The Big Mess

This morning I vacuumed the vacuum cleaner.

Before that, I vacuumed everything in the basement (including our shoes and a broom and dustpan), tripped over boxes and tarps to reach the washer and dryer, and hit my head on a pile of plywood.

All courtesy of He Who Makes a Big Mess.

How big of a mess?

So big that, as I said, I had to vacuum even the vacuum cleaner, which has been sitting right next to his workbench. Like everything else within a day's walk of the workbench, it was covered in sawdust. At first I mistook it for a piece of his woodworking equipment.

Whenever he is in the throes of a Big Project, there is usually a Big Mess. Sometimes I can get him to contain the mess to, say, one room, or one room plus outdoors. This time, the Big Mess extended from the basement (including the laundry room, where clean clothes sometimes reside) through the kitchen on the next floor up to the third floor room now being transformed from junk room to library, and even into the bedroom (which, one might think from the look of things, is being transformed from bedroom into junk room). If there were a way to extend the mess into the attic, I'm sure he would find it.

Now, there were two options for dealing with this situation. I could run around behind He Who Makes a Big Mess and try to contain things, or I could calmly accept the situation and try to convince myself that having to run an obstacle course every time I needed to do laundry might provide some health benefits.

Faced with these two choices, I made up a third: Create my own mess.

I chose to make my own mess in the one room untouched by He Who Makes a Big Mess -- the bathroom. My project was to peel off the old caulking around the tub, clean out all the mold and gunk, and put nice, new caulk on. I would place this project in the Extremely Fun Activity category, where the definition of Extremely Fun means "One of the Worst Possible Jobs You Could Ever Do." In that case, yes, it was an extremely fun work project. The worst part, really, was reading about all the horrible things mold can do to you (make it difficult to breathe, make your hair fall out, cause extra body parts to grow, etc.) after I had already started digging into it, with no protective gear on unless you count clothes.

I would just like to say that it feels really weird to sit in a bathtub with all your clothes on.

But my mess was no match for his mess, not that I was being competitive or anything. I cleaned mine up in almost no time at all.

I complained that his mess was so big, I couldn't even clean any of it up. He Who Makes a Big Mess pointed to some coffee grounds on the counter (I do not drink coffee, if you know what I'm getting at here) and said, "If it would make you feel better, you could clean this mess up."

I asked him if he would like me to illustrate the expression "box your ears" for him, but he suddenly discovered some urgent business he had to take care of at his computer.

Sigh. At least THAT does not involve a Big Mess.