More of Me Because Really, Can You Ever Get Enough?
Don’t Answer That.

October 9, 2008

WARNING: The following post contains nothing of spiritual or social worth unless you happen to be enthralled by the most mundane details of the life of a uber-ordinary Christian Lesbian. If that’s the case, then prepare yourself for a feast!

It’s Thursday already. How did that happen? I took a reprieve from posting for the past few days while tackling projects on the home front. I dared to venture into our storage unit and sort through 30 plus years of stuff that fell under categories ranging from “I might need this one day (in another life)” to “I have to haul this with me to the grave because I have all sorts of sentimental warm feelings attached to it.” It’s a sad, sad thing to pay a monthly storage fee to house such memorabilia as grade school scrapbooks, a mixed drink glass shaped like the PeachTree Plaza, a full-size Tigger costume, and three shoeboxes of letters from Mom while I was in college containing gems such as “I had a raisin bagel for breakfast and when Daddy gets home from work we’re going to meet the Lees for dinner.” Mom always had a raisin bagel for breakfast and they always went to dinner with the Lees, but do you think I will ever be able to toss so much as one of her postcards away? Good luck with that!  And after 20 years in children’s ministry, I have enough teaching materials to start a moderate-sized preschool and keep the kids in crayons and color pictures for years. Stop by sometime and I’ll recount every Bible story from Genesis to Revelation in full-color fuzzy felt flannelgraph. The only exception would be the story of Sodom which could only be told one time since replicating the fire and brimstone for heightened dramatic effect tends to leave nothing but flannelgraph ashes though I’m here to tell you, that was one lesson that roomful of three year olds will never forget.

So I spent the week sorting through it all in an at-home version of “Clean Sweep” and divided it all in three piles of save, give away, and toss. The toss has already been delivered to the dump, the give away is listed on Craig’s List and the save was tucked back away into its exclusive rental facilities awaiting the day when a stranger sent by the state upon my demise hauls it’s sentimental sorry self to the city landfill. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

I even spent time this week painting our guest bathroom. If I actually thought you cared about our bathroom I might imagine you asking “Why did you paint your guest bathroom?” and this is the answer I would give you. “The two screws holding the toilet roll dispenser to the wall came loose. One day I pulled the paper and the dispenser fell off the wall. Those two stripped screws left two surprisingly large screw holes.” At this point, again imagining you cared in the first place, you’d ask “Why didn’t you just repair the holes and touch up the paint?” A good question to which I would answer, “I did patch the holes and texture the wall but the previous paint job had been some funky textured antiquey application that was impossible to touch up and so, two screw holes precipitated a repainting of the entire bathroom.” By entire I mean a 4×4 half-bath guest bathroom that took longer to tape than it did to paint. Just a little perspective for the sake of accuracy in reporting.

AND I patched the hole, and textured and painted the resulting patch in the dining room ceiling from where the chandelier had originally been hanging before we moved it because it wasn’t centered by the previous owner which was making my obsession self slowly insane.

AND I re-hung new curtains in another bathroom.

AND I touched up the wood trim through the house.

AND I watched a ridiculous amount of TV, languished at Facebook, and remembered to clean the cat box three whole days in a row which is one of my house hold chores that D normally covers for me because of my tendency toward selective memory problems.

It feels good to have all those little niggling tasks done. My mind feels as cleared out as my storage unit so now I’ll turn my attention back to blogging and carrying on about the tremendous joys and challenges and realities of being just an ordinary Christian lesbian living in the world today. Re-organizing the garage will just have to wait for another day.

Oh, before I go, here are some photos from last Sunday’s St. Francis Animal Blessing and Pet Festival we held at our church.

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Posted in Storytelling