Victory is mine!

No. Not over fleas. Sorry.

I killed over 20 by hand today.

But we'll talk about fleas later.

Much later.

The Victory I was referring to was, despite not being over Flea-kind, profound and multifaceted. It was a victory over laziness, bureaucracy, the Bush Administration, paperwork, and my own inexplicable emotional issues surrounding The Mail.

Behold!

This sad pile is all that's left of my enormous mail backlog that goes back over three years. Recognizing that while external motivation isn't my first choice, but is sometimes the ONLY choice to accomplish a task, I deliberately mixed my tax paperwork for 2005 in with this huge pile of crap I've had since before I moved into my house. Precisely as planned, panic set in some time yesterday when I realized that NONE of the paperwork necessary to do my return was in the proper place. Instead, it was in THE PILE! The Pile, having outgrown first a shoebox, then a medium-sized moving box of the variety used to fire people, finally took up residence inside a disused weekend cooler. Various sorties through the years have retrieved much of value from the Pile, and also had the effect of rendering large portions of it obsolete. However, the final push came tonight as, file box in hand, I sorted through the ENTIRE Pile. Though I was tempted to stop once I was sure I had all my 2005 tax paperwork, I persevered and managed to churn through the rest of it. What you see in the picture is the garbage pile, proving the axiom that the older the paperwork, the less likely it is to ever be used again. I'm guessing we're seeing about 85% shred-bait by volume.

In addition to cleansing my postal palette, I also finished my return tonight, and somehow emerged with a hefty refund.

Life is good.