The Bag Lady

I can procrastinate with the best of them. I’d been putting off dealing with the plastic grocery bags that had piled up by the front entryway for at least a year. Hubby says there must’ve been 12 years worth there but I know it couldn’t be that many. Right?! Most people would just throw them out or randomly grab a handful and drop them off for recycling the next time they go to the grocery store. Not me. We actually USE those bags for many things: to line the bathroom and bedroom trashcans, the kitchen garbage in the RV, to wrap meat in when we want to freeze it and to pick up dog doobie. My mom always called it doobie and it stuck. I can’t help but laugh extra hard when I hear the name of the band The Doobie Brothers. 😉

I take pride in the fact that I ALWAYS pick up after the dogs when walking them. Hubby does too. I wish I could say the same for everyone else in the neighborhood. There’s more and more dog crap left lying around, even on the sidewalks. It’s uncivilized. Through trial and error, I’ve discovered the perfect method for picking it up without getting your hands dirty. I’ve got it down to a science where I can pick up all 3 dogs’ waste over a half hour span using only ONE bag. Someday, I will share this with the world by writing a blog post about it. Obviously, there’s a lot of people that don’t have a clue how to pick it up… Needless to say (yet I say it anyway?!), I need bags WITHOUT HOLES. They can’t even have a pinprick in them or I will end up with canine fecal matter all over the leg of my pants. Prior to Saturday, I would go to the entryway and dig through the bags until I found a couple (I always have backups) plastic bags without holes. Due to recycling, these bags are being made cheaper and thinner all the time. It doesn’t take much to get a hole in them. Everyday, I get so frustrated since I end up going through about 10 bags to get one good one. I’d put the crummy ones to the side and someone else would go and mix them with the good ones again!

I finally HAD to do something about the bags, to save my sanity. So I took about 2 1/2 hours and went through them all. It was an exhausting and thankless job. It was only made better by tweeting with Chrissi Johnson who was cleaning out 4 clothes closets at the same time. I got 2 big bags of good bags and about 8 small bags stuffed tight with inferior bags. Towards the end I had enough and just trashed what was left since hubby said what was in the 2 big bags was already enough to last 12 lifetimes. Sometimes I know how ridiculous I am and other times I need my husband to point it out to me. I felt so much lighter having done that one thing. That corner behind the front door was SO messy before I did that that I wouldn’t even take a BEFORE picture out of sheer embarrassment. I did take an AFTER picture and am posting that. To me, it still doesn’t look good but it looks much better! We have no storage so have to keep our beer, wine and soda in our living area. It looks terrible but what can you do. I made it look about as good as it can look. I never thought I’d be a bag lady but we do have similarities. Our lives are crumbling around us and we’re fussing with plastic bags. I’ll have to keep at it so I don’t end up on an episode of Hoarders like hubby always threatens.

Cleared out entryway