Material Accumulation Run Amok! "My mother is insane" page 6
Okay, before we head into my room let me explain a few things. I moved back down here from Seattle a few years ago to go to college. It was decided I would get the master bedroom, since it had cable and phone lines. My mom, who only has the one TV and never talked on the phone in her room anyway, moved into the other bedroom. You saw what happened there. Right before I moved down she assured me the bedroom was cleared out. So imagine my surpise when I get down here only to find there were still three dressers in the room, still full of her clothes. Not only that, but there was no room in the garage to put any of my boxes, so everything I owned had to go into this one room. She said she'd clear out some room in the garage, but as you can guess that didn't happen...
So here's my room. That pile of boxes right in front of the door is some of her stuff that has been creeping in. That bubble wrap above it is covering the "displayed" part of my Transformer collection, since anything that's not covered gets coated with a thick layer of dust in a few weeks. The bed was hers, but would have been too much trouble to move. That thing I agreed to have left in the room.
More of my room. Most of my boxes are all full of old schoolwork, childhood toys, and electronics that in a normal house would be in the garage, but not here. I get to live with them every day. Also I have a large fuzzy mushroom with a pillow on top.
This is something you might have seen in some other parts of the house but it's most visible here. In addition to closing the curtains, my mom covers the small windows with cardboard to "keep the heat in/out", depending on season. I'm not sure how that's supposed to create any measureable affect on the total temperature, but she got mad whenever I took them down so now I just live with them.
The other side of my room, leading to the bathroom.
The closets are still full of her old clothes, since I don't need closet space. The thing is they're both just as full as this all the way down their length, and I'm pretty sure she doesn't fit in most of these clothes anymore. A lot of these clothes are from the 70's and 80's.
My bathroom. The exercise bike showed up while I was gone one summer, then the vacuum a little later. The bike is useful as a clothes rack. Time for a bathroom story. One time I ran out of toothpaste or floss or something, so I opened the medicine cabinet looking for more. Instead, I found the bathroom cabinet full of my old prescription bottles. I then realized I'd never thrown a prescription bottle away, I'd get new ones, and the old ones had just disappeared. I'd never thought about it. I confronted my mom, and she told me she was keeping hers too, and was saving them to cut the labels off so the prisoners wouldn't know what medications we were on. I told her that was crazy, and that I was going to throw mine away. A few days later I went to do that, only to find they were all gone. Mom took them all, and hid them in a box somewhere so I couldn't throw them away. They were out of my way, so I didn't pursue it any further. I make sure to throw my old bottles away now though.