Around 3 months ago, our good friends were having a garage sale, and we having recently moved loads of The Daver’s crap from one apartment to our freshly-bought condo, had tons of shit to unload. So, I packed and packed the unused crap into boxes for Dave to pack into the car to take to their house. Pretty much any story where stuff gets moved involves me packing while Daver lays down with a headache.

(as an aside: we have a division of labor here; Dave carries shit down the stairs to wherever it happens to be going, and I do EVERYTHING else).

(an aside TO the aside: and by “division of labor” I mean that I pretend that Dave is going to carry the stuff downstairs and so I get it all together and about half of the time he actually carries it down)

(an aside to the aside to the aside: I want an elevator)

Predictably, the garage sale came and went. And the boxes sat. Dave always gave me some vague mumbles about donating the stuff to charity while the boxes remained in the same dining room position, slowly gathering dust and moss. For months.

Rather than getting angry about it I figured that I would take care of it myself.*

According to my calculations, it dawned on me that the longer that I let these items sit there, the more apt Dave was to remove them from the boxes and lovingly welcome them back home because he loves his things unnaturally. Like old threadbare underwear and broken cassette tapes.

I, of course, was having NONE of this. Our condo had no storage as it was and the less stuff we had, the better.

So there I went, huffing and puffing my way down to the dumpster, where I put the stuff to the side, hoping that someone might go through it and take what they’d needed. Because while I wasn’t going to be giving the Gnomes on Ice glasses a home any longer, someone else might find them perfectly lovely.

Before I brought my last load down, I took a break to eat. By the time that I had managed to get back downstairs, I noted that all of the boxes that I’d set out NEXT to the dumpsters were gone. Vanished. Fin.

This assuaged my guilty ego in more ways than one. Maybe I should invite them in to peruse Dave’s collection of old receipts and gum wrappers.

*this would prove to be THE running theme in our marriage. Well this and “Becky is kind of a bitch.”