I wasted a good part of yesterday fighting with Brian over some stupid house projects. He is of the opinion that I should be able to use the items I have at hand to organize a storage room and my office.

The problems I was hoping to solve:

• I have a storage room with camping things, art things, toys, bike things, etc. stacked on the floor. Every so often, I restack them neatly, but then someone needs something and the flinging begins. It's usually a mess.
• My office has a huge Sauder desk wrapping around two sides of the room. It also has a four-drawer metal filing cabinet. They came with the house and I've been using them, but neither is a handy shape for my needs. I have at least two dozen boxes of books stacked against a third wall and finding anything when I need it is a big ole pain.

Since he will be out of town from today until the end of August, I proposed using the month to organize these two spaces with:

• storage shelving
• a smaller desk and some book shelves

That doesn't look too controversial, does it? If you said no, then you are not a man who has had to put up with my haphazard, mindless way of throwing furniture all over a room with no plan so that every room of every house we've ever shared has looked like a junk collection and it's his house, too, and he doesn't want to live in a crap heap. It was depressing. Later he said forget it, do whatever I want, he didn't care. Which means I can't win: either I live with the situation I have or change it and get the disgusted eyeroll thing. Depressing.

Then I had a dream about removing my tongue, which seemed germane given the day I'd had. I decided to brave the eyeroll. My tongue and I went to Lowe's and bought a couple of shelving units for the storage room. I just put one together and it's missing the caps for the top posts AND the wall brackets (which aren't necessary, but I'd use them if I had them). How freakin annoying is that? Since I still have one unopened package, I was thinking maybe I could slog on over to Lowe's and open it there. If the pieces are missing from it, too, I can return it then and bring the mostly-assembled one later. If they aren't, maybe Lowe's can round up the missing pieces for my first shelf. I don't know, maybe I should just take it apart now and return them both. But I want to make that room work! Bleh.