Sunday Confessional Update

Since I'm having trouble remembering some of the more embarrassing things I've done in my life to confess to, I thought I'd share a funny little update to a previous Sunday Confessional story.

Remember this one? Where I shared my husband's weird hoarding behavior and the fact that I take garbage to my mom's house to get it thrown away?

Well, a month or so ago my husband had to go out of town for work. I was also on a business trip that week, so my mom flew up to stay with my kids and then when I got back we worked like animals to get my basement cleared out and cleaned up in order to put the house on the market.

The house never went on the market, although I'm still hopeful that might happen this spring.

The funny part of the story is that while we were clearing out the basement, we came across a near-empty metal filing cabinet that hadn't been touched or looked at for six years. I told my mom to pull the files out of it and set it up on the street, where some lucky winner would repurpose it at their house.

I also found a box with various assorted contraptions that looked oddly familiar but I couldn't put my finger on it, so that also went into the trash headed for my mom's house.

The rest of the garbage that was truly garbage went into our garbage cans.

Well, my husband came home that Friday and was peevish that we'd had the nerve to clean the house, and was worried about what might have been thrown away. So he went through the trash, as usual. He found nothing but garbage, but it still ticked him off in his own charming but mentally ill way, and it was a rough patch until I left for Florida with my kids and my mom the next day.

A few weeks later, all hell broke loose. Apparently, my dumpster-diving next door neighbors, the hippies who hang plastic twirly-gigs from the trees in their front yard and leave Christmas lights up year-round, brought the metal filing cabinet into their garage. With a thousand other pieces of furniture and detritus they've collected from the street curbs, half of which were mine at one time or another.

My husband saw it.

You can imagine the fallout. It wasn't pretty.

So let this be a lesson to you.

If you want to get rid of something, you actually have to get rid of it. Take it miles away to a relative's house and put it on their curb so your weirdo hippie next-door neighbors don't bust you trying to get rid of it!

Oh, and that box of assorted odds and ends I threw out? It was a hand-steamer-cleaner thing that I bought off QVC ten years ago and my husband used to clean the cars. Oops. Good thing Target carries those, I've been saved.