Quite a while ago now, I wrote a blog post where I ruthlessly made fun of my husband for his “idiosyncrasies” when it came to how he organizes his stuff. You see, among other things, he used to keep his CD’s in alphabetical order by category, and listen to them in that order. He also used to be a total freak about scheduling out our day. A lazy Saturday might have an itinerary like this “Well honey, from 8:15 to 9:45 we’ll be at the farmer’s market, and then go to the coffee shop until 11:30. I would like to walk the dog promptly at noon, and grab lunch at say 1:06…so that I have time to walk my normal route, and get a 12 minute shower in.”

Okay, maybe it wasn’t that bad, but I do remember a time when we were dating where he told me that we were going to hang out with friends and that there was no time table involved, but had a near brain hemorrhage when I took 20 minutes to get ready. So yeah, my guy can be a little on the rigid side. So, I was really glad when I slowly saw these things slip away. He now listens to music on his iPod in a completely random order, or however he feels like it at the moment. Also, he has gotten used to my family’s go with the flow attitude about weekends.

We now live pretty much how I have always lived (since being on my own), in some stage of huge mess. Our home office is our catch all room, and I periodically try to declutter it…with varying rates of success. One of the biggest problems is that we have an overly large music collection on CD, as well as a moderately large collection of data and software CD’s….I know…we live in the dark ages.

Today I was thinking about our impending move and thinking how much easier it would be to box things up if we were a bit more organized, and had gotten rid of a bunch of stuff. At that point, a mountain of loose CD’s fell on top of me, and it took a large portion of my decluttering time to stack them all back up neatly. I started brainstorming about all of the possible solutions that one could use for CD’s that seem to be taking over your life, when I realized that the home organization that I so crave is living underneath my roof. Okay, so maybe he doesn’t get how to put away any of the kitchen utensils, but CD’s are his thing. And after realizing that my system of take a disc out of the player, and leave it on the counter for a while and then shove a bunch on my desk, and then leave the pile there for a couple of months, wasn’t WORKING. I realized that I’m making it too hard. My husband has things that he likes a certain way, and I have things that I like a certain way, so why aren’t we using each others’ strengths?

So tonight he has started on his project, and is adding all of our music together in a wonderfully alphabetized, color coded, categorized, and labeled system that is going rock my socks off and help make this move easier. I don’t know why I’ve been fighting his way for so long when it’s clearly better and…well, better.

Do you ever have those moments where you realize that you’re a doofus who is making your own life harder?