That's it! PUUUURRRRRRRGGGGGGGE!

I was going to paint our bedroom this weekend. Mine and Pynchon's. I guess it would be syntactically easier to just say "the master bedroom," but that would, semantically, be misleading you with respect to creating delusions of its grandeur. It is not the bedroom of a Master, but rather, as a room, it masters us and all of our bedroomly possessions, forcing us into the one arrangement that fits the furniture while still allowing doors to open and people to get into bed without crawling over one another. My clothes, for instance, have all been mastered right out into the hallway, actually, so unmasterly is the closet situation.

Anyhow. I was going to paint. But painting requires accessing the baseboards, and accessing the baseboards requires moving the storage chest into another room (easy enough), rolling up the scatter rugs and putting them into another room (easy), rolling the bed into the dead centre of the room (easy-PEASY! it's on wheels!), and ... moving the dressers ... and the .... bedside tables .... that are completely covered over in stuff like a paper cone entombed in candy floss, only not nearly so yummy. Books. Alarm clocks. Pennies. Bike lock keys. Stickers I'm hiding from Munchkin. Jewelry that doesn't fit anywhere else. Random bits of hardware that have fallen off I'm-not-sure-what but am afraid to throw away. An ugly photo album we got as a gift. A couple of sweaters. Earplugs. A pill cutter. Three water glasses with varying levels of water and cat hair in them. More books.

It's a cluttery disaster, and the worst of it is, it's not that I'm just untidy and have neglected to put these things away. There is no designated away to put them to. This, to me, is a special kind of horror.

So instead of painting, I spent the weekend purging stuff from my house. The entire trunk is FULL of stuff for the charity shop--TV, VCRs (yes, plural), potty chair, mounds of clothing, sports equipment, that damned photo album, glassware, table linens, towels, and blankets and sheets and duvet covers. The recycling buckets overfloweth with bashed down cardboard from long-neglected moving boxes, and boxes from new computer, new phone, new iPad, etc. etc. Pounds and pounds of paper that are no longer needed: bills from the old house! The garbage is full of expired sunblock, ratty t-shirts, too-small underwear, plastic bric-a-brac, and half-crayons. No room in the house was spared, from the attic to the bathroom, to the kitchen, to the den. I mucked out closets and storage bins and hidden corners of stuff.

And! I'm on a campaign this week to use up all the little soaps and lotions and potions and salves and bathroom gewgaws I've happily received as gifts but am apparently saving for the apocalypse. No more! Little tiny things in my bathroom, be done with you! So today I used green tea and lime shampoo, lavender and shea body lotion, peppermint foot creme, and chocolate lip balm. I smell like a day spa that exploded.

Still. I was able to put away / throw out / recycle all the crap from my bedroom. Maybe next weekend I'll get to start painting.

Do you go on purge binges? What sets you off? Do you like it? Why?