At organizational odds

You know when you were a kid, and the teacher would get up in front of the whole class and lecture about how somebody had done something but didn't specify who that somebody was? I was rarely that somebody, but I always felt guilty. Even if I had no idea what the teacher was talking about. I was that kid.

Sometimes I feel that way with III. He has a quick temper about little things. Right now, he's made at the credit report companies because of an issue with a new store credit card he got five years ago whose (first and only) bill never got forwarded to him. So the $50 on the card was sent to a collection agency and he paid it, but now it left his credit score <700.

I came home from bringing B-dog to the vet and he was upstairs on my computer to use the printer. I could tell when I walked it he was pissed. I didn't yet know why (I thought it was possibly because I had un-trashed some stuff he had put in the garbage... more about that in a minute). But now that I do know why, I'm avoiding him. I know he's not mad at me, but I don't like when he is like this so I'm going to hide out until he's in a better mood. Maybe he'll come down to his PS3 and shoot some things and that will make him feel better....

III and I have very different levels of tolerance for mess. I can make dinner, and I'm comfortable leaving the dishes in the sink for 24-48 hours as long as there's no overflow. III likes to come home to a clean sink. I am happy to crawl under the mussed covers when I go to bed at night. III has to crawl into a bed with hospital corners- he'll make the bed at 10pm to go to bed at 10:02.

So yesterday he decided to clean out some of our closets. He left a few piles and a big bag of garbage in the "office" (one of our spare bedrooms) and asked me to go through the piles today. While doing that, the bag (which was actually a huge gift bag) that had the trash in it ripped. This allowed me to see that he'd thrown out a bunch of gift bags and boxes- ones I had saved to reuse. And I do- I use them! I reused several boxes this Christmas on gifts and sometimes need to grab a gift bag on my way to a party. Also, in the bag I found a cardboard sleeve that contained one of the class pictures from one of my years of teaching (I'm up to 10 years worth).

This is not the first time he's thrown something out of mine. He tries to be careful, but it still happens. I didn't even say anything to him this time- I just pulled out and reorganized the stuff I wanted to keep. As irritated as I get with him for throwing out stuff I want to keep, I'm pretty sure he gets as irritated with me because of all my piles.

But seriously. Couldn't we find a happy medium between "pack rat" and "absolute purger"?