clutters last stand

 Apparently, there is a law like Mr Murphy's that says clutter will always increase to fill the available space.  I can vouch for the truth of this.  Since my daughter and son-in-law moved in a year ago with their three children while they build their new home, we have been fighting an ongoing battle against the clutter monster.  Even after 2 skip bins, 3 or 4 large trailer trips to the tip and a verge pick up we still don't seem to have any less clutter than when we started.

It is also true that as one untidy child leaves the nest, the next in line who may have been previously tidy, not wanting to be outdone by their departing sibling, feels it necessary to fill the vacant position as mess maker extraordinaire.  

Yikes!!

I tried to police the No Dumping rule when my four children were younger.  At one stage I had a box in the doorway of the living room and threw all foreign objects into it.  The idea was that the little litterers would retrieve their belongings and put them away.  Our oldest daughter just found it very convenient to have all the things she needed in one spot and used the box as a closet.  

So I was sitting on the patio the other day trying to rustle up the energy to clean up the clutter in the spare bedroom (full of boxes and debris accumulated from the extra large number in our household) but, knowing first hand that the clutter law is alive and well and operating at my house, I was hesitant to start.

Sometimes cleaning up is forced on us in a moment of panic.  I responded to a distressed scream from daughter number two recently, when she saw what she thought was a mouse run under her bed.  Before I realised what was happening I had sorted through all the clothes and various boxes around and under her bed, restacking them and vacuuming as I went, while princess stood on top of the bed watching.  It dawned on me that I could have been sucked in.  She assured me she had seen something, so I carried on.  Finally at the end, with a lovely clean room and no mouse, the object of terror was found.  A tiny little gekko, no doubt trying to escape from the screaming, was hiding under her lamp stand.

So back to the patio. The spare room wasn't really that urgent, just annoying me, and besides I was still tired from the phantom mouse incident and, having gleaned some wisdom with age, I knew that on previous bouts of house pride, it could be a waste of time. You know exactly what I mean, you start to clean the hall stand near the front door, a small patch of long lost shelf starts to appear and your enthusiasm swells.  Now you are attacking it with gusto, and almost start to enjoy yourself.  But, alas! no sooner have you given those shelves one last flourish of your polishing cloth and lovingly placed a scented candle in the centre and gone to get the dinner started, than one of your little darlings comes in and dumps their school bag on it.

I'm Cheating - this is where we stayed in Paris

                                               

So, I have a choice, go and attack the spare room knowing that I am fighting a losing battle with the clutter, or sit on the patio enjoying the birds flitting in and out of the ivy, drink another coffee and read my book. The birds are looking more and more fascinating...  

Eat, Pray, Love and eat some more.

I saw a little bit of Julia Roberts new movie Eat Pray Love a few days ago.  She was enouraging her friend to ignore the carbs and just eat the pizza in front of her.  Julia's character had come to the emancipating conclusion that life is too short to never be able to enjoy pizza without guilt. It made me want to shout Halleluhah! Julia more power to you and break into an adaptation of Martin Luther King Jrs famous speech "I have a dream, I have a dream that a woman is no longer judged by whether she has wrinkle free skin or the size of her dress, but by the character she exhibits.  It is time we stopped being dictated to by what other people think we should be. Our self esteem is bombarded by media images of models, some of who are fourteen or fifteen peering at us from glossy magazines and even their youthful little faces have been airbrushed to oblivion.  Why do we even try to live up to such manipulation. Cindy Crawford was being interviewed by Oprah once and I heard her say, that in real life even she doesn't look like Cindy Crawford. (They used to remove her famous mole from her pictures) 


Most women I know, including me would say they need to lose weight, and with the mountains of diet information available,  diet plans in every magazine, low fat, low carb and my generations grapefruit diet to name but a few, you would think we would all be slim.  I know for myself I could utilize my most powerful weight loss tool, I could use my arms to push myself away from the table a bit sooner.  My food bill would go down, my arms would tone up and I could send the savings  off to a world relief organisation.

The last time I checked the world statistic site, it said that in America the year before they had spent $262 billion on diets, and I would think most of the Western World would be on par, and yet as Nations we are all just as fat.  (My husband is convinced that it is the cottage cheese as you mostly see fat people like myself eating it - sorry I probably should be politically correct so would that be size challenged)  Imagine what impact just half of that amount would have on some worthwhile cause like world hunger.

Its a constant dilemma. Should we vote with Julia and stuff ourselves with pizza, or should we go with Katherine Hepburns approach in one of my favorite movies 'Guess Whose Coming To Dinner'  She pulls into a drive thru diner with co-star Spencer Tracy her husband in the movie, it is six o'clock in the evening and they are to have dinner with their daughters in-laws at eight.  The lovely elegant Katherine orders black coffee, and gets annoyed with Spencer for ordering boysenberry icecream, ' you'll spoil your dinner', she chastises him.  On the inside I always imagine that I am a disciplined devotee of Kate and have no trouble just having black coffee and not spoiling my dinner, when it is six o'clock and I have to wait till eight.  But the truth is that like pudgy Spencer, I would probably order the icecream and it wouldn't spoil my dinner at all.