The new dog is forcing me to keep the house a tiny bit less cluttered. I’m not sure how I feel about this.
I require a certain amount of clutter in my life. Whenever I’m in someone else’s house and it looks like a page from a Pottery Barn ad, I wonder “where is all your stuff?” Some people don’t require a lot of stuff and that’s fine, but EVERYONE has SOME stuff.
I have a lot. Books, magazines, notebooks, yarn, more books, more yarn, the other notebooks… there’s a lot. It piles up. To the untrained eye, it looks like piles of things. And it is. There is such a thing as the File Pile and it doesn’t take me long to put my hand on whatever I’m looking for. I understand that this is not the optimum way to organize one’s life, but I have tried other ways and… this is just the way I’m made.
When Piper was a puppy, we had to keep the house fairly de-cluttered because she chewed things. When she eventually got over that, we gradually let the clutter re-form. But now that Ellie is here, the clutter has had to beat a hasty retreat.
Sometimes, we fail. For instance, the first round of Xmas gifts we’d bought for my mom became victims of SuperStorm Ellie. She ate them, because she is an asshole. She has also eaten one of my yoga blocks, countless items from the bathroom trash, Tupperware (and contents), my favorite sandals, Freddie’s shoelaces, a Barbie doll, a bath toy, 2 towels and a blanket. SO FAR.
She’s a menace. And, since we know so very little about her, I have no idea if she’s going to grow out of this phase or if it’s just how she’s made. We’re done for.