Sharing the Wealth (of Germs and Grunginess)

My dear spouse brought this miserable cold home from work... He got over it in three days. I've been sick for a week, and it seems to like me so well, its decided to stick around. At least the worst (the sore throat and fever) is over. Now I'm just alternately dripping like a faucet from the nose, or left thinking Liquid Plumber might be what it would take to clear the clog... I am sick of being sick. And worst of all, the baby seems to be catching it from me. He's running a fever, and is a crabby little guy at the moment. I don't expect this nap to last long.

And on today's agenda is the continued archaeological excavation of my junk-locked living room, into which I am supposed to be willing to admit company tomorrow night. Actually, this was supposed to be two weeks from now, which was just about how long it would take to get the place quasi-presentable, but our guest moved things up, and my husband (who has absolutely no shame about living in a pig sty) agreed without consulting me...

The slob gene is one I wish we could have avoided passing on to The Boy, but we're both afflicted, so it seems inevitable he will be too. Unless two old very sloppy dogs can learn new neatnick tricks...

Kevin says we should be chanting the mantra "we have too much shit." We are at the point where one (or both) of us needs to learn how to throw something out. The Collier Brothers have nothing on us. (And you know how they died, right? Killed by their own boobytraped junk... We don't have traps set, LOL, but the piles of books and magazines are independently dangerous. An avalanche of paper could kill someone around here.)

If only being a packrat was a marketable skill, we'd be fabulously wealthy...

I probably should never have booted the computer today, because it is much more fun than cleaning up (i.e., skillfully concealing) this mess...

Thank God The Boy hasn't started crawling yet, because we are far from baby-proof. That may be the only thing that actually motivates us to change. In a hysterical last minute manner, of course.

As one of our friends says, "you need a bulldozer." And a dumpster or two.

Or a magically expanding house that stretches itself to add on a much needed library and pair of home offices, as well as an extra bedroom or two, and a studio for me and audio-visual editing lab for Kevin, and ... you get the idea.

Two aging packrats. Two cats. Two dogs (one a humongous German Shepherd). One baby. Four hundred tons of art supplies, equipment, and research materials. One small "starter" home. Yipes.

Oh, and did I mention the sixteen filing cabinets and seventy boxes of research material for dear spouse's book (a technological history of egress systems in military aviation) which are being truckled in from Texas sometime in the very near future?

We are doomed.