My Closets Are Cleaner Than Yours

My closet before:

I could not stand it one more second. See all the stuff on top? That's all the "scrapbooks" that I made one summer when I worked part time. (My idea of scrapbooking--shove an envelope of photos inside a plastic sleeve and write something on them). Plus there's the memory boxes for the kids (Madeleine's contains a beautiful picture on the cover and Meredith's is blank. Too bad, second kid). The blue thing is my first jewelry box which contains many interesting historic trinkets including a WIP (Whip Inflation Now) pin from Gerald Ford. The hat was given to Roger for his 40th birthday and has Death on it with the inscription "Relax, I'm just here for the cake." All in all, a terrifying mess held by sagging boards.

Now this: You can actually SEE the rocking chair that was used to rock my precious infant self instead of some MAN using it as his personal "CLOTHES THAT AREN'T DIRTY ENOUGH TO WASH YET" recepticle.

Madeleine's closet Before:

What do we have here? I hung up her Halloween ballet tutu on the curtain rod. My oh my, Martha Stewart had better concede the prize as the most tasteful person on the planet. If you look closely at the top of the closet on the right hand side you can see the 1966 Show 'N Tell that I hoped to resurrect for my kids, who I'm sure aren't like JADED or anything from the Wii that Santa brought.

I still have all my old Show N' Tell records and slides, but the light bulb burnt out. I called GE and the customer service rep chuckled and told me they didn't make light bulbs anymore for the Show N' Tell. So much for bringing good things to life, eh? However, I poked around on ebay and found somebody who sells a bulb that will work. Smashing! Ebay is the most wonderful website on the planet.

If I hadn't found out that Daddy's 50 old computers (I'm not kidding. He bought them at garage sales. He once had 9 old nasty cars. Can you say HOARDER?) weren't worth a dime by consulting ebay, I might have wasted time trying to sell them instead of hauling them to the Salvation Army, where thousands of homeless alcoholics probably found salvation through a Commodore computer. Actually, they are probably in a toxic landfill somewhere but la de da, that's my great grandchildren's problem. I'll be dead soon.

After. See the big box on top? That contains light bulbs. We're buying the new type that are saving massive amounts of energy, and I might just freecycle the whole mess of them. I cannot stand paying money to the power companies.

Meredith's closet Before:

I...I...just don't know how to convey the horror that lies before you here. First of all, Roger's clothes are in here. I, personally, have so many clothes that there is not room for them in the master bedroom. Please contain your jealously. 90% are hand me downs from my sister and late aunt (who had literally 500 outfits, and some of them fit) and the other 10% are thrift shop finds. The outfit I wore in the slide show where you get to see my hair which I swear really ISN'T ORANGE IN REAL LIFE..anyway, the outfit where I'm hugging my family lovingly while Madeleine looks snitty (Folks, the tween attitude is already here. Boarding school is looking better all the time). ANYWAY. I found the top in a thrift shop for a dollar and the bottom is a Kathie Lee Gifford skirt from Walmart that cost $10.00. I used to love her clothes because size 12 skirts always fit me perfectly. I could grab one while feeding a toddler animal crackers and a sippy cup and roll right along. Dang I miss them.

If you look carefully you can see a cross stitch, a real, genuine, lovingly hand crafted cross stitch that I bought at a thrift shop. It says "Ashley Clare Daniels, born January 14, 1987--You're so precious, you're so dear. How blessed we are to have you here" on it. I intended to rip that out and cross stitch Madeleine's name on it, but it will be great for the first grandchild, which I hope will not arrive in 7 years. Since I fully intend to inform my daughters about effective birth control and abstain from cavorting in nightclubs choosing instead to spend my time on the internet searching for effective chastity belts, I hope to avoid becoming a young grandmother, and if you are thinking that I am old enough to be a young grandmother right now and that I will certainly be an old grandmother by the time my children finish their PhDs and get MARRIED (or have a commitment ceremony), I would like to personally invite you to...oh dear, I promised my advertisers I wouldn't put any profanity on the blog.

After:

I tried to have Roger's pants cover the two old computers we have which contain the original emails we received about Madeleine's referral. It sure would be nice to pull them off of the drive but the drive had candy, pencils, crayons, and lollipops inserted in it once upon a time. No grandchild will ever get close to my computers.

So concludes my self congratulatory essay on What I Did Over My Christmas Vacation. I left out the part about sleeping 14 hours a day, watching trashy movies, and eating mountains of cookies.