Minneapolis Couple Valiantly Fights to Maintain Control Over Fourth and Final Clean Quadrant of Dining Room Table.

So, as many of you know, Shad runs his own business, and I am in law school, and God Help Us, sometimes things just go to shit around this house.

As testimony to this, I present: The Dining Room Table.



I love this table. It love that it is tall, I love that we can squeeze 12 people around it for a dinner party, I love to fill its entire 54" x 54" surface with tasty foodstuffs. But it is a strong witness to the general neglect of all things household-related.

Every now and then, I am hit with a strong feeling of "I was not raised this way." For example, I get I-was-not-raised-this-way-feeling when I am ordering my fru fru Starbucks coffee or when I let the dirty dishes sit for a few days. Or a week. Or two weeks. And I get this feeling when I look at this table, which has not been cleaned off in a month and a half.



Quadrant One was the first to go, obviously. It is in the natural pathway connecting the front door to the bathroom & bedrooms. So as we enter the house and, in my case, run to the bathroom because I can't seem to hold my bladder for more than two hours, we dump things here:



So we've got shopping bags, receipts, printed out recipes, partner-less knee sock. Typical homeless crap, right? No big deal. I've got no problem giving up this quadrant. You have to put the miscellaneous crap somewhere.

Next to go is quadrant two: the work area. Sure, I could put my laptop away at the end of the day, but why?



So this section wasn't that hard to give up, either. This left us with half the table. And I must say, we held on to that half for a good couple of weeks. But our neighborhood library recently re-opened, and I had to go get some books, and...



Okay, okay! We stack the books in quadrant three. And this leaves us with the last quarter of the table. Still a fair amount of space. If we push the encroaching crap aside, we have just enough room to enjoy a tasty little dinner of balsamic chicken with avocado salad, as we did tonight.



And we are keeping this quarter of the table well-scrubbed, polished, and crap-free.

I am hosting a little dinner party next week while Angela is in town, so I guess I am going to have to clean this sucker off. Dang.