I woke up at some time after three o’clock in the morning yesterday. I’ll never know exactly when because it felt like I laid there for about one million years, hoping that I would fall asleep again, before I finally accepted that I wasn’t going to, grabbed my tablet and a book, and shuffled out of the bedroom.

Instead of parking my butt on the sofa, though, I headed straight for my basement lair. I sort of decided on the spur of the moment that I wasn’t going to pretend that I could read for about an hour before heading back to bed and try to get back to sleep. Nope. Just gonna tough it out all day.

I put some music on the stereo (softly) and, after blogging the last scene I could remember of the dream I was having before I woke up (Kirk and Bones and Scotty eating pie at a Denny’s), I surfed the internet for an hour or so. Something I found there made me go for a book across the room, but I had to step over the pile of crap in the middle of the room to get it. Then what I read made me want another book, and this time I tripped over some of the crap. I tried to rearrange it so I would have maybe one spot in the middle of all the crap to step into, but it was the kind of pile of crap that wasn’t rearrangeable, so I put some of it away instead.

Putting it away required rearranging some of the crap on a bookshelf to make room for some books. Then I piled three typewriter cases and a box full of photographs in a corner, and moved some paperwork to two of the three filing cabinets in the basement. Now I was in full-out putting-things-away mode.

Immensely satisfied with myself, I moved a television to a shelf over the workbench where I could use it to watch instructional videos. And Buster Keaton movies. Might as well be honest about it. Prolly watch Jonny Quest, too. But first and foremost, it’s for instructional videos, let’s not forget. Just sayin’.

The rest of the night went like that: trawl the internet for a few goofy stories, maybe add a goofy story myself, then clear out some of the crap on the floor by throwing it out or putting it away. To give you an idea just how much crap I’m talking about here, I kept that up until five o’clock in the afternoon when Tim arrived for dinner. By then, I had hauled the last of the trash out to the bin and was just vacuuming the floor.

Of all the garbage I threw out, the throwing-out I’m most satisfied about was the pile of wires and cables and electronic junk I got rid of that we’ve been collecting for years. Every time we moved into a different apartment and got cable television hooked up, the cable guy ran ten or twenty feet of coax from the wall to the box, and we kept that. Every time we bought a new electronic toy that came with one of those little transformers that plugged into the wall, we kept that. We kept every cord, every plug, every adapter. We had miles of antenna wire, the kind that picked up VHF and UHF signals for radios and television sets. We had dozens of telephone cords, even though we haven’t had a land-line telephone for more than a year now.

I piled all those wires and dongles in a big box, carried it up to the living room and set it down on the coffee table in front of My Darling B, who was reading a book. “I know we’ve been saving all this stuff ‘just in case we ever need it,’” I said before making great big puppy dog eyes at her. “Please let me throw it out now? Please?”

She let me throw it out. I love her so much.