Ever since my sister pretended Mike Wolfe of American Pickers was her BF, I made fun of her on Twitter and ended up interviewing him over the phone for BlogHer, my family has been all about the pickin'. The Easter Bunny even brought me an Antique Archaeology tshirt.

But this Mother's Day, the pickin' got serious.

I know, right? Aren't they so creative?

My mouth hung open, sort of salivating in anticipation. It's possible being from Iowa makes one prone to sorting through people's junk. Maybe it's because we didn't have any cool stores growing up, so we were forced to make do with vintage. Maybe it's because people in Iowa have sheds where they can store forty years worth of crap no urban dweller would have room for. Whatever the reason, I've always liked looking through old stuff even if I had no intention of bringing any of it into Chateau Travolta or wherever I was living at the time.

We headed to breakfast, and then we pulled up at my favorite antique store/flea market in Kansas City. It's four stories tall, you can see through the floorboards to the people walking around below your head, it has a wicked-scary freight elevator that swings eerily in an open shaft, and by the time you've walked through and made eye contact with all the stuff, four hours have disappeared -- along with your nasal cavities, any liquid left in your eyeballs and your common sense.

I got a potting table.

Mike Wolfe would be proud.

It sprouted before everything else. It was pretty close to where I knew there was a coneflower.

But as it grew, I felt edgy. It doesn't look right. It looks broad-leafy.

It looks like a weed.

But I don't know.

So I keep watering it, waiting for it to flower so I'll finally understand.

But it makes me nervous to water it, because if it is a weed, it's putting down roots and stealing nutrients from the flowers around it.

Have anything like that in your life?

---

In keeping with the backyard theme, check out my review of the Backyard Guide to the Birds of North America on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews!

I opened the door to see a slight man standing on my front step. "I was driving by," he said, gesturing to his truck, "and I noticed your trees could use thinning."

I stepped outside, noting the woodchipper hitched to the back, the phone number on the side. "How much?"

He threw out a number, too high. I called Beloved, master negotiator. A few minutes later, my husband sent me to the ATM for the final amount. "Hurry," he said. "It'll go faster than you think."

I laughed. Surely they couldn't trim three trees that fast? But when I looked outside, the man on the doorstep was already 20 feet in the air. Three huge limbs lay on the ground. I thought about how long it would take Beloved and I to cut down such limbs, to drag them away. They must've weighed as much as a man.

I got in the car.

By the time I got back, the little man had moved to the front. "How much off this one?" he asked.

"As much as you can," I said. "I keep worrying that one's going to smash my car."

My sister and the little angel and I went on an errand. We were gone maybe twenty minutes, and when I returned, the man and his truck were gone, the trees transformed -- gone were the tributaries of tiny branches and left were the strongest limbs.

I pulled up to the house and sat there, staring at the tree, thinking how much I longed to trim my life like that, strip it to its skeleton, slash and burn the dead branches that come crashing down every time it rains.

With all the clutter gone, I could finally see my house.

When I was in college and my friends and I went out to eat (which was more often than not), one of us would inevitably use the restroom and return to a rapidly cooling sandwich or a nearly-gone pizza. It's one of those inevitable laws of life -- things happen when you have no ability to deal with the ramifications.

For instance, if you really want to finally finish scraping wallpaper off your kitchen, wait until your company is launching a huge redesign! And while you're at it, maybe five literary agents will ask to see your whole manuscript almost an entire year after you started sending it out.

I'm scared and hopeful and scared about how this week will end.

Over the past two weekends, I've pulled off the last of the country rose wallpaper in our kitchen. It's gone. All of it. Gone, gone, gone. Even though we're planning to take down the soffits eventually, I don't know what "eventually" means. For us, "eventually" can mean "two days from now" or it can mean "before the little angel graduates from high school." So I painted them anyway. And the kitchen ceiling.

When it was all said and done, the kitchen went from "heinously ugly" to "needs updating." And just like that, some iceberg fell off my psyche and drifted away.

Then it started snowing on the first day of spring break, and I didn't even care.

Huh.

Editor's Note: I don't have pictures. I seem to have chosen the busiest week of 2011 at work in which to conduct this home improvement, hence my recent radio silence. 'Cuz that's how I roll. Updates to come!

It's my fault. The carpet is so light-colored and only three years old. I caress it sometimes. Last year, we asked for a new vacuum cleaner for Christmas. So we could keep it cleaner, stare proudly at its stain-resistant fibers. After living with the disgusting Berber at This Old House for six years, new carpet has felt like living in a wall-to-wall dreamland.

So maybe I won't let anyone use the door to the back deck that's located randomly in the living room. BECAUSE THEY MIGHT TRACK ON THE CARPET.

And maybe I make every child remove their shoes within five nanoseconds of entering my house. BECAUSE THEY MIGHT TRACK ON THE CARPET.

And maybe I have been making my five-year-old daughter use travel coffee cups, water bottles and maybe, maybe even two leftover sippy cups when she dines in the living room. BECAUSE SHE  MIGHT SPILL ON THE CARPET.

And then, then! Just as I was chastising myself for being ridiculous, I let her eat french toast sticks and syrup in the living room.

Wait for it.

She pushed back her TV tray. It tipped over in slow motion. My feet were stuck as though rooted in sand. A tiny, ceramic bowl containing Mrs. Butterworth somersaulted gracefully through the air, spraying thick and sticky brown syrup in a four-foot swath across my sweet plush. All the sippy cups were for naught.

She stained the goddamn carpet.

We just can't stop messing with the closets.

This time I remembered to take a before photo.

It wasn't horrible, but the shelves were so deep we hadn't seen some of the items on the top shelf in two years and kept buying the same cleaning products over and over again.

 

A hodge-podge of extra supplies and who-knows-what.

I can't believe all this stuff was on the top and bottom shelves. Doesn't that seem impossible? But it was.

 

I put the towels in the piles they would go back into the shelves so I could, like, measure them and stuff.

Here's what the closet looked like with the shelves pulled out.

 

The shelves were two of these deep each. No wonder we couldn't ever reach anything.

 

Somebody Little reapportioned the boards for mixed media projects that I've assured her she can sell for great profit.

 

This time we used a different brand of shelves, but it was the same basic idea: Buy them as long as you can and cut them with bolt cutters down to size. This shelving is expensive (at least to me), and it's cheaper if you buy it longer and cut it down than buy the right size.

The stripes on the wall (which we still totally installed over without painting) represent the old shelves. I actually measured the piles of towels and stuff so the shelves would be based on what we were going to put on them rather than the other way around. We ended up with one fewer shelf as a result.

Beloved's idea to install mini shelves on the sides (note the feather duster at convenient Little Angel level) worked out great because the new shelves were at least five inches shallower than the old ones.

 

I did manage to get everything back into the closet without eliminating anything, even though the shelves are so much shallower. We weren't actually using the back five or so inches of each shelf because it was too hard to reach.

I can't figure out why every closet in our house is so deep. You can kind of see what I'm talking about from this photo. That white drawer thing is about two feet deep. I could stand inside this closet and brace myself against the back wall with my leg half-extended.

It'll be a lot easier now to tell the babysitter or the grandparents that all of the little angel's medicines are "in the linen closet on the second shelf on the door" rather than "buried eighteen bottles deep and maybe lost forever." Also, that rod at the top was my idea. I found it in the back of the old closet. I used it to hang the most frequently used cleaning products, and yes, I am fucking proud of that idea. Ahem.

 

We decided to celebrate by inviting over the neighbor girl and painting their faces with what was supposed to be glow-in-the-dark face paint. Those face-paint people are LYING LIARS FROM LIARSVILLE. It so doesn't glow. I even shown flashlights in their faces for a while to charge it up.

 

A young fairy off to save the world from evildoers.

 

This outfit was totally styled by the little angel herself, including the wings and the Home Depot apron. And the matching socks.

And so, another Sunday wrapped up at Chateau Travolta. Only 1,000 home improvement projects left to go.

So after processing a drive to Iowa that culminated in three $70 fill-ups of the Ford Explorer, we're ditching it.  Even though we're a little upside down in our loan.

We're downsizing -- drastically.  Like to a compact for our family car downsizing.  Like to something that gets more than 30 mpg highway downsizing.

Goodbye, swimming noodle at all times in the trunk.

Goodbye, leather seats and moon roof.

Goodbye, third row for when Ma and Pa are in town.

Goodbye, intense guilt about my carbon footprint.

Hello, freedom from the vise that settles around my temples every time I pull into a gas station, which is at least once a week.

Hello, four more years of car payments.

Hello, managing our variable monthly costs in the best way we know how to do.

Last Friday, I attended a green fair at my work and checked out the Honda Fit, among other cars.  I spent the weekend trying to convince my beloved to give up the huge tanker we drive now in favor of something definitely less comfortable and tricked out. Something with FEWER bells and whistles.

He is a man.  This was hard for him.

I enlisted my brother-in-law. Over noodles at lunch on Sunday before we drove home, my brother-in-law looked severely at my husband.  "G," he said.  "You need to embrace the economic realities of our time."

Beloved had been beaten at his own game.

Last night, we test-drove a Fit and looked at a Corolla.  Both are probably half the size of the Explorer and get literally twice the miles per gallon.  Beloved took one look at the 14-inch wheels on the Fit and visibly shrunk a few inches, but he manned up and hid his disappointment. 

We didn't buy anything yet, but we are definitely shopping.  The Explorer's days are numbered.  We'll keep the old one, as it is paid off, and you really can't argue with that.  I can't wait to ditch the one I'm driving, as its huge wheels and vast expanse of space no longer seem prudent for the family of three that doesn't plan to grow any more and the four-year-old who no longer needs a Pack-n-Play, a stroller, to carry her own food and diapers, a carseat the size of a sofa or 6,000 bottles when we travel.

It's time to start getting our lives under control.  This is step one. (cut a hole in the box)
-----------------
Need some light summer fiction? Read my review of Emily Giffin's new book at Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews.

So last night I woke up in the middle of the night to the most heinous odor of all time.  A skunk had sprayed right outside our house, and our bedroom window was open.  I started crashing around like a crazy person, earplugs in and glasses off, trying to find the window to MAKE IT GO AWAY.

I don't think Beloved smelled it then or heard me, but ten minutes later he was up, gasping and spraying smelly spray around the bedroom. Bella the cat had the good sense to stay downstairs, where the windows had been closed. 

We wondered later if our black-and-white cat had attracted the skunk, a la Pepe le Pew, and it had sprayed in frustration in being unable to reach Her Hotness. 

So now, no snoring, but waking up from a skunk. It took me an hour to fall back asleep.

And in that hour, I sat there thinking I KNOW HE THOUGHT IT WAS ME.