I hate clutter, although to look at my house you wouldn’t know it.  I do try to get ahead of it.  However, when you are married to a packrat who is the son of two packrats, it is a difficult task.

     You know you have a packrat in the family when you throw things away and the next day you find that at least half of the items have magically reappeared.  You know you have a packrat when your attic, basement, and outdoor shed are bursting at the seams. 

     When you find an old, empty card for a tiny light bulb stuffed in a drawer and throw it away only to have your husband retrieve it from the recycling bin to ask you what light came from the pack, you have a packrat.

     If your mother-in-law has paper bags from a store that hasn’t existed in twenty years, all neatly folded in a six-foot tall bundle stashed under her basement steps, you know where your packrat came from.  (We won’t go into ALL the OTHER hoarded stuff.)

     If it took more than five years to put a dent in your deceased father-in-law’s accumulated clutter: yep, your packrat is his son and he brought a ton of it to your house.

     If you could hold a weekly yard sale every week for a year and still have too much clutter, ah huh, there’s a packrat around somewhere.

     I’ve decided that once spring is here, I will start in the attic, work my way to the cellar and throw away, donate, and sell all the clutter.  If it isn’t nailed down, if doesn’t have extreme sentimental value, if we don’t use it regularly, it is gone.

     If I have to, I’ll hog-tie Dear Hubby to keep him from playing junk retriever.

     Are you a packrat?  Do you know a packrat?

     Our electric company wants to raise our rates by thirty percent.  Yep, you heard me right, thirty percent.  Now I probably wouldn’t mind quite so much if in the past three or four years we hadn’t had at least one power outage every month or so.  I probably wouldn’t be quite as miffed if the power outages had only been for minutes at a time.  However, these are constant power outages that have lasted from two to over eight hours at a time.

     Can I bill the electric company for my Koi who died when the pond filters and pumps were off for over eight hours?  No.  How about billing them for damage to my electronics, will they replace my computer?  No.

     Maybe they’ll spring for a cup of coffee so I can warm up while I wait for the power to come back on.  What, not even a cheap cup of coffee?

     You don’t even get the pleasure of bitching to a human being.  No, you phone them and an electronic voice directs you through their obstacle course that is worthy of Special Forces training.

     If I’m going to have to pay them thirty percent more I want a human on the other end of the phone so I can at least vent a little.  It’s better to hear a human voice saying, “I feel your pain and I wish I could help….”  I want someone you can yell at about how your dinner was cooking and now that the power has been out for an hour, it is ruined.  Maybe that person would even spring for a hot cup of coffee…