I've gone from living with a complete hoarder, messy slob to sharing a house with an organizer, who wants to clean and paint and dump the trash.

It's a shock, I tell you. I went home last night and all three rooms downstairs had piles of stuff in various categories--keep, sort, toss, put away. It took her an hour just to show me what she had done (started on). She'll be back today.

My previous efforts are so puny and timid by comparison. I never dared touch Norm's stuff. While being respectful of the need to consult with me, she has no qualms about labelling it obsolete, broken or useless and putting it in the appropriate pile.

Wow. For years, I've wanted a clean, organized and usable house without every available closet crammed with storage, every flat surface inches deep in -- oh, what is the polite word? Excrement? Offal? Waste products?

I'm going to visit Norm today to find out what his ideas are about that wall full of shelves of old VCR tapes. What do you want to bet he wants them boxed and saved? As if he were ever going to look at any of them again....

She wants to paint. (What? Boring off white walls too boring?) And I want to rip out the carpet and put in flooring of some sort, maybe parquet.

I feel like I'm on a train going 90 miles an hour. Enjoying it, but it's exhausting. Wheeeeeee!