moink!

today's confession....i'm a pig. you wouldn't know this by lookin at me out of my pen and with just a bit of notice, probably not if you came by to visit me cause after livin' with this deep dark secret for my whole life i have just about mastered the art of hidin' it when necessary. so much so that i am often called upon to help others figure out ways to organize their own pens. see...they think i am an expert at ORGANIZIN' when the fact is i have become an expert at DISGUISIN'. and the reason they are always impressed with my knowledge of containers and such for settin a pen up is because i have tried them all in my effort to get and keep my pen under control. see - my biggest problem is that i'm a pig who likes everything to be perfectly neat all the time. this is a difficult problem to solve cause i can start the day off in perfectly neat surroundins' and by nightfall there will not be enough floor left available to walk a straight line...the only way to get to the door is to hop from open spot to open spot (tinker has gotten used to her head jerkin back and forth during the ride). this makes it quite difficult to check and see if mini can make it out of her pen so we can spend some quality time together. see - she too is a pig.

i come from a long line of pigs. jo says she is not one of em but it's hard to tell. she can see us headin' across the yard her way and all she has to do is turn the fan on high and wave the dust buster over her head a few times while sitting on the banquette for her trailer to look neat. and when she is in my pen she sure has no problem lettin' things drop hither and yon so i think she did indeed get some of the pig blood. my brother and sister are neat freaks so the gene seemed to skip them altogether.

growin' up, sharin' a room with queenie, there was a wall with two closets with slidin' doors - one for each of us. queenie had everything perfectly hung up, all the hangers facing the same direction, shoes all in neat boxes and the shelf above stocked like a department store before the doors open. she could get dressed with no problem no matter where she was off to cause she had everything ready to pick from. my closets doors were never on the track so i could climb in on one side and use it sort of like my own private dressin' room. most everything was in a pile on the floor - so much easier than havin' to take it off a hanger if it was what i wanted to iron to wear. the shoes were mixed in to the pile so no need to open boxes but i must admit i could sometimes find only the left one or the right one. but i was always in a panic about runnin' late while queenie would already be on her way.

when i was in college i arrived home from dinner one night to find my suite mates had moved all my belongins' out into the hall. they had tried painting a yellow stripe around what was designated as my area but it just wasn't enough to keep me in my pen. i do believe the only reason the sorority i joined let me stay livin' with em was they needed an artist in residence - and i had the most boyfriends. they could always count on me for painting somethin' at the last minute for their appointed little sister or get 'em a date with some of my overflow.

i have lived in fear most of my life that someone would look in my purse. i'm sure there have been many a time i appeared to be luggin' around illegal substances of some kind my the way i cling to my handbag and when the need for openin' it occurs, i do so only enough to retrieve whatever is needed. it is what i would call a mini pig pen. for a time i had considered goin to one of those tapings of the ellen show but once she started haulin' people's bags along with her as she danced through the audience during the first part of the show and with my luck, she'd grab mine and my mini pen would be exposed on national t.v.

the thing is there's seldom anything i need in my bag. when it gets so bad i can't take it any more, i find i can remove my driver's license, my one credit card and lipstick tube and then shake the whole thing right over the trashcan and start over. sometimes if it's really bad - like if i stuff a half eaten bag of M&Ms in and forget to smush up the openin' and they spill and then it's really hot outside and they melt all over everything, i have to just pitch the whole thing and start over. mini's backpack is the same. i can go through it and know everything she has eaten while at school as there are little bits of it all stuck in some pocket....if i am really desperate for a snack late at night and am too fearful of the kitchen critters for a trip downstairs, i can dig in her backpack first for a small morsel to do the trick.

my piggish ways have made me very unhappy during my life. i just could never figure out how to change them and always deemed myself a failure because of them no matter how much i succeeded at everything else i decided to do. it's amazin' that i have achieved so much while failing my fight with this debilitating problem. and since people have no patience or understanding for piggish people, it was always somethin' i felt i had to hide because if it was discovered, i would be revealed as a big ol' fraud overall.

i wasn't diagnosed as havin ADD until about i was an adult. it wasn't that no one ever noticed that i was different - every doctor i had ever visited my entire life had tried to cram a prescription for some calmin' potion into my tightly closed handbag so i might relax a bit. but i have never been interested in relaxing. there was just too many things i needed to get done. and since i always figured out a way to do 'em, it seemed my only problem was finding them once i finished. but once i was diagnosed it seemed to make a bit more sense to me and i became a bit more forgiving of my piggish ways and tried not to be so hard on myself. but readin' up on bein' gifted with ADD didn't give me much in the way of answers for turning every place i went into my own personal pig pen.

i finally got more answers when my mini was diagnosed as having received more of my genetic make-up than i had planned to pass on to her. in fact, when all our diagnostic tests are put next to each other, it appears that the very same person took 'em all. my doctor never bothered explaining what each one meant and how it would effect me as is often the case when someone is assigned the dreaded diagnosis of ADD. some poor parent new to all this mumbo jumbo and already horrified at bein' told their child is not perfect can't be blamed for not delving into the matter to the degree i have ended up doing so. by the time my mini was diagnosed i had a long list of questions ready to go. the fact is there are so many things that fall under the name of ADD and it is amazing how many answers lie within each of them. one of the answers i found helped me understand my need to create pig pens everywhere i am.

if i had only known all that time sittin' and starin' at that wall with those two closets and wonderin' why my side looked so different from queenie's and why it was such a struggle for me to pull it all together and so easy for her, that the answer was all in my genetic make-up! i just didn't have what it took to come up with and then follow a plan for keepin' my area organized. i could've spent all that time digging through queenie's locked up little bank shaped like a house or lookin for her diary instead of beating myself up so.

i think there are lots of people who have piggyness in their inherited genes and don't even know it. i often read blogs of other moms who are beating themselves up for not doin all the things they think they need to be doin' or want to do and i think that maybe they just need to find some extra tools to help 'em succeed. and maybe if they knew it wasn't their fault, they'd be so much nicer to themselves. and i shudder to think about all the poor children who are judged as lazy when they are tryin' their best but they just need to be taught some tricks to help 'em get the job done. my mini's IQ is so high she is rated up there with the smartest of humans....but if you just got a glimpse of her locker, you'd think there was no hope for her. before i understood how to help her, she could never find the papers she needed for class and was feelin' bad about herself. she'll never have a clean locker but now that she has a big ol' pocket attached to the inside of the locker door to throw the important things in, she gets her assignments in on time.

i'll always have to hop around my messy piles at the end of the day but now that i know and accept it i have figured out ways to disguise the mess from myself so i can keep functioning until i stop and get everything back in order so i can mess it up again. my biggest tool is in todays blog view. see, once i got my most favorite problem solver in the world, my drill, i was able to set the doo dad den up just like i needed it to be. and i have done so in a way that when something doesn't work for my piggyness anymore, i just put the drill in reverse and figure out something that will work. in these shots you'll see i have these counters (actually hollow doors) all around the doo dad den that underneath can be crammed full of a little of everything....but no one has to know but me and jo cause i dressed everything up in cute skirts! since most people with ADD are moving so fast from one thing to the other stopping to open a drawer is impossible, i use open baskets and mason jars for everything so i can just carry the whole thing to where i'm working and it's easier to put things back where they belong. and when i'm picking up the big ol' mess, i can just pitch things back into their containers without having to remove a lid or pull open a drawer. i screw the ring thing on the jars just so it looks like there's a lid but i leave the flat metal part off. 

i keep all my art supplies divided in batches by color and paint their containers to match the batches. i took these shots in the middle of a cleanathon so i don't think everything is labeled but normally everything is - that way it's easier for jo to help me clean without her having to ask me where each little doo dad goes. in the doo dad den bathroom, i use painted terracotta flower pots for everything. and that stuff you see on the floor are floor cloths - the only way for a piggish artist to keep from ruining nice hundred year old wood floors. they work so well i have even painted 'em for fancier rooms and they are often mistaken as being original to the house.

so...just thought i'd share my deep dark secret with you and hope maybe there was some piggish person readin who might know they are not alone. maybe there's something i've learned the hard way that i can pass along to make their life a little easier. my cousin jo is always sayin' if people were more honest with each other about their shortcomings we'd all feel better about ourselves. i do so hope my confession here will do you just a bit o' good.

thanks for stoppin by and i hope to see you back here soon!