Life Means Learning.

Moving in and setting up house is hard! Especially when you've just received dozens of new gifts, and you're trying to make a home with your new spouse for the first time. It takes time (not to mention patience) to figure out just where everything will fit, what you'll keep and what you'll give away, etc.

Whether it was an early nesting bug or simply my desire for order, I didn't stop working on *most* of the house until it was at least functional and reasonably presentable; however, the laundry room and the back room (music room/guest room/craft room) have long been neglected.

Tim's closest is in the back room, but I've mostly made a habit of avoiding it, and that has worked well enough. The laundry room disaster was temporarily solved by hanging a sheer floor-length curtain across the doorway, to hide it from the kitchen. That was working well until the fire alarm (which goes off all. the. time. when you're cooking) was blaring loudly from oops--behind the washer. (I guess I had yanked it off the wall and set it on top of the washer and it had fallen backwards?)  Anyway, the fact of the matter was that guests were filling the house for a student event we were hosting, and the fire alarm could not be quieted. When my team director poked his head behind the curtain of secrecy to help find it, I cringed. And kept cringing. The mess and disorder of my life revealed. We're talking serious disorder. Glass bowls precariously stacked on shelves, boxes towering and at the same time falling apart… a load of laundry my loving husband had washed and dried but left on the floor… bowls and random lunchboxes mixed with bags and utensils piled onto the dryer... and that was just the beginning.

Needless to say, I was motivated in a big way to tackle the room.

AND IT'S A GOOD THING!! To make a long story short, besides the glass bowls which were threatening to jump off the shelf and create millions of glass daggers, I also uncovered the lint trap on the dryer. It had been sneakily hiding under an assortment of storage. It struck me when I unearthed it: "hm, I've never seen that before." BAD. Very Bad!

In almost three months of living here, it had never been emptied. Oops. How is it that you just forget about something like cleaning out the lint trap? I'm going to claim pregnancy brain, but really, I'm just very thankful that the fire alarm led to my embarrassment about the room and that my guardian angel helped me find it… before the two inches of tightly compact lint started a real fire. Which should have been any day now.

Lesson: learned. I will never again allow the dryer top to remain buried for three months.