I’ve always hated The Giant Monster. And in some inanimate way, I know The Giant Monster hated me too. I’m no animist, but I’m convinced it kicked me in the back on the way out the door for spite.

The Giant Monster (TGM) is a set of bunk beds we purchased eight years ago for our two daughters. The bottom is separate from the top bunk and it boasts a large lighted desk, generous shelving and a set of five drawers (it’s in excellent condition, if you’re interested).

Lately my teen daughter’s feet have begun to dangle off the end, and we decided it was time to spring for some new beds.

My husband and I were at a big box store last week and spied some Queen-sized mattress sets on sale. A big sale. A sale for suckers. On impulse, we decided to buy two sets, and sell TGM online. Impulses can prove to be  expensive.

We were quite a sight, driving down the road with both sets stacked in precarious fashion on top of a full-sized van. We drove with much fear and trembling and got the mattresses upstairs without too much difficulty.

The box springs, however, were too rigid to bend around the wall of our enclosed stairway. Silly us. We didn’t measure before we made such an impulsive purchase. If we had only bought doubles…

“Oh, well,” we said to one another. “We’ll find a solution later. Let’s just get TGM apart and put it in the basement until we sell it.”

Around 9 pm, I managed to help my husband get the heaviest piece from the second floor to the basement, but not before I felt something pull in my back.

At 4 am, I woke up in excruciating pain, but needed to pee, as all women do in the middle of the night. It hurt so much when I stood up, I passed out. When I passed out, I hit my head. When I hit my head, I triggered a dizzy spell (I have chronic vertigo).

A trip to the emergency room earned me some very effective morphine mixed with muscle relaxant and lots of sympathy, sprinkled with bits of “what in the @!#!* were you thinking?” I have not fully recovered from this incident, but I’m improving, thanks.

But, what to do with the box springs? Should we try and return the sets? The kids were already sleeping on the mattresses and loving them. Should we try ordering queen-sized box springs that come in two pieces? They would be outrageously expensive.

No, we made our beds, so to speak, so now we had to lie in them. One way or another, those box springs were getting upstairs!

“We just need a couple of inches,” we said to each other.

“Maybe if we remove one of the stair treads…?” suggested a recruit.

While I watched from the sidelines with my injured back and my whirling head, my husband took off one wooden stair tread, and then another, then another.

It wasn’t enough. The box spring was wedged in the stairway. I mean, wedged.

“What if we just bang off a little of the plaster on the ceiling?” someone suggested.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

After cracking a big hole in the wall at the bottom of the stairs, and hammering off the corner of the ceiling in two places at the bottom landing, and tearing off each stair tread AND riser, we finally got the box springs upstairs. A week later, we’re still in the process of repairing the drywall, fixing the stairs and painting. But we were committed to the mattresses, by dinghy.

When we sell our house, the buyer inherits a couple of Queen-sized beds.

I confess, I’ve been lax. My bedroom organization plans came to a screeching halt just before Christmas, along with my industrious blog posts, but I have a good excuse:  Santa left me with no budget.

One thing I’ve noticed during my foray into house improvement is that one project usually spawns another.  When you move stuff, it needs a place to go. The linens and blankets moved from my closet are now piled in a large wooden crate, waiting for a home in a different room. This will require a third closet system, and when those things are purged, sorted and moved, where will I put them?

Since I can’t afford to make the desired changes to my bedroom (and now a second bedroom) all at once, my pet project is turning out to be a long-term patience-builder.

Which brings me to tonight’s activity. The owner of the third bedroom closet is a very messy girl indeed. Unfortunately, she stores items in much the same way as her parents. We decided we could not wait for her to clean up any longer and dove in shortly after dinner while she was at an event.

We viewed the dirty socks, stuffed animals, blankets, pillows, school-books and a hundred other items piled on the floor, and giggled at some of the bits filling up her desk:  a mini-Tinkerbell fairy with one wing and no feet; several bits and pieces of broken jewelry,  scattered irritated notes to her older sister complaining of various injustices;  broken crayons and dried-out markers; several dozen half-used scribblers, notebooks and journals (scrawled with the warning, “Do not read! Private!”); tens of tiny containers filled with treasures, including a small square ring box containing…what? A ring? No, silly…two small plastic lion cubs.

As we chatted about how our daughter would feel about us throwing out her stuff, my husband laughed and said, “Well, she’s not here, so she won’t know any better.” When he saw the look I gave him, he pointed at me and said, “No, it’s not the same thing at all.”

I wish I’d used that reasoning when I was cleaning out his closet.

Picture this: a business networking event where plenty of entrepreneurs are wandering around with wine, cheese, business cards and a nametag.  It’s a small city…lots of people already know each other, and lots of people wish to be known.

Held in the atrium of a lovely office building, this evening networking opportunity is important to the salespeople who are manning tables set up by local businesses. While they sell their services, there are plates of shrimp, vegetables, cheese and hot dip for members-only to enjoy.

And then there’s me. A nervous first-timer thinking perhaps she should take a deep breath and dive in.  “I really need to get out there and network,” I think, “if I want to sell my writing services to businesses.”

(Frankly, the process of walking up to total strangers, offering my business card and saying, “Hi, I’m Rhonda. I’m a great writer…do you need a great writer? I thought so!” terrifies me. But, my mother used to say, “the only way around is through,”  so I went anyway.)

I arrive a few minutes early, and I ease myself into the process by visiting an empty sponsor table on the far end, manned by a bored girl who looks like she has to be here.

She is friendly and chatty and asks about my background…I mention I’m also a writer of children’s fiction and that I’m seeking a publisher for a novel, and she asks me a few more questions. I’m nervous, and the more I explain, the more I use my hands.

That’s when the unthinkable happens. I sweep my hand to the left, and smack a lovely glass bowl filled with red sparkly decorations on her display table against a brick pillar.  As if in horrible slow motion, I watch the bowl spill its contents to the floor, then smash to smithereens.

It was a very enthusiastic point I was making.

“I’m so sorry! Oh, I’m so clumsy!” I cry. My hands jump to cover my beet-red face, and my peripheral vision picks up the curious looks from people who are just beginning to trickle in. I wonder what they’re thinking? Oh, wait, I know: “Thank God that wasn’t me!”

“Don’t worry about it, don’t worry about it all,” she says, attempting to soothe my embarrassment while she hastily cleans up the mess. But of course, it doesn’t. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s looking gauche.

The next time I go play with the grownups, remind me not to talk with my hands.

For those of you who’ve been following my foray into the world of bedroom organization, I thought you may appreciate this short video produced by “Lava Lamp Productions,” (a video production company consisting  of my husband, a hand-held Panasonic video camera, our kids, editing software, and an amazing sense of humour).  My angst-filled blog posts regarding closet purging (specifically,  ‘The Big Fork and Spoon‘) have gained me nothing but my children making fun of me…but at least it’s funny.

…And you’ll be interested (pleased, aghast?) to know The Fork and Spoon have finally found their place on the dining room wall. As Mark Knopfler says, “Sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug.”

By the way, since lamenting the cost of wood laminate closet systems in my last blog a few weeks ago , we measured and drew pictures and measured some more, finally settling on a much cheaper  wire component system. More on that in the New Year, as well as our floor plan. In the meantime, enjoy a wonderful holiday season and my best to you for 2010.

We can hardly blame the mainstream media for no longer hosting public debate about whether climate change is actually happening: nobody wants to appear as though they’re supporting foolish conspiracy theories. Dissenters have been relegated to the journalistic ignominy of the internet, which is why the Internet is so juicy.

Isn’t it ironic that the people wearing the end-of-the-world sandwich boards used to be considered the wild-eyed fringe? Now, they’re the reasonable ones  and the crazies are the ones saying, “hold on, it’s not that dire. Everything’s going to be okay.”

This morning, Anna-Maria Tremonti and Linden MacIntyre read some emails on CBC radio’s The Current regarding the “ClimateGate” scandal and interviewed Spencer Weart, recent author of “The Discovery of Global Warming.” He explained away the hacked emails and computer files from Britain’s Climate Research Institute, saying he didn’t find anything particularly damning in them.

And on Tuesdays show, The Current broadcast a sample of debates being held in Toronto that evening between George Monbiot, author of “Heat, How to stop the World from Burning,” and Bjorn Lombourg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist.” The focus of the debate was how to best spend money on fighting global warming.

But I can’t help feeling cynical about it all, just like with the reports on the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan. There’s a lot we don’t know, and a lot we’re not allowed to read. All we hear are the accusations and the denials.

If scientists say the world is warming up…fair enough. I trust them, just like I trust my doctor when she says my thyroid’s underactive and I need to take that little yellow pill every morning. (However, she was also the doctor who asked me if I wanted to see a shrink when I was really suffering from an undiagnosed balance disorder. Lesson? Professionals don’t know everything.)

Since I am a citizen who pays her taxes, and since my wallet is about to burst with the trillions of dollars Mr. Monbiot wants countries like ours to spend on energy changes, could someone answer the following questions for me?

1)      How do scientists know for sure that heating and cooling trends do not run in cycles?

2)      Are we in a heating cycle, as climate-change deniers speculate, that has little to do with us?

3)      How do they know that what is happening now hasn’t happened before and will probably happen again in varying degrees (no pun intended)?

4)      How do scientists know that their present scientific models predicting the flooding of coastlines around the world are actually accurate?

Question number four is of particular importance, because politicians, special interest groups, the EU and the UN, are pushing countries to make some very drastic (not to mention, expensive) changes based on the accuracy of these models. And the third world can hardly be expected to keep up. As a humble citizen, I feel like a first-time parachuter being forced out at 20,000 feet by an overzealous jump instructor.

The IPCC has the vast majority of our global population convinced (at least, the ones that aren’t starving to death or are in the middle of a civil war and have bigger problems to worry about) that our demise is imminent. As a result, we are willing to hand over our sovereignty because of it.

The fact that so many people no longer brook denial and insist on extreme political and economic changes that have the potential to bankrupt us (like the UN, for example, who would dearly love to charge independent nations a global carbon tax) is bully behaviour. In the end, this movement has the potential to remove power from individual governments and put it in the hands of a much smaller (and richer) group of people.

I became skeptical about panic movements after Y2K—remember that? This time ten years ago, The Current reported about it constantly, along with every other TV news station, radio program, newspaper or magazine. We were faced with doomsayers everywhere we looked. Toasters were going to burn up, planes were going to fall from the sky, and your electric toothbrush was going to explode in your mouth on January 1, 2000 because of some computer glitch.

And then, midnight rolled around. The calendar turned over, the sun rose the next morning. Coffee makers dripped, planes landed safely, no cars broke down on the highway.

And what happened to the story in the media?

It just went away, never to be mentioned again, along with all the creative non-fiction authors who made a bundle on the story and a name for themselves in interviews. How about that?

Dressed warmly for walking to school this morning, Caleb stood at the front door with his dad and sisters. He looked up and said, “Dad, when I get big and have a wife, when my wife is out, I’m going to be in charge, right?”

Caleb got a little annoyed with me when I laughed out loud. It was an honest question.

My husband and I checked out our local building supply store this afternoon in search of closet systems, and I discovered something: crappy pressed board covered with  fake wood veneer is expensive.

We priced two short metal hanging rods and a cupboard undergirded with four drawers and a couple of shelves. A mid-quality system  cost roughly $350 per closet!

No, thanks. Christmas is coming.

Guess this means we’ll have to “rig up” something of our own.

We did it…we purged our closets. We separated clothing into a blue plastic bag–what someone might want–and a green plastic bag–what nobody would ever want. Technically, we’re performing Steps 3 and 4 simultaneously: The Sort and The Purge.

I’m also going to try a tip from The Organizing Connection for tracking my clothing usage: hang all clothing backwards, they suggest, (with the hook pointing out)  and after wearing, re-hang them with the hook pointing in. Then you can identify the clothing you wear most, and the clothing you haven’t touched within a month or so.

When we moved in five years ago, I noticed the color on the inside of the closets…1975 mint green, with various scuffs, one long wooden rod, and one high, deep shelf.  (I’m not a fan of deep shelves.  They become black holes. Your favorite green argyle sweater gets accidentally pushed to the back and disappears. Who knows what else is back there? A gravity well full of everyone else’s clothing?)

At the time, I couldn’t care less what color the closet was, or bother to custom-fit a new closet system, because we had been waiting for nine desperate weeks to move into our new place as our sale agreement stipulated. Our family of five camped with relatives all summer. By the time moving day arrived, we all just wanted to have our own place.

Today, I felt no different when I yanked everything out to purge, even though I saw it again—the faded mint green color still blaring a noisy tune.

In the Organizing Connection’s General Tips for Closet Organization, I read, “It always gets really messy before it gets neat. You will need to empty the closet completely so you have a clean palette to work from. This is a good time to either give the walls a good washing or it may be time for a fresh coat of paint. You will also want to get out your measuring tape and size up the area for a new closet organization system.”

Both closets measure 41 inches (3 feet five inches) wide by 37 inches (just over 3 feet) deep. Sketching out a design and shopping for an economical closet system will be our weekend chore. Maybe after we do that, I’d be willing to splash on a lick of paint. For right now, the purged contents are going back in.

What about the stuff I got rid of? I need to find another place for:

-          Several sets of king-sized sheets

-          A giant basket filled with loose photographs

-          My big, clunky film camera in its case, a Canon EOS. It’s a great camera, and only about eight years old: too bad it didn’t have time to wear out before it became redundant.

-          A three-drawer plastic container on wheels, filled with acrylic paints and other craft supplies

Folks, I feel like a fraud.  I’m not really organizing, I’m just shifting stuff around. We ditched a few books and threw out some old, ugly clothes, but other than that we’re just putting the other stuff  somewhere else. Perhaps this is why I put off organizing our bedroom for so long. The work here creates work in other places in the house, namely, the basement. I fear almost everything on the list is bound to end up there.

I’m scared of the basement.  Igor lives in the basement.

By the way, as you’ve gathered from the spoiler headline, the fork and spoon didn’t make it out of my husband’s closet. For that to happen, I think I may have to agree to display them somewhere, at least until he gets a man room.

Such is the price of peace.  The Middle East could learn a thing or two from me.

I had no idea he was doing it. After completing my kitchen chores this evening, I came upstairs to find my husband unloading the contents of his closet. “If you’re going to blog about it,” he said, “at least say I was awesome enough to start by myself.”

As the piles of clothing, books, sports paraphernalia, ties, belts, and wall art grow in the middle of the room, we are both simultaneously amazed and embarrassed at the gigantic mountain of junk that was stuffed in that tiny space.

“Everything that has a sports team logo is off limits,” he said. “Also off limits are all the office decorations that I’m keeping for the day when I have an office again. You know, giving away my books is going to be hard, because I really like my books… And don’t make me sound like a turd.”

I know all of you are anxious to hear the fate of the famous  Fork and Spoon. I’m sure they’re in the pile somewhere.

A few months after we were married, I threw out my husband’s blue baseball cap. He’s never quite forgiven me for that faux pas. But folks, trust me when I say it was a really ugly, dirty, floppy, smelly hat.

I stuffed it into the center of a blue garbage bag filled with items bound for the Salvation Army.  He didn’t notice it was gone until the following weekend, when he asked me, “Have you seen my hat?”

I can’t remember if I lied about it or not, but since I’m not very good at lying, I’m going to assert that I fessed up right away.

He’d been wearing it since high school, and at 21, he still looked like a teenager, as proven by the kid who came to the door on a Saturday in October selling magazine subscriptions. My husband answered the door wearing his weekend garb of the blue cap, t-shirt, sweat pants and Daffy Duck slippers. The boy asked him, “is your mom or dad at home?”

My husband was insulted, and made it clear to the boy that he was, in fact, an adult. He didn’t buy a subscription, either.

Eighteen years later, I don’t think we’ve changed very much as a couple. Even though I’ve never thrown out any precious item since the infamous blue hat, my husband still clings to his old, unfashionable stuff,  and I’m still begging him to reform.

This organizing experiment was not intended to be a marriage confessional, but I’m beginning to realize that how we surround ourselves with stuff and how we organize it says a lot about our personality.

The worksheets for Step 2 are designed “to help me make the new reality happen.” It goes on to say, “In the dream you created a vision of your ideal bedroom. Now, it’s probably scaring you—how to go from here to there?”

Yes, I think it seems too big to overcome, but I’m excited about the possibility of an organized work space, separate from our sleeping area.  Organizing Connection’s worksheets instruct me to come up with five actions to reach this goal, and to assign the goal to someone by a certain date. Hmm…better use a pencil.

I think we should do the closets first, because our new floor plan depends on installing new closet systems. Here are my five initial actions:

1. Clean out my own closet by Friday, November 20.
2. Have Kent clean out his closet by…when? TBD
3. Price and plan out new closet systems this coming weekend.
4. Design and price materials for our new wall shelving in our office zone.
5. Decide what to do with the bedroom furniture we are making redundant.