I think I'm at the point where I should stop acknowledging that it's been a while since I last posted, and just get on with it.

Which I would do, except that I'd be remiss, if only to my future reminiscing, if I did not at least mention the Non-Post raison du jour: we had some huge snowstorms! And while Stuck in the House sounds like the ideal set-up for a good long writing session, Stuck in the House with Others is not. The kids came home early on Friday the 5th, and didn't go back until midday on Tuesday the 16th, thanks to Presidents' Day on Monday.

Really, all this storm stuff demands its own entry, but I'm still waiting for the photos, because I really think it's a topic that would work much better with illustrations.

So I'll put that all on hold until someone who knows what he is doing can upload the photos for me, and I'll jump ahead to more recent events, far less earth-shattering though they may be. How mundane are we talking? How about sorting old papers while watching old movies? Yeah, I've captivated you now, I don't even need to see that gleam in your eyes.

It turns out that when one is Stuck in the House with Others, a really great project to take on is Straightening and Organizing. Seriously. This is especially true if some of the others include one's in-laws, and the Straightening and Organizing must take place in some far corner of the house. Preferably the upstairs, if your in-laws happen to have bad knees.

If you have any dim memory of times in the past when I've written about the mountainous crap that passes for home decor around here, you will understand when I say that a week of being Stuck in the House with little else to do but Straighten and Organize didn't even begin to put a dent in the mountain of crap. Because of course the same forces that are at work when the mountain is built - "I'll just put this in the box of Things I Might Need Someday" - are bound to trip you up when you attempt to go through the box. Here are some actual examples:

"Why, look - it's half a watch band! I'll just set it aside, because I'm sure the other half must be in here somewhere, too."

"Really, you can always use more paper clips."

"I can't throw out this tiny random mystery plastic piece until I check with my husband to see if he can tell what it came from....."

No, being swift and decisive will not get your excrement Everest erected. (Could I put that any less elegantly?) You have to have an inner dialogue with and about every sticker, thumbtack, twist-tie, bookmark, and dust mote in your collection. I took a single cardboard box - you've seen the ones, the xerox-paper ones with the lids, they hold about 10 packages of letter-size white paper - I took a single xerox box of stuff I'd hastily gathered up during some prior crisis-people-coming-over-cleanup, and I spent an entire afternoon with it, emptying it out, sorting the contents in little piles all over my bedroom: Kids' toy bits, paper scraps with phone numbers, rubber bands, single socks, school papers, pencils, ponytail holders, books, magazines, kitchen towels, on and on, and I slowly, methodically found a home for all of it, and put each item in its home. I'm proud to report that many items found their homes in the trash can, the recycler, or the donation bag, but they all went to their assigned places - although the toys might still be in a subset bag-of-toys awaiting further sorting, I'm not sure - and IT TOOK ME ALL AFTERNOON. One stinking lousy box.

I think you can guess that I've got a few more similarly-assembled boxes awaiting this process.

I was lucky with that box, too, in that it didn't contain too many advanced-level items. Because decluttering has levels. Level One is things like those paper clips and twisty-ties. Easy enough. Level two is things like receipts - they're probably out of date, but you've got to check first. Same with all those school memos and newsletters. Still, fairly beginner-level, that stuff, and since you get to recycle it rather than trash it, there's pleasure rather than pain in the purging of it.

Then you start moving up to intermediate level, things like toys. Some of them are easy: Death to you, stupid goody-bag whistles! Shuffle off this mortal coil, broken Slinky! But the complexity ratchets up quickly, until you're being sucker-punched by the sight of some baby toy, long outgrown, too well-loved for Goodwill....

And then there's my OWN old stuff, the boxes of papers from my own youth, which is at some black-belt level of purge I may never attain, and so I wisely leave them alone until I have worked my way up from wherever I am now, the level that is equivalent to "What's on this CD? Guess I'd better put it in the computer and find out...."

So despite my basic handicap in this area, I've actually been doggedly pursuing the projects begun during the big snow-in. In fact, these days I rush the kids off to the bus eager not to get to the computer, but to the cardboard boxes. Getting that one box empty enough to toss onto the big pile of cardboard boxes (because, yes, I save those, too) was kind of like the one good shot you get in eighteen holes of golf; sign me up for the league! And so I have little piles of sorted-out crap around the house, which makes a nice complement to the shoveled-up snow mounds outdoors. Step carefully, kids, there's a system.

So now, finally, I arrive at the story I was going to tell when I started this entry. I was ready to begin today's session of sorting and I was considering what sort of entertainment I might have to help keep me out of the Deep Wallow Zone. In the spirit of decluttering I settled on a movie I'd borrowed from the library that was due back in a couple of days: Freaky Friday (the original version from 1976). I say decluttering because we'd all started watching it together as a family but stopped about halfway through because of the kids' bedtime, and never got around to watching the rest. Maggie didn't seem to be enjoying it all that much, and I think everybody else just sort of forgot about it, so it became yet another incompleted project in our household.

Thing was, I was actually enjoying the movie quite a bit at the time, mostly from a nostalgic angle. Just in case you don't know the story, it centers on the wacky mishaps that occur when a 13-year-old girl and her mother mysteriously switch bodies and have to live a day in each other's shoes. Since I was 11 in 1976, I saw a lot of familiar sights in the course of the school day that takes place in the movie, and of course I'd seen the movie when it came out, so I was having a major time-machine ride watching it and was rather eager to continue the experience. How perfect, I thought, popping it into the player, all cued up right where we'd left off. I'll get this sucker all watched in time to take it back to the library, AND sort out this box of papers at the same time!

So I sat down on the floor and sorted away. Right about where I left off was a scene in which Mom-as-Annabel is in history class, and goes in very short order from answering the teacher's question to standing up and eruditely expounding on the Eisenhower Administration - until she's hit with a paper airplane that says PIPE DOWN AND SIT DOWN, or something to that effect. And then her next stop is the big field hockey game, where everybody's counting on Annabel, their star player, not realizing that Annabel's at home in her mother's body burning a turkey in the oven and overloading the washing machine.

So Mom-as-Annabel takes the field, and wouldn't you know it, the opposing team has been coached to GET ANNABEL ANDREWS, and suddenly this poor girl is getting elbowed, stomped, thwacked and smacked from every direction -

And suddenly I was sitting there with a lapful of stuff and tears just started POURING, POURING, POURING down my face -

???????

Yowza.

Interestingly, it didn't really freak me out at the time, my completely inappropriate reaction to this Disney kids' comedy movie from 1976. After all, I'm kind of in the hormonal zone on the calendar. I was also all by myself, which seems to allow these sorts of stupid responses to things on my TV screen. And in fact, I even caught myself thinking "oh, GREAT, now I'm going to be all fuzzy-headed and spent for the rest of the day," as if the whole thing were just some minor inconvenience, like a sneezing fit - and in fact, it came on that quickly. And even now, I'm not all that bothered by it. Really, this is what the 40s are, at least for me.

And I don't have to take more than a couple of steps back from that screen to see some rather obvious buttons being pushed. I mean, right off the bat, I think my own mom-ness just simply didn't like to see this poor kid getting beat up.

And, from the other side of the fence, maybe I didn't like seeing someone a bit like my own self standing out there, so completely bewildered -

I couldn't help that, because, as I mentioned earlier, being from 1976, the movie's a fairly neat cross-section what the world looked like during my own early adolescence, everybody running around with that hair, those sweaters, slouching at their desks, taking typing class, playing field hockey - I never played on the team, just in P.E., but it's an alarmingly brutal sport, even when nobody's deliberately hitting you with anything.

And then you've got two sort of major crossroads in life - adolescence and midlife - and then you cross THOSE over themselves, well, that's kind of potent, in ways that you might not be seeing on the screen, but play on your emotions nonetheless. Even something as fluffy as the bit where Mom-as-Annabelle goes out shopping and gets her hair and nails done - oh, for a chance to play dress-up, and be back at the age when you look good in anything....

And that bit where Mom-as-Annabel is delivering a college-level lecture in history; from where I sit, I can't help but feel for her, because what is Mom doing back when she's in her own body? Picking up the kids from school, scheduling a carpet cleaning, doing the laundry, shopping, and being at the beck and call of her husband when he needs her to whip up some food and drink to entertain his clients. Was this deliberately or accidentally poignant, this moment when we see Annabel's mom as a scholar? Certainly in the 70s feminism was everywhere, but there's no bold stroke made to highlight this moment as anything more than she-knows-more-than-Annabel, so I have to wonder. But certainly it made an impact on me, because some of those papers in the stack are my alumni magazines, with their usual news of the incredible accomplishments of my college classmates, men and women, all of them, it would seem, with high-powered careers, awards, publications - I've gotta believe they don't spend their mornings sorting paper clips.

Whew.

Yeah, I'm guessing you're all wishing I'd talked about the snowstorm instead.

Good news, then - there's a chance we might get another one. A small chance, admittedly; right now they're saying this storm is more likely to travel north of us. You can bet I'll be checking in at 11 a.m. for the next update to the forecast. But for all our sakes, let's hope it's not a bad one. I'm not sure all this sorting is good for me. Sometimes all those time capsules are best left undisturbed.