Free to Be O.C.D.

THE BAD O.C.D.:

I’m so glad I do not need medication for my O.C.D tendencies.

But the question remains: Why do I like the Container Store so much? After finishing our kitchen, we had to buy some shelving to place next to the stacked washer and dryer inside the laundry cupboard that was built with twelve extra inches all along the vertical side for the purpose of detergent and cleaning supplies to rest on neat shelves. We jumped on the ELFA bandwagon. It’s just the coated white bars shelving stuff...but it goes in extremely easily. You just screw in the top cross bar and everything else hangs from it. Fun. Problem solved. And it just feels Swedish and right. In addition, we purchased a little bit of shelf liner for just a couple of shelves (oily things) and a silverware tray. Golden. It all works well.

But in addition, some O.C.D. mania set in. We bought a container or a holder-of-a-something for almost everything else we own. An ironing board and iron holder, a plastic bag dispenser, a sponge holder, all sorts of clips and hooks, a slidey thing for the cleanser basket under the sink, lid holders and spice risers, another big hangy hook, extra collapsible laundry baskets. You name it.

We’re returning all of it. I was not the only guilty party in acquiring all this landfill. A nice O.C.D. guy named Wally helped us to pluck all these crazy things off the shelves even before he designed our very practical ELFA system. Adam, my Recognized-by-the-State-of-California-Domestic-Partner, was just as nuts as I was before we got to the ELFA meat of the matter of our journey, filling up our cart. When we returned home, most of the holders either didn’t fit or were unnecessary or just plain old took up more room than the thing it was supposed to hold. What a load of plastic! It’s so nice that stores these days will take back almost anything. That stuffed gopher. Sure.

Never shop when you’re hungry.

Never go to the Container Store, ever. It just makes you want to box up everything.

And now for THE GOOD O.C.D.:

I had one of those recurring annoying error messages every time I turned off my computer. What could be wrong????

I looked up ccsvchost.exe online (the crux of the error message) and it became clear to me that I had a registry problem. You see---as the years go by and you delete programs from your computer, the registry (the place in the system that makes a list of everything and points things where they need to be pointed, or something) ends up being loaded with all sorts of dead, useless entries. Sometimes, the system reads these as errors. And, having all this old stuff there clogging up the works, slows the machine down. So, what you need is, get ready, A REGISTRY CLEANER! For $29.95, you can buy one and download it and clean your clock. After reading the reviews on CNET.com (my nerdy Bible), I purchased the most highly recommended one, Max Registry Cleaner. It really is wonderful. I did a scan of my registry and it found 1800 items that needed killin’. So I killed them. Then, I scanned my startup menu and got rid of the nonessential items there, making startup faster.

My computer is humming like bird. Though, Max Registry Cleaner now has a little piece in the Startup...which slows the startup down a bit.

As I often say about Norton: The anti-virus IS the virus.

Keep it clean, babies. And at the end of the day for all your productivity, guess what you’ll have? Order and Cleanliness and Dearth of anything else.

And isn’t that what it’s all about?