Again The Same Fight

Author: siggy

We have the same fight over and over:  it is about things.  I want less to enter the house.  She is, again, active on “Free Cycle”, a web site where people give things away.  The theory is for less to end up in land fills.

Yesterday, she came home with a scanner and some other things we did not need.  It does me no good to tell her I do not want that item.  She gets seduced by things.  She even admits that.

I have been after her to gather documentation for her deceased husband’s pension. (She is the beneficiary.)  The documents she needs are probably in our “junk room.”

I could not believe it among some books piled in one corner of the house falls out her first marriage certificate–over thirty years old the document was.  It was in tatters to give you some idea of the disorder in this house.

A friend months ago came over and made some order out of our “junk” room.  Unfortunately after that she kept putting more stuff in there.

Actually it was me. She kept getting more things and I did not want to “junk” up the living room.  I had to put the stuff somewhere.

And it is true as she said the junk room is no longer neat and it is hard again to walk in that room.  There is so much stuff in there.  She does not want to search for her documents until the room is neater and she could walk around in it.

All this despite the fact the new stuff (since the room was straightened out) was obtained by her.  There is old computers (even ones that run on DOS), extra printers, broken down stereo equipment, books etc.

And it is true I am not as neat as her but she is the pack rat and stuff keeps entering our house whether or not we need them and all I want to do is tear out my hair.  And we periodically keep having these fights.  About things.

Certain things about my wife drive me nuts.  For a start, we have old computers hidden in all corners of the house.  Some of the operating systems even run on DOS (before Windows came out).  She can’t bear to part with them.  We even have software for these “dinosaurs”.

Some of the computers crashed but she still entertained the idea of salvaging the hard drives on them and the 1000’s of graphics she had stored on them.  I can not understand any of this.  These things are driving me crazy.

I am still flabbergasted we actually straightened up one room, started from scratch, put a new rug in it and furnished it.  It is our office and incidentally our favorite room in the house.  I become happy when I go in it.

In that room, though, is a pile of old catalogs–years old that she collected and stacked between the two clothes closets.  She could not possibly order any thing from these catalogs.  They are too old.

I even ordered current catalogs from the ones she especially liked but it made no difference she would not discard the old ones.

I guess she is a pack rat.  All this is driving me a little bonkers.  But I chose to ignore my frustration.  There are too many things I love about my wife.  And I am sure there are things I do that drive her nuts too.