Oh chaos...you are a cruel mistress

So, the Husband and I decided not to move. Last week we renewed our existing lease for another year because we'll be moving in a year anyway and moving twice in a year just sucks.

This whole not moving thing though, has necessitated some serious reorganization of Burnstopia.

You know how when you think that you're moving you sort of let things slide. Things that you normally wouldn't? Like...overly crowded kitchen cabinets, or piles and piles of papers to be filed, or piles of crap on bookshelves or the pile of duffel bags that you just sort of stuffed in the closet after your last trip in JANUARY and closed the closet door la La LA!

Hello, Internet, welcome to our CHAOS!

Two weeks ago the kitchen was cleaned out, cabinets reorganized and pantry restocked--we sort of went into survival mode eating out of our pantry so that we didn't have to move it, so that was getting a little Soviet in it's barrenness--want soup? beans? pasta? corn chips? Nope! But here, we have 4 cans of tomatoes!

This week it's been the front room.

You must understand the front room has been the bane of my existence since we moved in. It began as a his and hers office space. To understand why this has been the bane of my existence you must first picture to yourselves the vast differences in the working spaces of The Husband and the Wife.

The Husband likes piles. Let's just let that piece of insanity sink in...he LIKES piles. Piles of blank CDs, piles of cords, piles of pens, piles of papers, piles of receipts etc. Piles piles piles. Clutter clutter clutter EVERYWHERE. The Wife? Ah, she is a different bird, she like everything put away, filed and then beautiful blank empty space.

So there are his and hers bookshelves and his and hers desks kept in accordance with their preferences. The Wife, she is honest, she will admit to occasionally sneaking into the front room and putting the piles AWAY. She cannot be faulted, they were mocking her. This past weekend began the Great Reorganization of the Front Room.

See, since we aren't moving and we ARE still having a kid the kid is going to need some real estate in Burnstopia and that real estate is going to have to be the front room. We had already bought a dresser and a crib and just sort of stuffed them in to the front room to deal with them later...LATER? It has arrived.

Monday night was the moving of the bookshelves which was interesting in and of itself...mine comes down, moves and goes back up in an hour. The Husbands? Comes down, sits in the middle of the floor for a while, he sorts through some of it, then it sits there a bit longer until the Wife is done with her bookshelf and glaring at the giant pile of piles in the middle of the floor and begins to stalk towards it at which point the Husband springs into action and begins to re-shelve his bookshelf.

Last night was the moving of the desktop. We are such yuppies, people. I hate to admit this but we have a desktop and a laptop which makes one computer for each person living in the apartment and I'm even more mortified to admit that we're contemplating a laptop for me which would officially propel us into yuppy-dom. My comfort is that we still only have one car and one TV with no buttons. The Husband loves the technology thing so I let him have at it. I moved wall hangings and futzed around doing chores while he lovingly disassembled his desktop and dusted and reorganized the computer into a new space.

Then, in a fit of impatient madness we moved the Boy's furniture OUT of our living room and into the actual space that they will be occupying! We are mad crazy fools! And it all fit, which makes me 1) very happy and 2) spatially gifted.

The next task on the list is to begin systematically steam cleaning the carpets. When you live with cats, you learn very quickly that the kitty litter? It gets caught in their wee toes and thus tracked all through the apartment. Which, regular vacuuming usually picks that up, but when it's rainy outside and you track water inside, the water hits those tiny grains of kitty litter, thus dissolving them into wee little gray spots on your pretty pretty white carpet. So we're steam cleaning to get all of that up.

In addition to the steam cleaning, we're FILING, people. After 6 months of talk we finally settled on and bought a filing cabinet. So that giant--literally 3 foot tall--pile of papers, articles, bilingual texts etc in the corner of the front room can finally be labeled and filed. I can't wait!

I know. Many are the levels of my dorkdom. I have accepted this and come to terms with it.