Do You Hoard What I Herd?

J is in her January mode.  This is only my second January here, but Buzz has about 15 of them under his belt, and he says that in January after she gets the Christmas decorations put away, J typically gets all OCD about “not being a hoarder”. 

There is this show on TV called Hoarding Buried Alive.  Oh, J will start out to watch it.  She is fascinated with all kinds of personality disorders, at least that is what K says when he looks at the things she watches (disappearances, murders, mayhem, hoarding, random crazies and such. J says she is very picky about WHICH murders she likes. No gangs or drug dealers or prostitutes – no- her favorites are the average white bread American couple who veers off the straight and narrow…  K says Point Proven- but I am getting off topic). 

So anyway, the other night, J crawled into bed and decided to try watching Hoarding Buried Alive.  No luck. She couldn’t do it. After about fifteen minutes of saying things to the TV like, just get rid of that empty toothpaste tube!  and  oh my word, can’t you just throw it away, she started scratching her neck and muttering – then clicked the TV off and  leaped out of bed. She raced to the closet in the spare bedroom and began tearing things out of it – shoes from 1996, dresses she hasn’t worn for five years, half-burned Christmas candles, etc etc -  and throwing them in boxes.   I raced to help  by sniffing the boxes while J said things to me like, I refuse to be buried alive, Maxie even though that closet looks NOTHING like those hoarding houses.  But that doesn’t stop J.   Just seeing the hoarding houses on TV is enough to send her into her buried alive panic mode. 

The boxes go into the “garage sale” room, and J is satisfied for the time being that she’s not a hoarder, which is kind of ironic considering that of all the rooms in the house, this one is crowded enough to question her hoarder tendencies. 

But here’s what I don’t get.  JK are big into antiques and going to antique stores and coming home with things.

No no Maxie, those are antiques. We collect those.  Not hoard. 

So I think what it means is, if you like it, it’s collecting. If you don’t understand the other person’s proclivities for saving that miniature shampoo bottle, or empty jars, or all the Charlie Brown cartoons for 40 years, that is hoarding.  Buzz says the JK affinity for antiques  is fortunate for him at his advanced age; apparently pets can be antiques.   

I have known about hoarding all my life; just like those people on TV, I was born with the hoarding gene.  But in my bloodlines, it’s called herding. The other day I dug a bunch of my babies out of the basket and herded them into a ring around the kitchen rug and into the living room. I can’t explain why I do it; I just like to hang out with them.  J lets me do it for a while, then she scratches her neck and picks them all up. 

About a week ago, JK took their showers and I moped around, depressed. I knew I wasn’t going.  I don’t CARE if they give me a rawhide candy cane, I want to GO.  Oh, FINE,  I’ll have a rawhide.  Buzz takes his and says to me,  This doesn’t happen nearly often enough and skulks it off to his lair.

 I hate the sound of the garage door going up and then back down.  They are gone.

When they got back several hours later, I did my Overjoyed Dance. But it didn’t last long.  The smells on them!!  So abnormal! I dropped back a few feet and circled around them, letting my nose do the sorting.  Musty,  metallic, wooden, muddy, dry, old, junky, rusty.  Dust. So much dust!  And another dog?  Pit bull, maybe?  And Buzz, from his bed, asked me - is that a hint of Lancaster’s BBQ? Nothing antique about his nose.

I saw a pit bull at the unbelievable acres of antiques and junk we walked through, Maxie, J said as she set a little bag on the table. Her name was Piper. Cute dog.  So I COULD have gone.  So unfair – but it’s over and they are home.

The next day was New Year’s Day.  After breakfast K said to J, Well, you ready to get that thing out of the car?  Car??  Car!  I jumped up. 

Yep.  Let me just put on my work clothes.  J went upstairs.

K opened the back door and let me out.  I went, but I didn’t like it that he shut the door and then went to the garage. I raced to the back gate to see what he did next.  He brought the car out of the garage and backed it up to the fence.  Oh man. I hate it when that fence keeps me from checking things out! I barked at them and jumped as high as I could.

Maxwell,  honestly.  You’re going to impale yourself one day. J opened the gate and I catapulted onto the driveway.  K had opened the back of his car.  There was something in there! I jumped in to see what it was.

Whatever it was, it was huge. And old.  It took up the entire back of the car.

It’s a sink, Maxie, J told me. Jump down.  We need to get the frame out of the car. They lifted a big wooden frame out of the car and set it on the driveway.

An old sink. I jumped back into the car and sniffed at it. And she thinks it’s weird when people keep shampoo bottles and old toothpaste tubes?  I felt itchy just looking at the thing,  but  JK seemed excited about it.  K got out some tools and did some man stuff to the  wooden frame with drills and hammers, then he and J carried it to the back deck. 

K got the hand truck and wheeled it over to the car and said to J, you ready for this?  This thing is a beast.   J held up her hands. They had leather gloves on them. Ready, she told him.  Move back, Maxie. Move!  I moved.

That sink was very, very heavy.  JK slid it down, off the car, onto the hand truck. Then they wheeled it to the back yard and onto the smaller deck.  I watched as they wrestled it up two steps onto the deck floor.  They were both breathing hard.  Oh my word J said. How much does that thing weigh. 

Probably 200-plus pounds, K said.  They stared at the beast. 

OK, now how do we lift that onto the frame, K asked.  Can you get it up that high? Because we have to go up high enough to set it down correctly. 

J looked doubtful. I don’t think I can hang onto it for that long or get it up that high all at once.

K went and got a bucket and turned it upside down in front of the frame.  OK, we will lift it up onto the bucket, then lift it from there to the frame. Think you can do that?

I can do it.   J pulled her gloves tight. 

I watched as they lifted it in stages onto the frame.  But it wasn’t on straight.  The frame needed a few alterations to make it fit right.  They had to take it off again.

It’s a good thing K hoards    herds   collects tools because by the time they were done getting that sink onto the frame the way they wanted it, there were extension cords, a crowbar, a bucket, a hammer, a drill, a saw, boards, nails, screws, drill bits, a mallet, and a few other items scattered around on the deck.  I stayed away. I know that energy K exudes when he is in the middle of a task that has taken 4 hours when he thought it would take 1.  I know better than to get in the way.  But that is all part of his determined nature and I admire it greatly. 

J was a little help, but not much.  She fixed the faucet and fetched tools and waited for the right moment, then did her part lifting the sink onto the frame. AGAIN.  And AGAIN.  And prayed that her leather gloves would protect her fingers from being snapped off if they were to be caught between the frame and the sink. I know those wimpy leather gloves. I’ve chewed them often enough.  Her fingers would have snapped like dry spaghetti. But  I didn’t tell her that. She is fond of her fingers even though some would say she’s hoarding all ten of them. 

Yes that is mildew. It's a bear to keep off.  Power wash in the spring.
And the white stuff is from the jasmine above, it's not bird poop. =)

And guess what, at the end of the project, the sink was installed exactly how they wanted it and K added some boards for a shelf at the bottom and J is going to paint it and add some other shelves to the area and turn it into a gardening center.  A gardening center! Pots! Even better than gloves! Oh, I can’t wait for spring. 

Thank you so much for all your hard work, J gave K a big hug and a kiss on the cheek. I LOVE it, and I love that I can see this awesome sink outside my kitchen window. It just makes me happy to look at it.  I could tell K was happy too.  It does look really cool.

Except K wasn’t all that happy with me when they were engrossed in lifting the sink for the third time and I sauntered innocently from the back yard through the workshop to go visit the dogs across the street.  Not my best day in the obedience factor. And then it didn’t help when J couldn’t find her other glove and then stared at me accusingly, like I had something to do with it.  Which I did, but she didn’t know that until several days later when I brought it to her, so why the accusatory glares then, is what I say!

I’m glad JK hoard  collect antiques, including Buzz and the kitchen sink. It was a great way to start the new year and when J gets her gardening center all put together, I’ll add another picture. 

J says she could never ask for a better husband than K, so she has no plans to collect more.  =)  And now that she doesn’t watch Hoarding Buried Alive anymore, she isn’t as itchy and the house is getting the usual Januarily organized. But she still watches the mayhem shows.  
I keep a close eye on my babies . I see a fox pelt, she sees a toothpaste tube, I say tomato, you say tomahto. Who knows, I might just add a glove and a pot or two from her gardening center to my collection this spring.