An Example of Minutae

I had a friend in San Diego who re-arranged her furniture at least once a month. She grew up in a military family and moved around quite a lot. She would start to get stir-crazy if she was in one place for too long, and moving furniture around helped her feel like she was changing it up. I haven't ever known anyone else who did that. It was really funny and endearing.

A couple of weeks ago, Ben re-arranged our furniture:

I tried to be open-minded, but it just never meshed well. The reasons:

1. I felt like it wasted the space behind the couch.

2. It minimized the playing area for the kids in front of the couch.

3. The couch and green chair were wayyy too close together, too. It created a bottleneck if one was headed from the dining room to the back door. My kids are always right in front of me when I'm headed somewhere in the house, and I usually have to side-step them. But I could do no side-stepping because of the bottleneck right there. And because of the closeness of the furniture pieces to each other, the kids decided it would be cool to balance, one foot on the green chair, one foot on the purple couch, and yell, "Hey, Mom! Look at me!!" a million times a day.

4. My diaper-changing floor area was eliminated, so I had to grab the wipes and a diaper and travel to an open area to change Mikey's diaper, instead of dropping down right there where the supplies are kept. (I've never owned a changing table. It was always too expensive. I've changed diapers on the floor for seven years.)

5. Since I spend my whole life on the couch, feeling sick, I usually watch TV. The way the couch was, I could prop myself up and watch TV, straight-on. When the furniture was moved, I had to crick my neck to watch TV. It didn't work out for Couch Potato Kar.

After a couple of weeks, I asked the Benny Man to move the stuff back. Things are back to normal.

Perhaps boring posts like this are why I have, like, two readers...