We’ve got another one on the way. Another winter storm that they’re saying could be a “major” storm. Fun fun. What will we do if we have another day where schools, businesses, towns, governments, and Dunkin Donuts are all closed? (Okay, let’s be honest for a moment: I live in New England. Dunkin Donuts is NEVER closed.)

In all likelihood we’ll do what we did last Wednesday. Last Wednesday we ended up with (you guessed it) another snow day, stuck inside a small house with each of every one of us eventually going a little bit stir-crazy. (I don’t mean to sound bitter about all the snow, I did voluntarily move north fifteen years ago after all. But c’mon, enough’s enough.)

So what did we do to pass the time last Wedneaday?

We cleaned.

(Doesn’t everyone do that on a snow day?)

We’re still digging out from under all of the Christmas and birthday boxes and paper and crap that’s exploded all over the place. It felt good to really dig into some dark corners, tear it all apart, and put it back together again in a neat and orderly fashion. Not to mention the throwing out of a ton of shit that we just don’t need or use. I think we ended up with five big black trash bags worth of stuff we junked.

But the pièce de résistance belongs to my wife, who took our arts & crafts closet for the kids from this:

To this:

It’s a thing of beauty.

PS – I could hear my wife even as I wrote this, in my head, going “My god, don’t show them what it looked like!” Yeah, it was a mess. But if you’ve been in my house, you’ve already seen it. The fact is, this is life, life with two kids in a small house, and you know what? It’s messy. That’s something I try to make myself at peace with every day. It’s not easy, and I fail at the “make peace” part about 50% of the time. But that’s life. It’s not all sitcom. And the fact is, getting this beast cleaned up was a HUGE victory in the house, a victory belonging to my wife. So, I post it.