Home bizarre

My house is, to put not too fine a point on it, kind of a disaster area.

A friend described it as "looking like a museum run by lunatics."  Part of this is that my wife and I have dozens of interests, so we have a huge amount of random stuff.  Carol is a professional artist (you can and should check out her amazing work here), so between the pens and inks and watercolors and framing supplies -- as well as all the finished pieces -- it takes up a lot of room.  We're both amateur potters, which is a whole other set of supplies and products.  I'm a fanatical book and CD collector, and also a musician with (at last count) five flutes, three recorders, three pennywhistles, a set of bagpipes, a guitar, a djembe, a concertina, and a piano.  I collect masks, and have them hanging on walls all over the house.  Then there's the odd random stuff; just from where I'm sitting, I can see a Bigfoot statue, an antique typewriter, a gargoyle, a bronze sundial, several ceramic statues of characters from Doctor Who and Lost in Space, and a scale model of the Miller-Urey apparatus.

Our house isn't neat, but I can at least confidently assert that it's interesting.

There's also the problem that Carol and I are both housework-impaired.  This is not helped by the fact that we have three large dogs.  When we have guests coming over it's preceded by three days of panic-cleaning so we don't die of humiliation as soon as our guests walk through the front door.  On the other hand, it's a good thing we sometimes do have guests, because otherwise one day we'd go missing, and when the police came to investigate they'd find us both trapped in enormous clumps of dog hair.

We'll never make Home Beautiful, but we did make the May edition of Home Chaotic.

My work station

The reason all this comes up is a loyal reader of Skeptophilia, who sent me a link suggesting that the problem isn't that I have a million interests, the attention span of a fruit fly, and zero aptitude for housework.

The problem is my home needs an exorcism.

At least that's what Australian psychic Catarina Ligato would probably say.  Her vocation is "cleansing" houses of their past inhabitants, who do stuff like creating "negative energy," making rooms feel unnaturally cold, and moving your belongings around.  They can also produce odd smells, although I wonder if we'd even notice that given our aforementioned three dogs.

If Ligato checks a place out and finds it's haunted, she respectfully asks the disembodied ghosts of former residents to leave the place in peace.  She also uses a "crystal wand" and "sacred spray" to encourage their exit.

Kind of the spirit world equivalent of a mop and a can of Lysol, is how I think of it.

"Doing this work is a calling, it’s not for everyone," Ligato said.  "I know other psychics who ended up in psych wards for losing their balance.  [Working in homes] can feel a bit more positive, because you’re helping both the inhabitants and the spirits to find peace."

If you don't want to shell out the cash to hire Ligato (her minimum fee is three hundred dollars) -- or if, like me, you live halfway around the world from her -- you can always DIY it.  Burn some essential oils, she says, play some calm music, keep the windows open, and "declutter regularly."

It's this last one that would be the sticking point for us, because as I mentioned earlier, clutter is kind of our raison d'être.  I mean, I guess it'd be nice to live in a neat, clean house (not that I know first-hand what that's like), but... I like my stuff.  This is my Emotional Security Stuff.  If I were to start doing a Marie-Kondo-style culling, I'd be a little lost.  Okay, maybe I don't need an Indonesian statue of a cat playing a flute, but yeah, Marie, it kind of does spark joy.

So I think the fact that we're constantly misplacing stuff probably isn't caused by the ghosts of former inhabitants moving our belongings around, but more that (1) we have a huge amount of random things strewn everywhere, and (2) we're both kind of scatterbrained.  As far as it feeling cold sometimes -- well, it's an old house, and we do live in upstate New York, which is a four-season climate (the four seasons are Almost Winter, Winter, Still Fucking Winter, and Road Construction).  I don't think I'm ready to pay Catarina Ligato to fly out from Australia to do an exorcism, entertaining as that would be.

I might give the essential oils a try, though.  I doubt it'll help with the overall cleanliness, but maybe it'll help with the doggy smell, which can get pretty intense sometimes.   Every move in the right direction is a good thing.

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