Let's write!

As I've been talking about on and off here, the major project that I've been working on since I got laid off last year is to reclaim this house. My husband and I are horrible pack rats as well as phenomenally lazy, so over the last twenty-six years, this house has become a real mess. I've made some great progress, such as packing away three decades of video game systems and their games, clearing out most of one room and making it a gaming room, clearing out another huge chunk of another room, and making tons of trips to Goodwill and the dump), but there's still a long way to go.

Another thing that I've been doing is optimizing things and adopting lifehacks. For example, our dishwasher hasn't worked for years, so we've been doing dishes and leaving them in a dishrack on the counter. This is especially terrible in our tiny galley kitchen because half of the counter space is always occupied. (One counter has the microwave and toaster oven, so only two of the counters are normally available.) We do not plan to replace the dishwasher until mid-next year (because we're trying to space out our major expenditures and this year, we had the trip we just took), so in the meantime, I bought an over-the-sink dishrack and installed it in one of the two half-sinks. Yes, it blocks using that sink, but we don't really have a need for it. Now we have all our counter space back and quality-of-life has gone up.

My current mini-project is to correct some big mistakes we made when moving in here. We were pretty young and dumb when we bought the house, and when we moved in, we just stuffed things in the cabinets and closets without much thought. The more inaccessible parts of the kitchen are particularly bad. There are two cabinets on either side of the stove, one of which is against the wall and right next to the door to the garage, so to really get into it, you're shoving yourself against the doorknob.

Moreover, the shelves are adjustable but we've never moved them, and they're still in the stupid arrangement left by the previous owner (or possibly the people who built the house; the house was built in 1994 and the previous owner was the original owner). In particular, the top shelf is as high up as it can go, making it impossible to see into even if I'm on a stepladder and leaving a tiny space for things. When we moved in, I put some party supplies (paper plates and napkins with an appallingly 90s design) up there, and there they stayed. I decided that I needed to clean out that cabinet and rearrange the shelves so that the bottom two are small and the top is large, so that I could store large things that I rarely use, rather than small things that will get lost. (It has become the booze shelf.)

So, yesterday, I started clearing out the things in the cabinet and found tons of long-expired stuff in there, so that's a bonus, too. Then I got the stepladder, pulled down the party supplies, and began taking out that shelf. When I lifted it, I felt and heard something move on it. I had no idea what it was, but I could tell it was small and light from the movement and sound, so I tilted the shelf and let it fall. After I put the shelf down, I picked it up.

It was a small blue case made of cheap plastic, round and about 4 cm across. I opened it... and it was a partially-used month's supply of birth control pills.

That got a good laugh in this house.

No, they weren't mine -- precancer made that not a concern since long before I got married. But the real question isn't whose it was. The real question is why? Why did someone store their pills in the most inconvenient spot in the house, making it harder to take them regularly, which is a necessity if you want them to work? Why are they in the kitchen and not in the bathroom or bedroom?

The original and previous owner of the house was rather well-off (a pharmaceutical rep) and single at the time he sold it to us, though that's about all we know about him; he might have been divorced. Maybe he had two girlfriends he was trying to keep secret and so he hid one woman's pills so the other wouldn't find them? But you'd think that both women would want to keep control of the pills and keep them either in their purse or at their own homes. Maybe he was married and found his mistress' pills and hid them from his wife? But you'd think he'd get them out of the house as quickly as possible, rather than hide them.

Mmm, he was a pharmaceutical rep. Maybe it was a sample and he hid it because he didn't want his girlfriend thinking he had a bit on the side? That doesn't make sense, though, as I really doubt that reps give out samples of birth-control pills. Also, a few of the pills were missing.

Anyway, your guess is as good as mine. We will never know.