did I manage to buy such uncomfortable shoes?

The second question is: Seriously, did I try them on someone else’s feet or what?

And the third question is for the Tidy among you. It involves towel storage.

I have some photos to accompany this question, and I feel a little nervous because I will be showing you some of My Mess. The problem is that if I label my messiness as Bad, I’m also labeling everyone messy as or messier than me as Bad. Like, you know when a size 8 friend is talking about how very fat she is? And if you’re a size 14, you’re thinking, “If she thinks SHE’S fat, what must she think of ME?” It’s all very well to say she’s talking about herself and not other people, but what she’s done is drawn her line, and now you know what side of her line you stand on.

People don’t always INTEND to draw a line, they may be making a self-deprecating remark to decrease judgment and alleviate self-conscious anxiety. It’s just that their self-deprecating remark also deprecates a whole group of other people who fall into their category and GOSH I do think that’s something to be avoided.

Where was I? Oh, yes: so this is why I’m NOT going to make any self-consciousness-alleviating remarks about the photos. Even though I am feeling self-conscious about them.

What I need advice on is a Towel System. I used to keep towels on a shelf in the bathroom closet. Which is the perfect place for towels. The problem is, it’s also the perfect place for a cat to seek refuge from children. I used to have a Cat Towel that I spread out over the pile of towels for fur-deflection, but then the towel would fall off, or the cat would knock over the pile of towels, or Paul would remove the cat towel to take a towel for himself and would neglect to replace the cat towel afterward. (I’m not criticizing him AT ALL—I’m very grateful he sometimes gets his own towel just as if he were a fully grown adult!)

The other problem is that the shelf is now too small to hold all our towels (SEVEN PEOPLE).

So anyway, here’s a photo of the shelf that used to have towels on it. Now it has a towel-lined box for the cat, but the cat knows what’s what and never sleeps there anymore. He’s waiting for us to put the REAL towels back.

And here is the temporary witness relocation location for the towels: the top shelf of one of the kids’ closets. I can’t quite reach, so I have to half-fling them up there. And when I take a towel down, other towels come flopping down with it. It is frustrating, but at least the cat can’t get up there.

And I don’t even KNOW what to do with washcloths and handtowels. Even when I have a good place to keep towels, it frustrates me that washcloths/handtowels don’t fold into shapes that fit neatly with folded bathtowels. Flinging them up on the shelf didn’t work AT ALL, so now I keep them, um, on top of our bedroom bureau.

So, what to do with the towels? I’ve tried NOTHIN’ and I’m all outta ideas.

The available locations are:

• The shelf in the bathroom closet where they used to live, but with some sort of cat deflection system. Also, that shelf doesn’t have room for all our towels (SEVEN PEOPLE), but maybe I could free a second shelf?

• In the bathroom vanity. This might keep the cat away (though he can pick doors open if he finds out the towels are in there), and also I could put the vanity stuff on the former towel shelf. But how to fold the towels? And I don’t think they’d all fit. But again, second bathroom soon.

• On a lower shelf of the kids’ closet, with other kid-closet stuff moved to the less-accessible shelf. Then we wouldn’t be able to get a fresh towel if the kids were asleep, but that’s a relatively minor issue.

• Some other location.

Halp. Tell me how to tidy the towels, and where to do the tidying.

MY, haven’t I been a lovely mother this morning! Some highlights:

1. When child asked a routine question, clutched sides of head and said “URRRRRRG!!! EVERYONE! STOP! ASKING! ME! QUESTIONS!”

2. At peak of busyness/frustration, when older two boys presented boring old million-times-repeated bicker (“He called me stupid” “Well he hit me!”), said “Shut up, both of you.” Nice language. Nice diplomacy.

3. Claimed would throw away anything found on the floor, since floor-residence clearly meant no one wanted it. Nice irrational bluff.

4. Made general declaration of martyred righteousness, along the lines of “Why do I have to do all the work around here?” Nice adolescent example.

5. In the middle of busy before-school routine, couldn’t tolerate mildew-speckled shower ceiling one! more! second! and started scrubbing at it with bleach wipes, then got frustrated with children for needing before-school assistance when I was clearly! busy! Nice priorities.

6. Asked series of questions I already knew the answers to, starting with “So you lost your lunch box,” passing through “Your BRAND-NEW lunch box,” and ending with “Less than a week after you got it.” Nice shaming.

Well! Cleaning report: shower ceiling, which has had speckles of mildew for years as I’ve whined “But I can’t REACH it,” has a significantly reduced mildew population. I used a—wait for it—STEP STOOL. I know! I too was amazed that such a product could be applied to this situation!

You are going to feel a lot less sorry for me when you hear that one of the things in the mail pile was this care package from Shelly of Notthedaddy:

The way it happened was this: Shelly of Notthedaddy sent a care package to Shelly of Scenic Overlook, and the package included a book I’d been wanting to read, and I said so in a comment on Scenic Overlook Shelly’s post about the package, and Notthedaddy Shelly was all, “Oh hai! I am your fairy godmother!” and a package arrived in the mail for me. So now I’m thinking of trying that all OVER the place. “I’ve been wanting to drive that car,” I’ll say to you, or, “I’ve been wanting to try that Godiva chocolate,” and you’ll just hand it over!

This has put me in a care package mood. Plus, I’m trying to declutter, and I see no reason I couldn’t “declutter” the gift closet a little. So let’s have a care package. Leave me a comment that starts “I’ve been wanting…” and I’ll pick a winner on Friday night (the 18th). I am afraid you have to be in the U.S. (or APO/FPO) for this: it is SO EXPENSIVE to ship a car full of Godiva a box of clutter overseas.

I saw this for the first time this morning and assumed it must have happened during the night—like, a cat got trapped in the room or there was an earthquake or something. “OMG, what happened???,” I said. “Oh, Henry pulled those down,” Paul said. “…When?,” I asked. “Saturday, I think,” Paul replied. “…,” I said.

Mail, including things such as PAUL’S MAGAZINES. I’d had no idea how vital my “putting them on his desk” role was to the household.

Before I left, I emptied all the trash cans.

Before I left, I did laundry like a madwoman (I’m assuming that’s what madwomen do? Lots of laundry?) so that there would be NO NEED to do any. Paul was spontaneously moved to do some anyway. So far today I’ve found William’s sleeping shorts in Edward’s shirt drawer, William’s shorts and jeans both crammed into his jeans drawer so that it can’t close (shorts drawer is one drawer up and has plenty of room in it), and a little stack of mixed shirts, socks, and underwear resting comfortably in William’s shorts drawer.

Paul SNIPPED OFF the pull-cord to this lamp (one of the reasons I BOUGHT the lamp), “because the kids kept messing with it.” WT?????????????????????????????????

I’m flying tomorrow to go see my niece, and I am just about to lose my mind in a whirlwind of happy travel stress. It’s the GOOD kind, where there’s Lots! To! Do! but it’s all happy stuff. Packing my People magazines. Putting pecans and apples in baggies. Tucking the empty water bottle in the little net pocket. (Oh, are you looking for a whole post about what I’m bringing in my carry-on? You are so in luck!) Making sure my cell phone is charged so I can Twitter my Riveting Travel Updates (last time I made this trip, I informed everyone that I was on! the! plane!—you don’t want to miss that kind of breaking news). Doing some laundry with the feeling of preparing the house for a Little House blizzard instead of with the usual feeling of trying to shovel during a snowstorm.

I’ll be back on Tuesday, but I might be able to tear my eyes away from my niece long enough to send an update from Nieceville.

Right after I wrote about the watch this morning, I decided I MUST BUY IT and I went rushing off to Target. The watch was gone. Then I came home and read the comments, and I am NOT AT ALL bothered that almost everyone dislikes the pretty, pretty watch, and this definitely does NOT feed into my anxious fantasies that if we were to meet in person you’d be all, “OMG, she is a FASHION DISASTER! I expected so much more from her carefully-posed-and-angled publicity shots in which she has done her hair and is NOT wearing an orange watch!”

(Maybe the watch is cuter in person?)

Anyway, I have a new quandary. Rob wants to join Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts or whatever. I asked him why he wants to join, and he said he wants to toast marshmallows and learn to survive in the wilderness, and I was thinking maybe Cub Scouts would not be ONLY that.

Also, it seems to me that in our area, such groups are High! Parental! Participation! Pressure! and I am NOT INTERESTED AT ALL.

So here is what I am wondering:

1. What is a typical Cub Scouts meeting like? Toasting marshmallows the whole time?

2. Is there indeed an expectation of parental participation, with grousing from the other parents about how “It’s always the same parents who help and the same ones who don’t”—as if the other parents could not possibly be spending their time helping with other things the scout parents aren’t interested in (and grousing “It’s always the same parents who help and the same ones who don’t”)?

3. Do you know any Cub Scouts or former Cub Scouts, and if so, tell me everything you know, from uniform prices to badges to how often the meetings are to what the WHOLE CONCEPT of Cub Scouts is.

I saw this Casio watch at 75% off at Target yesterday (Amazon.com’s original price is inflated, because Target’s original price was $59-something and their clearance price was $14-something), and I DIDN’T BUY IT. Now I am kicking myself. What was WRONG with me? I was all, “I can’t read the display, whine whine!” but surely I could have LEARNED to read it? And it’s cute! And I need a watch! And it was 75% off! And it matches my new bathroom!

I’m wondering if I should drive back to Target today, more than an hour round-trip with three small children, on the off-chance that the watch will still be there. (Are you about to suggest that I call the store and have them check? THEN YOU ARE NEW HERE.)

Today I took a big bag and I went through the kids’ drawers, using the “You can keep as many X as you have room for” motto. I find so many good deals, and I do so much buying-ahead, it’s not uncommon for me to end up with, say, twice as many t-shirts as a child needs. They were only $1.74 each! —Well, but we don’t have room for them all, so there’s a full drawer plus a stack of alternates waiting in the closet.

It was hard at first, because I LIKE all the shirts. It was easier when I divided into colors: Yes, I like brown shirts on Rob, but does he need FIVE brown shirts? No. Let’s keep this one because it’s a polo (the other four are t-shirts), and this one because it’s the best of the plain brown, and this one because it’s striped brown, and these two other brown ones go into the bag. Then: blue shirts.

My efforts were “first sweep” level: I’m not ready to pare down to the essentials of life, and I LIKE a little bit of excess, but I kept reminding myself that even if I got rid of only ONE SINGLE T-SHIRT that was SOME progress. We needn’t go from king to monk overnight, but LET’S MAKE SOME PROGRESS.

I took another bag and tried to fill the whole thing with stuff to throw away, not including anything already in a trash can. My house isn’t littered with pizza boxes and beer cans, but it IS littered with kid-meal toys, little paper art projects someone stepped on, popped balloons, pine cones someone collected on a walk and then lost interest in, empty bottles of lotion no one threw out, broken paddleballs, catalogs someone partially cut up for an art project and then forgot about, etc. I didn’t manage to fill the WHOLE bag (in part because a lot of stuff I got rid of could be recycled), but it made a single-layer-gone kind of difference in the house: I couldn’t put a finger on what was different, but everything looked a little better.

Mottos:
“You can’t clean clutter.”
“You can keep as many X as you have space for, and no more.”
“Small efforts are still worth it.”

We chose a color! I was reading all your suggestions and comments, and then I got to Jen of Never Melts, who said she’d painted her bathroom ORANGE. It took about 4 seconds for me to be completely committed to having an orange bathroom.

I played around with Behr Color Smart, then went to Home Depot and got paint chips of the orange shades I liked best, then brought them home and looked at them a bit more and picked my favorite and we’re putting it on the walls today.

This is just the first coat, and also the lighting makes it look funny, but you get the gist, which is orangeness. It’s Orange Spice 250B-5.

I lovvvvvvve it. And since my towels are “one each of what was on clearance at Target,” they’ll go PERFECTLY. Blue! Green! Yellow! Pink! Red! EVERYTHING goes with orange! Orange is the new cream!