On Wednesday, the highlight of my exciting afternoon was when I vacuumed out the drawers on my half of the office (a slightly less scream-and-stomp-around highlight than yesterday’s). While Richard may be perfectly happy letting all his miscellaneous stuff cohabitate with sawdust, I am not so accepting, and the reason I have been allowing myself to believe that the reason why I’ve been a lazy slob and not yet moved all the rest of my stuff into the office drawers for weeks now is simply that they were full of sawdust and needed to be cleaned. Of course, once I vacuumed them then I no longer had an excuse, so after no small amount of grumbling (which was inconveniently ignored by the cats) I slumped off to the guest room to collect all the remaining things and laid them out on one of the office desks.

Here is when I discovered that I could open my very own card shop. I have an entire drawer full of note cards and stationary! Some of this stuff is in boxes that haven’t even had the plastic covering removed. An entire drawer full of stationary and I Never Write Letters!

Some of it is because my mom gives us a box of Thank You cards every year for Christmas, and one or two of the packages were bought by myself in a weak moment (mainly because they had something feline that was just too cute to pass up, or some other flimsy excuse). But the rest has simply just accumulated over the years, and now I am stuck with trying to figure out just what the heck to do with it all.

I can’t just throw it out. One does not throw out perfectly good stationary (It’s sort of akin to tossing books into the trash which, as anyone knows, is one of the lesser mortal sins). And I can’t really give it as gifts to other people because most of the boxes are a bit squashed from having been forced into an already too full drawer of other similarly sized boxes. And there is no way, even if really did try to sit down and do it, that I could write that many letters. People hear from me once a year, at Christmas. If I type the letter, everyone gets the news. If I have to hand-write it into the cards, only the first half of the people get all the juicy tidbits, while the others have to content themselves with ‘Merry Christmas – hope your year has been as exciting as mine!’ because my hand gets wayyyy too tired to write out a page and a half of chatty blather in that many cards.

I’m thinking I’ll just leave it in the drawer for now. Perhaps years from now I’ll be suddenly struck with a letter writing jones, and well, I’ll be all set.

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Jenipurr’s Helpful Cooking Tips: When you’re making Chicken Paprika and you hit the point in the recipe when it says to add the cornstarch and you add it and suddenly you are stirring something that is bubbling and frothing and resembles something out of a scene from “The Creeping Slime Monster From the Swamps of Dispair” far more than it resembles dinner, it may occur to you that that orange box you reached for was not the cornstarch, but baking soda – this is about the point when you should turn to your ever-patient husband, who has already listened to your little ranting whine about all the ants you had to kill that day and even given you a completely unsolicited backrub in the bargain, and say ‘I think we’re going out to dinner’.