When is too much, too much?

Yesterday was Sunday, laundry day. This weekend was my turn. I stared at the pile of laundry which overflowed in the basket that I shared with my sister. I decided to tackle the problem in bits. First I pulled out all the jeans, which was a pain because the legs got stuck to the shirts and they're heavy so they wouldn't come out easily. Then I dumped everything else on the floor and sorted by delicates...and the "tougher" clothing. Then I shook out the smaller laundry basket for whites and sorted again by delicates and everything else. Fortunately the "everything else" was just my sister's pair of white jeans so I put that back in the basket for next week.

Washing clothes has become pretty routine this school year so I didn't really mind the process of adding in detergent and softener and the transfer to the dryer. It was after the first load of regular clothes (aka shirts, non jeans shorts, and socks) that I realized that my sister and I faced a deficite of hangers! There were four dry shirts that could be hung back into our closet and four damp delicate shirts that needed to hang out and dry. Unfortunately there were only two hangers! TWO hangers?! What happened? I couldn't believe it. Did we really buy that much clothes? Last week I helped my sister to hang up clothes and we had a little over enough hangers. Maybe our mom stole some. Shocked, I sat in my room and thought about where the hangers could have gone and where I could get more hangers. I realized that earlier in the day my mom had told us to hang up some jackets that we had left on the floor so I unhooked those, folded them and put them in a corner. Then I took our marching band standshirts and folded those and put them in the container with the Northwest Passage/Seattle trip shirts. I had eight shirts that needed to be hung up plus six more in the washer, so I needed 14 in all and had now accumulated a total of ten hangers. I sorted through the shirts hanging in my closet and found a hanger that didn't have a shirt on it, so I was up to eleven. After ten more minutes of pondering and wondering how I was going to fix the situation I decided to take out three blouses that could be folded and added them into the containers that hold my tanktops. Finally, I had the fourteen hangers I needed. I went back to take out the clothes from the washer so they could air dry and realized I left a bunch of hangers on a chair! GAH! How could I forget? I caused myself so much trouble trying to find hangers.

The hangers on the chair weren't enough to cover for the fourteen I needed. I still would have had to move the jackets and do some creative thinking. When I was panicking about finding hangers I realized that my sister and I had a lot of shirts, blouses, dresses, and dress skirts and pants. It really seemed to be too much since I hadn't worn a lot of the clothing in a while. And then there are two containers that hold our camousels and tanktops because we realized earlier in the school year that we didn't have enough space and hangers for those. Each week my sister and mom go shopping while waiting for me to finish May Day practices. Generally, my sister comes home with something. She can't wear a lot of what she buys to school so she's limited to the weekend and we don't go out on Sundays so it's really only one day out of the week that she can wear what she buys. I think we need to stop buying clothes because we are running out of space in our room. I can't fit all of my jeans in my drawer, partly because I'm too lazy to fit everything in and partly because there really isn't space unless I want to strain the sides of my drawers by shoving everything in. The excessiveness of the amount of clothes we have is disgusting, especially since we can't wear a lot of what we buy or we kept clothes we didn't want to keep because they were gifts. It is fun to shop and bring home cute clothes, but for the sake of our room and the idea of being capitalistic pigs, I think I'm going to hold off buying clothes.