"It's just not possible!"

How does that old saying go?  "From the sublime to the ...."?

So yes, this morning I finished reading Confessions of Madame Psyche.  (I'm writing this Sunday night, though I assume it will post on Monday.)  You've already seen two posts mulling over some of the thoughts that it sparked.  And then this afternoon I took a carload of stuff over to Wife's house.

The point (in case I've neglected to explain) is that for the past year, in addition to paying Wife's support, I've also been shelling out $300 a month for a storage unit that we first rented when we bought our house back in 1994.  Of course you remember that we sold the house last summer, but the storage unit remained ... packed with long-forgotten junk.  And I agreed to pay for it, because I'm a nice guy.  Also, at the time some of the stuff in there was mine and I didn't want Wife pre-emptively seizing it all.

In the ensuing months, I have nibbled away at it – not as energetically or as systematically as I wish I had, but enough that I think I've retrieved all the really big chunks of my stuff.  I'm sure there's more – when we emptied our garage we found the most unlikely things had been packed together, so there was a lot to sift out – but I'm comfortable in saying that I've moved out a first-order approximation of all the things that are mine ... or at least so far as I can reach.  I'm going to have to empty another layer of Wife's junk before I can see what's behind it.

What makes this urgent now is that a couple months ago I did some calculation to figure out how I'm going to pay tuition for the coming year: for Son 2 at Durmstrang, and for Son 1 at college.  Depending on whether I'm going to owe Wife some kind of cash payment to even out the distribution of assets, I either succeeded in planning a budget or I've got at most about $200 a month more to find somewhere.  But part of that plan involves not paying for this storage unit after the end of June.  So I want either to empty it or to let Wife take over the payments.  She will insist she can't possibly afford it (and that's probably even true), so that means emptying it.

Last weekend I took her a carload of stuff.  Today I took another carload of stuff.  If I keep at it this way until the boys are out of school, then I can use their help to get the heavy things (furniture and trunks).  It should be possible to get done by June 30 ....

... always assuming, of course, that there's some place to put the stuff when we pull it out of the storage unit.  Ay, there's the rub.  Where exactly might that be?

My short answer is that I'll take care of housing any of my stuff and the rest is Wife's problem.  She's the one who has wanted to keep all this stuff for so long, so she can have the headache of finding a place for it, or selling it, or putting it out for the trash.  But of course she's not so happy about having to pick up this responsibility.  When I first texted her yesterday that I'd be coming up today with a caroad of stuff she replied, "Bear in mind the amount of space I had last time. I need time to sort through stuff and liquidate some of it between more loads There simply isn't that much space and you've blocked off the one walkway to the left hand side of the garage."  I didn't bother to reply.  Besides, if I waited for her to "liquidate some of it" she would never get around to it.  I just drove up there this afternoon and started unloading boxes onto her front lawn.  She saw me, came out to say Hi, and then started in.

Wife:  There's nowhere for me to put any of this!

Hosea:  [I continued to unload boxes as I talked.]  OK.

Wife:  Well what do you want me to do with it?

Hosea:  I don't know.  It seems to me I remember there was a lot of space in your garage that was just inefficiently-used, so you could probably rearrange things to fit a lot more inside.  But I'm not going to tell you what to put where.

Wife:  Well are you just going to leave it here?  You know I can't leave things here over night!

Hosea:  OK. 

Wife:  If you think there's room in the garage, can you at least put them there?

Hosea:  No.  I did that last week but I put things in the wrong places.  So it's better if you put them away because I don't know where anything goes.

Wife:  That's just great!  You mean I'm going to have to spend all evening dealing with these boxes?

Hosea:  I don't think it's going to take you all evening.  Maybe more like twenty minutes.  Roll the bicycle over to there and see how much space that leaves?  And there's only about ten boxes.

Wife:  Well I can't put them there because I can't block that cabinet.

Hosea:  OK.

Wife:  Besides, I can't carry these boxes.  You know I'm not as strong as you are.

Hosea:  But these are banker's boxes, and they're only about half-full of fabric.  Or knitting needles.  They are light.  Five pounds?  Ten pounds?  You can handle that.

Wife:  I can't do that and all the asset planning you want me to do because I can't be in two places at the same time.

Hosea:  But you don't have to be.  This will only take you a few minutes and then you can get back to the other.  I won't be back again with more until next weekend.

Wife:  No!  You can't come back with more next weekend!  Don't you get it?  There's nowhere to put any of it!  It's just not possible!

Hosea:  OK.  But I don't know what you want me to do then.  At this point I've already paid the storage unit up through June.  Do you want to take over payments after that?

Wife:  You know I can't do that.

Hosea:  Then what do you want to do instead?

Wife:  Why?  Because you can't be bothered to keep paying for it just a little longer?

Hosea:  Because I can't afford to pay both that and tuition.  It's one or the other.

Wife:  Well maybe we could move to a smaller unit ....

Hosea:  Anything you want to do is fine, but I can't contribute to it if I'm also paying tuition.

Wife:  OK but look.  I can't clear out any more space in this garage until I can sell some of these things.  I can't sell them until I can post them on craigslist.  I can't sell anything on craigslist until I can post a photo, and I can't post a photo until I can find the cable for the camera, and I haven't been able to find that since I moved.  It's around here somewhere I'm sure, but it got lost in the move and I haven't found it.

Pause a minute and let me make sure ... did you follow that?  Wife is saying that she absolutely cannot fit anything more in her garage until she finds a camera accessory that was lost when she moved last September and that she hasn't replaced yet.  And that one piece is preventing any forward movement on any of this.

Really?  She's been stalled since last September and she hasn't done anything about it yet?  Really??  Call me crazy but I'd conclude from this that it's not a high priority for her.  I admit there are things I haven't done since I moved either, things that will tie up this or that loose end.  But I also freely admit that they are low priorities for me, and so far as I can tell none of them affects anybody else.  Nobody else is paying $300 a month on my account because of any of them.  So it may be self-serving but I see a difference.

Sorry, I'm griping.  And really I shouldn't have to comment at all.  Wife's marvelous ability to make anything impossible, to barricade herself mentally into a corner so that she is helpless to budge, is so remarkable that it should be enough for me to show it in action and then steal away silently into the night.  Maybe if I spent more time at it ... applied a little artistry instead of just banging these posts out as fast as I can.  Of course, then I'd have to spend still more time contemplating conversations that I find alternately ridiculous and frustrating.  Or frustrating because they are so ridiculous. 

Maybe I should get a bite to eat and go to bed.  There's a thought ....