fyi my closet is not a picnic table

This is not a familiar subject for me (i.e. it is not cute or delicious), however, I need to share. I'm housesitting for my parents tonight and decided while I'm home I should prep my room for my post-graduation arrival with all of my college apartment stuff. And, well, the picture some what explains it all.

The past few weeks I have been majorly purging stuff from my room at home. I saw a very inspiring Oprah on obsessive hoarding featuring a woman that had 15 dumpters worth of trash in her home. Gross. Well, my room is definitely not that bad since it is physically much smaller than even ONE dumpster, but one of the guest psychologists on the show explained that everyone has hoarding tendencies, even if they aren't as extreme as the crazy lady with 7 tons worth of junk in her 3,000 square foot house. You know that junk drawer in your kitchen? That antique chest you can't even open in fear of random stuff falling on you? The cupboard filled with crafting supplies you haven't touched in two years? That's all a form of hoarding in its own way, and the more clutter that physically fills up your life, the more clutter you allow to emotionally fill your life.

Admittedly we are a nation of people who love to have stuff, but when you have a hard time finding things you actually want or need because of all the useless material items filling up every nook and cranny in your home, you're not the one having the stuff, the stuff is having you. I encourage everyone to release the control all of your stuff has on you, clean out your closet, sell the things you can, give the rest to friends or charity, and throw all that stupid junk you don't need away. Trust me, you will feel so relieved after doing so. I had no idea how stressed my overflowing closet was making me until I cleaned it out and suddenly I felt so calm and relaxed. It was wonderful.

As you can imagine, purging 23+ years worth of material posessions is not an easy task and it takes time to go through all of the things you own, and even more time to convince yourself you don't need it. So I've been doing my spring cleaning in stages, and I'm down to the nitty gritty at this point as I've been really productive in the past few weeks. I decided to give a little storage area I have in the corner of my room another look to see if I could get rid of anything else. I found a few old notebooks I didn't need and when I grabbed them I saw a few ants. Ew, right? It didn't really bother me though because this house has always had a few ants in it, so I moved some more stuff around searching for anything I had missed in my previous cleaning sessions and saw some more ants. And more ants. AND MORE ANTS.

I thought they were just eating some vitamins I had left sitting out, but then I moved a plastic bin to reach the vitamins and saw they had made a little home for themselves under it and were having all kinds of tiny larva babies. It was so sick. The "nest" was about the size of my fist. I promptly freaked out, ran downstairs, grabbed some Raid, came back to my room, and sprayed the suckers good. Right next to the nest was a painting I made a few years ago of Tater Tot and I didn't want to ruin it so before I could finish spraying the pests to death I had to pick it up (covered in ants fleeing for their lives) and move it to a safe area. Okay, this is where the story gets really gross. I picked it up and the ants had literally made a giant larva nest the size of the 8 1/2 by 11 frame which was holding the painting. Thank goodness I hadn't eaten in a few hours or surely I would have barfed, and then I would have had two nasty messes to clean.

The worst part about all of this (you mean besides thousands of ants and maggot-like ant babies?) was that it was impossible to spray all of the ants right away because I had so many books and binders that had to be removed first. So they were scurrying around like crazy and crawling up my hands while I desperately removed photo albums and yearbooks as quickly as possible, before thoroughly soaking the cupboard in Raid and then wiping up all the ant carcasses with toilet paper and flushing them down the toilet. Nicolle: 1, Ants: 0. They put up a good fight, though.