Home Alone

Julie is in New Brunswick for two weeks so I'm on my own at the moment. It is very strange to be the only person at home; I almost forget how to be by myself! The television is not on if I don't want it to be on and nobody minds if I'm on the computer for a while. Nobody is waiting for dinner to be made and nobody cares if the dishwasher ran or the laundry is done...

Hm... Yeah, after two days of this, I'm over the thrill. :(

I bought her an iPhone last week (early b-day present) after her mp3 player broke. She's taken to the new technology like a house on fire... she's twittering, texting, watching netflix, skyping, reading books, playing scrabble and using the iPod all the damn time! I think my iPhone is jealous of all the attention hers is getting. The Facetime feature is AWESOME for keeping in touch - basically it's skype but without the constant 'You froze... Should we restart? No? Hello? Oh, there you are... Yep, still frozen but I can hear you...' We did the Facetime thing this evening and it was fantastic. The only downside to that is both people have to be hooked up to wifi at the time, it doesn't work over 3G. So between that and texting, I guess I'm not really that lonely after all. :)

This evening I watched a couple of episodes of Hoarders: Buried Alive on TLC. One thing I don't understand (and believe me, I understand everyone is different and I don't know how it feels to actually live in a house with a hoarder) is why do the other adults living in these houses not put up a fight and challenge the hoarder? Why are there always these grown up kids that yell at their mom for being a hoarder but they're sitting on their lazy ass in front of a computer? Trash all over the floor... rodents running around... holy hell... I would get out a trash bag!!! Mom? You don't like this? Tough!! I'm throwing out the 48 slurpee containers you have stacked beside the bathroom sink(?)!!

Of course the ones that have OCD, that's a whole other story and usually requires a much different approach. I'm talking about the ones that are just suddenly shocked one day that their house is packed full and they don't know where to begin. But again, it is easy to criticize having never been in something like that. I always think of the one episode where the young boy ended up moving himself out to the back shed to live in a sleeping bag because his parents had his room crammed with stuff. Or the guy who refused to at least clean up the staircase after his wife tripped over a stack of magazines and broke her leg on the way down. Sometimes it's heartbreaking. :(

On that note, I'm off to tidy up the kitchen.