Piles Beget Piles

Image from www.theexpeditioner.com -- not my house!

In my house, piles beget piles.  This is an amazing phenomena that occurs when one solitary item is left in a place it doesn't belong.  Before you know it, the out-of-place object spawns five or ten other objects, and continues to multiply if left to its own devices.

Not everybody has this problem.  My mom, for example.  For as long as I can remember, she had two piles: one pile of school books and papers in the dining room, and a mail pile on the kitchen counter.  Occasionally she'd have one or two other temporary piles (around Christmastime in particular), but they never lasted long.

This is definitely not the case for me.  I didn't take pictures because that would be embarrassing, but here's what happened last week for me.

I left one dish in the sink to soak.  It had baked-on potatoes which just weren't coming off no matter how hard I scrubbed.  While I was upstairs doing laundry, Justin helpfully stacked a few more dishes in the sink instead of putting them in the (empty) dishwasher.  So what had been one, manageable dish became about ten dishes, which effectively made the sink unusable.

Another place this often happens is the dresser.  The dresser has four things on it: a lamp, some flowers, a picture, and a jewelry box.  That is all that belongs there.  Unfortunately, it's a very handy place to stack... well, everything!  Every single morning and night I clear off all the accumulated debris.  I don't know how things accumulate overnight (well, actually, I do... a certain someone stays up later than I do :) ), but during the day it's almost entirely my fault.

It happens a lot of other places, too.  We live in a three-story house and if you run up and down the stairs for every little thing, you don't get anything done!  So we make a pile at the top and bottom of each staircase of things to go either up or down.  The idea is that we'll take something whenever we use the stairs.  Sometimes that works, but mostly Justin gets tired of stepping around things (he has bigger feet than I do, and consequently they take more room at the top of the steps :) ) and makes about five trips up and down, carrying things to the appropriate floor.  It also happens on the bathroom counter.  If I leave a hairbrush out, soon a towel joins it, then the toothpaste, then the hair dryer, then one of the cats decides that it looks like a comfy spot to nap, etc.  It never ends!

Thus far, I haven't found a long-term solution.  Right now, my theory is that if we just put things away, things won't even have a chance to spawn into piles, but that is far more easily said than done!  "I'll do it later" isn't a good option, and "I'm tired" isn't a good excuse to avoid something that takes about two seconds to do.

But oh well.  We'll keep trying!