HOPELESS CASE

An article in this morning's newspaper shouted out at me. "Put your house on a diet," the headline read. Clutter. Get rid of it!

It may sound like an oxymoron, but I consider Big Bore and myself to be organized clutter-ers. We have a lot of "stuff" that is grouped together and consumes practically every empty space in the house. Start with the living room walls---filled with 69 paintings and photographs and even a seascape puzzle glued together and framed. Six trips to Colorado and Arkansas are documented with collages of eight pictures each. Treasures. Can't live without them.

Then there's the cat "stuff" inside the entertainment unit. Book shelves and cabinets filled to the max. Photo albums, at least 40 of them. And plants. Once it turns cold outside, many of them come inside--22 of them at the latest count. There is no room for a dining table in this house because the plants take up all that space.

Big Bore is responsible for cluttering up the kitchen, basement, and garage. Again, it's all organized. Right now he's in the process of building more shelves in the basement. He's pretty much maxed out the shelving in the garage. I know where absolutely nothing is in these three clutter havens, but ask him and he'll go straight to it.

So, after reading this news article I decided to put Casa de la Flaming Bore on the Clutter Diet for today. I went over to the candle area in the living room and immediately tossed out two glass lids that go to candles that are almost used up. Don't need 'em. And guess what? Later in the morning Big Bore confronted me, the two glass lids in his hands.

"Why are you throwing these away?" he asked. I guess he'd been rummaging through the trash.

"The house is on a diet," I said. "We don't have any use for them."

"I do," he protested. Apparently once the candles are used up, he can melt away any leftover wax in the glass container, clean it up, and use it to "store things," like nails. Well, excuse me!!!

Later, he came back into the living room with a plastic plate/bowl I'd removed from an end table and had taken to the kitchen sink to be washed and put away.

"Where did you get this?" he asked.

"It was on the end table not being used. It's part of the fat I'm cutting out with the Clutter Diet."

"Well, I want to put it under this fern," he said. Go for it. Never mind that the fern already had a perfectly fine plate underneath it.

Maybe I'd better sign up the house with Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig. I can already tell that the Clutter Diet isn't going to work around here.