I sometimes run the spellchecker twice. In case it missed something the first time.

Everyone has their own, personal demon, supposedly. Some people drink. Some people gamble. Some people collect Star Wars figurines. Some people hear voices. And some people have little fits of OCD in the most random places in their lives. Guess which one I fit into?

I drink, but not demonically. I do not have the patience to gamble, and Star Wars scared me as a kid, so while I enjoy it now, I never was really into the whole marathon-thing. The voices I hear are usually real live people who are really talking to me, so I should hear them. But I do have a vicious case of OCD when it comes to... PICTURE ALBUMS. (This does not bode well for my future as a, dumdumdum, scrapbooker. Especially because my mother does it. Genetics are vicious. Much like alcoholism, I firmly believe scrapbooking is an inheritable trait.) The rest of my life is fairly chaotic and messy. But my pictures are another thing. I even have a digital camera, so they could all just go on-line and be sent to friends with funny little commentary, to be stored in a folder somewhere for a while until it gets deleted on a random purging several months down the road, when someone says, "Why the hell did I let someone take that picture of me with my finger up my nose in front of a blurry mountain and post it on the internet? Why?" But I don't stop there. I need a physical copy of each and every picture that has any identifiable blob in it at all. Because on-line albums are so NOT the same thing at all. So I order prints. Often doubles, to inflict upon unassuming, more internet-friendly friends.

Meanwhile, when I get said prints, I feel the need to sequester them away, almost immediately. This is because of another OCD-related pet peeve: PEOPLE. Those fuckers.

What is SO HARD about keeping pictures in orders? My pictures go into albums chronologically. Pictures are taken chronologically. (It is impossible to do otherwise. "Oh wait, now that I've taken a picture of us totally drunk, we should go back and get one BEFORE my hair fell apart and that mysterious smudge appeared on your jaw." Much as I have *wished* for this ability, it is impossible.)

But when PEOPLE look at pictures, they often look at one, put it down face-up, and then take the next one, and put it on top of the face-up one, and so on... ohnonononononono!!! PEOPLE. That inverses the order. You're making time go backwards. That is Very Bad. And also: Extremely Annoying. How difficult is it to keep it in order? Why on Earth would you do that to someone? Who collects their stack of inverted pictures, all 24 or 36 (or 183, if you have a digital camera and order them all at one time!!!) all grateful, "ooooh, now I can tell the story backwards, this is great, thanks for totally inverting time for me!" This can only be topped in awfulness by the people who insist on totally taking one out, to pass around, and then continue putting pictures down, thus destroying any logic in timing, at all. These are also usually the same people who are incapable of pointing at something in the picture without touching it, and getting fingerprints on it. Folks, we are not two-year-olds. We can point without touching and causing smeary messes. On the upside, at least I can easily tell (had I any police equipment for finger printing identification) who the jerk was who insisted on messing with The Order Of Things In My Universe.

Moral of the story? Don't touch my pictures.

So usually, when I get pictures back, I immediately put them into my album, and then show them to people. That way, grubby little finger-pointers can touch all they want, and there's a nice, plastic cover in the way. And they can't get them out of order. Phew.

Putting pictures in albums is intensely satisfying to me. I just got back an enormous amount of pictures I had ordered (it came in a full-sized mailer, not a picture holder!!!!) because we had gotten engaged, taken a trip to France, and attended a best friend's wedding all in a short chunk of time, in which I hadn't been able to order pictures. So all the pictures came back, at once. I organized them very carefully, and put each one into my album lovingly. It was near-orgasmic as I reached the end, at #224.

Now that my pictures are in order, I feel my life is fairly complete. Minus our house, which is disgusting. We were going to clean on Saturday before our friends from Albuquerque showed up this weekend, but they arrived HALF AN HOUR EARLY. At 4:30 p.m. We were SO not ready. I mean, we slept in, went to breakfast, got new cell phones (mine's PINK, oh yes it is!) and sat around watching some Laguna Beach reruns and napping all afternoon. Our friends were supposed to arrive at 5:00.

We figured waiting until 4:30 to Do Anything was a totally reasonable plan of action, because of course we could run a load of sheets in the laundry, vacuum, do the dishes, clean the bathrooms, make the guest bed, hang clean towels, change out the litter boxes, get rid of the piles of accumulated mail, pay the bills, and have a nice bottle of pinot grigio open and breathing for our weary travelers in half an hour. Of course.

Except they showed up early. So we made them sit on the couch and hold up their feet as we vacuumed under them, and then just sit and stare at each other while we madly scurried about upstairs, not letting them even come up to unpack because oh! the horror.

Well, I kinda did that. My darling fiancé, The Funasaurus, mostly stayed with them and acted like a good host. And was also even a good fiancé, by coming up to check on me, and help me get the fitted sheet over the last corner of the guest bed since I may have shrunk it justalittle in the laundry, and was unable to make it happen in my slightly stressed-out state. That is an incredibly impressive feat, being a good host AND helping me with chores while I beat on my last nerve with our rattly dust buster, which is why I'm going to marry him.

The rest of the weekend was fantastic. We went to a free concert for a local band The Samples, ate some sushi, and contributed a whole lot to the stimulation of our economy. At the mall.

I even took some pictures, which I hope to get back and put into an album before too long.