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!

We have a pear tree in our yard (*pause for partridge jokes*), and I don’t know what kind of pears those are but they’re SO YUMMY. But we also have an apple tree, and the apple tree has gotten unpruned enough (*pause for prune jokes*) that it’s shouldering out the pear tree, and this year the pear tree has produced eight pears (usual is several dozen), way up high where I can’t reach them but neither can the apple tree so I guess I can see the pear tree’s point.

The pears are ripening, and I’ve lost two because they fell and birds/bugs/rot got them. So today I had the GENIUS IDEA to lightly SHAKE the tree, and then any ripe pears would fall down to me and I could get to them before anything else did. I shook the tree; a pear fell down; I AM A PEAR-HARVESTING GENIUS. I shook the tree again, and a pear beaned me (*pause for bean/fruit jokes*) right in the upturned eyebrow. It hit so hard, everything went black for a few seconds. (Or maybe I just closed my eyes when a pear hit half an inch away from them, whatever.) Now my eyebrow is puffy and sore…and sticky. Stop laughing—that pear was REALLY HIGH UP.

My sandals, let me show them to you:

I got these from Lands’ End on a pre-summer sale for $29, and I’ve been wearing them all! summer! long! I love how shoe-like they are (my previous sandals had soles that were thin pieces of nothing), and how they don’t smell bad, and how they don’t make embarrassing suctiony sounds against my flat, flat feet when I walk. I love that the footbed is neither slippery-plasticky-smooth nor suedey-hard-to-clean. I don’t love the velcro, which is of course starting to curl, but I still love the sandals.

So when some of the colors went on clearance for $14.99 I should have told you immediately, but I hadn’t decided yet which ones to buy or how many, and I was worried that you would pounce on them and buy them out from under me, because I am a Sharing Person but not so much a Sacrificing Person. But now I have decided and ordered, and now I am ready to share. I’d bought the pink ones originally, and the green clearance ones (my second choice) weren’t available in my size. I bought the Coral Orange and the Gull Gray.

I would not call the orange ones “Coral Orange.” I would call them “Tide Bottle Orange” or “Target Clearance Sticker Orange.”

They are in fact oranger than I would like, but the pink ones dulled down from a summer of sand and sun and water, so I imagine the orange ones will too.

I super-love the Gull Grey ones: they should be called Gull Grey & Pretty Yellow, because the two colors both contribute strongly to the overall color of the sandal.

If you buy the Brown, which look like they should be called Brown & Target Clearance Sticker Orange, be sure to let me know what you think of them—I NEARLY bought them too but had to draw the line SOMEWHERE.

My dudes. I did so much MESSING AROUND with clutter and dirt today, I didn’t even stop every few minutes to Twitter what I’d done, it was THAT MUCH messing around! But it’s too bad I didn’t Twitter it, because when I post on Twitter I can go back and remind myself what I did.

Big project of the day was cleaning the floor of our closet. …I think I did mention before that my cleaning is not always RATIONAL, and that oftentimes I go with it anyway? Yes. So I hauled out about six brand-new sets of king-sized sheets bought at 75% off; maybe ten pairs of shoes including “tags still on” and “Why aren’t these long since thrown out?” and “Whose ARE these?”; a box of maternity clothes; several shirts that had fallen off hangers without us noticing; scraps and coins that had slid under the door and gotten shoved under everything else; empty Target bags; a wadded-up down comforter we only use in winter; a pint of dust and lint and cat fur and sand.

I gathered up one bag of shoes to donate and put one set of sheets in the donation pile too. I put the comforter back into the zippered vented bag it was sold to us in (which I also found crammed in the closet). I filled another bag with shoes too worn out to donate, plus the sand/fur/etc. And I used the dustbuster.

Then I put things back in: sheets in a stack, comforter next to them. Three shoe boxes, each holding a pair of shoes I’m keeping but don’t need in regular rotation: winter dressy, summer dressy, and shoes that go with a particular skirt I wear to baby showers and tea shops.

I threw away a pair of bee slippers (bee-shaped, not bee-intended) I like to wear to the maternity ward because I can slip them on/off easily and they’re cute. I dug them back out of the trash, because I could be in non-maternity parts of the hospital sometime.

I put the box of maternity clothes in the basement. I should donate them but I want to keep them a little longer.

In general, though, I’m trying NOT to get caught in little eddies of clutter that no guest should ever have the opportunity to notice anyway (if my mother-in-law goes into our bedroom closet, we have deeper problems than previously realized). But I did get rid of a vintage suitcase (matching ROUND carry-on) I never use because it’s hella heavy and smells bad. And when I went to put away something on the Gift Shelf, I pitched out two toys I bought long enough ago to be pretty sure I’ll never give away.

Here is something I’ve noticed: there are many times during the day when I am standing around gazing into space, and I can use those times to play “Is There Anything Here I Can Get Rid Of?” So, for example, while I’m brushing my teeth I would normally be staring at myself in the mirror and wondering if I have tongue cancer, but instead I open the cabinet and see if my eye alights upon anything I can toss. I got rid of a lipstick, an expired bottle of cold medicine that didn’t work anyway, a barrette I don’t like, a tube of eye cream I never use, and so on.

And while I’m giving the cookies another minute in the oven, I would normally be staring at the countertops and wondering what the CRAP is that weird yellow stuff and why am I the ONLY ONE who EVER cleans countertops, but instead I open a cabinet or look around at the counters. I got rid of a mug, some baby spoons, lids that came with some baby bowls but I never use the lids anymore, a box of cereal nobody likes, a box of tea bags I never use, and so on. Not all at once, but like the mug went one time and the lids went another time.

I find this is putting me in the nice beginnings of a clutter-noticing habit. Mustn’t get one’s hopes up when one has a lifelong reputation for cleaning binges rather than consistency, but I AM finding that things are gradually disappearing and that it’s adding up to pleasing changes—whereas usually I’d think, “What’s the point in getting rid of ONE MUG? Besides, we have room for it.”

Now for those of you not following on Twitter, here are the other things I’ve gotten rid of:

• broken postage scale
• hand-knit baby blankets
• baby hats and baby coats
• baby bath seat
• half-used workbooks with all the fun parts done
• Easter door hanging
• gross instant flavored coffee
• expired Jell-o in non-favored flavors
• bits of trash (bread ties, foam craft shapes) on top of microwave
• little decorative nest with 5 eggs in it; I’d thought it would be sentimental but it was hard to display and impossible to dust
• fridge magnet paper doll that was insufficiently magnetic and so was always stripping her flat little clothes right where they’d get kicked under the fridge
• Tide with Febreeze (used up, not tossed)

And here is my current mantra: “You can’t clean clutter! You can’t clean clutter!” It helps me to continue through the layers in the hopes of someday seeing the wipeable flat areas underneath.