my bag of sorrows is filled with leaves

Jack has been so lackadaisical about his blog lately that I'm stepping in. Mainly cause I don't want to do the work I brought home, but also because I think people are starting to dislike him for it.

I might be telling you something you already know, but Jack has a tendency to obsess over things. Sometimes it's the big stuff like passing the bar and saving for the future, but more often than not he's obsessing over how the magnets are arranged on the fridge and whether my stack of papers on the desk is perpendicular to his suits hanging in the closet. Yeah, it doesn't make much sense. As of late, he obsesses over our house--are the storm windows on correctly? do our wood floors squeak more now than they used to? do the shutters need to be repainted again to prevent wood rot? do we need to bless the Indian burial ground beneath the foundation more often? etc.

We have gi-normous old trees in our yard, which at this time of year means lots of leaves everywhere. Which also means Jack's latest obsession--do we need to clean out the gutters every other weekend or should we do it every hour? One of the problems with his obsessions is that while it keeps me from living, it keeps Jack from sleeping (he recently told me that he had a "bad sleep summer" cause he spent most nights worrying about the guy who mows our lawn--specifically, was he fudging the number of times he'd mowed and was he cutting the grass too long? And when Jack called him every day to ask when was he going to mow the lawn next, did the guy really return his calls in a timely manner?).

So he woke me up at 5:45 a.m. today saying, "Do you hear the rain? Two days in a row now, that's bad news for us." I was all, "um, I'm tired." He said, "Do you not realize that our gutters are overflowing with leaves? If it rains anymore, the water won't be able to drain off the roof, and we'll have to replace it. Do you want that to happen?" I was all, "um, I'm tired, shut up."

Once I was more awake, I tried to calm him down. I said we'd clean the gutters again this weeked, and I'm sure our roof can hold out four more days. When that didn't help, I tried to get him to talk about what his day looked like and how busy we both were. When that didn't work, I just made shit up. "Don't you realize that the winter solstice means that there's a stronger magnetic pull toward the core of the earth, so gravity is stronger? That means that the water will be forced down the gutters, despite the leaves. Don't you know that? That's part of why we picked this area to live in."

So if you're looking for us this weekend, I'll be outside cleaning the gutters while Jack's arranging the magnets on the fridge.