A Touch of Monk

I have gotten a lot better over the years, but I suppose that you could still call me a little "Monkish." I like things to be in order, even if that is impossible with a house full of pigs, oh I mean children. Here are a few examples:

CDOT has been redoing highway 34 straight through town and the traffic disruptions have been a nightmare. But I have to say that I LOVE new blacktop. I love how smooth and uniform it looks and how the painted lines are all crisp and bright. It's like a work of art. If only they could do both lanes at once so there wouldn't be an unsightly line in the middle where the blacktop isn't completely uniform. That always distracts me.

A few weeks ago we went to the local museum. One exhibit in the museum features all the ink stamps that the city of Loveland has used for 40 years in the Valentine re-mailing program. The stamps are set in a big slotted box in middle of the table and there is a date marked on each slot where each stamp should go. Of course, not everyone has O.C. tendencies, so they were all mixed up. While the kids had fun stamping scratch paper, I set to work placing each stamp into its corresponding year slot and even organized the scratch paper into piles: used scratch paper here, unused there.

We have a sesame street set of alphabet books that hardly ever get read. Why may you ask? Because I cannot let them be out of alphabetical order when they are put back. Each book has the letter on the spine, so isn't it only logical to put them back that way? My kids don't think so, so the books are kept behind the entertainment center so they stay safe and alphabatized. I must be crazy.

And don't tell Paul, but I had to refold the underwear and towels that he tried to help me with last night. I tried to resist, but they didn't look like the ones that I had folded.