52 Changes - You Can Take it With You

Here's a fun little confession: even I don't get the pun in this week's title.  Apparently there is a play called You Can't Take it With You, which was followed by a film version in the 1930s, neither of which I have ever seen.  In fact, the only reason I've even heard of this play is that it is performed by a character in a book I've read.  And no, this wasn't some grand work of literature - it's a teen horror book called Chain Letter that we used to have.  It's basically another incarnation of the whole I Know What You Did Last Summer genre, but we had a random copy of it floating around the house, and I used to read it periodically when  I had nothing to do.  So there you go.  This all has absolutely nothing to do with what I'm writing about today, but you never can tell what you'll get with this blog.

With that out of the way, what I obviously intend to write about today is my car.  Yeah, didn't see that coming, did you?  Well, much like the entire condo, and my desk at work, and pretty much any other place I've spent any amount of time at lately, the inside of my car has become a cluttered mess.  We take camping trips in my car, do most of the errands around town in my car, and probably the biggest offender: when we travel home we do so in my car.  And any car trip pretty much necessitates some snacks and beverages.  Oddly enough, we never seem to remember those when we leave home, but by time we hit the Iowa 80 truck stop, it's time to grab some munchies.  Sometimes literally.

So we start with just a car full of packed belongings and a few foil wrappers and some pop bottles, then spend the weekend at home, during which time any trash can just be tossed in the car.  The dangerous thought in play here is that if we've already got trash in the car, we can just add to it and we'll get it all when we clean things up post-trip.  But that cleaning session rarely if ever seems to happen.  After a long weekend away, cleaning up the car is hardly the first thing we want to do when we return.  So it gets pushed back a day, then another day, and finally ignored until the car is a mess.

This was the case until a few weeks ago when my left front wheel started making horrible squealing noises any time the car was in motion.  It was pretty apparent I needed to take the car in, so I just scooped up everything in the car and dumped it into a bin in the garage.  The guys at the garage fixed my brakes for the minor sum of $880 (#!$*!%) and were kind enough to throw in a vacuum of the inside.  I got in, was able to drive without traumatizing all the dogs in a five mile radius, and thought that my car actually looked pretty nice now that it was clean.  No more need to wait for others to offer to drive to lunch.  No more petrified tangerines bouncing around the passenger foot area for months (sadly that did happen).  It was great, and I wanted to keep it that way.

Realistically, there's no way to ensure that junk doesn't find its way to my car.  That's just silly wishful thinking.  So the key is to address the junk when it happens.  The plan - to always take a thing or two that doesn't belong out of the car when I get home.  In time, assuming I don't add to the mess at a greater rate than I remove, the car should get clean and on the average stay there.  And if there's a day where I don't see anything to pull out of the car, as there actually have been so far, I can pull from the bin in the garage.  So far I haven't been missing anything important, so in all likelihood I could just toss the whole thing, but I can whittle it away gradually, just like with the car.

I like this one, because it's not a major change.  Forcing myself to do dishes every other day or so (last week's entry) is hard, because it's not something I usually do.  But going inside from the car is something I already do; I just need to slightly modify the routine to grab a piece of trash before I go.  Simple, and making progress.  It'll be like being the boy scout I never was as a kid: leave the car in better condition than I found it.  And with a clean car, I'll be better able to focus on driving, so I won't run someone over and thus won't get threatening chain letters forcing me to do horrible things as some sort of mysterious punishment.  Ha!  Tied it all back together.  :)