Wardrobe Organization

I had to go pick up a prescription for Dave in St. John's Wood yesterday morning. He went to a hospital urgent care center near the school on Friday but the doctor forgot to give him some of the recommended medication, so I went back for it -- ear drops and throat spray. That's St. Elizabeth, above, keeping watch over the hospital's entry foyer and the empty wheelchairs.

Dave is not a happy puppy. He's having trouble eating because his throat and ear are so painful. He says the doctor swabbed him for strep, and I guess we don't have the results of that test yet. His fever seems to be down, though, so that's a good sign.

It was indeed very rainy yesterday. I spent the day reading The New Yorker and I'm pretty much caught up now and ready to start "Great Expectations." I also did a load of laundry, watered some plants and organized Dave's armoire.

Dave's method of storing clothing is basically to pile everything up -- and I say "pile," but even that implies a level of neatness beyond what I'm really describing. I'm convinced that he forgets he owns a lot of his clothes because they disappear at the bottom of a mound or the back of a shelf. I hung his pants in one place, shirts in another, summer stuff in another, stacked shorts and t-shirts together and flipped the stacks so he'd wear some of the stuff that had previously been relegated to the bottom.

A lot of it he probably won't want to wear, because when Dave wants to dispose of an article of clothing, he doesn't put it in the trash or the charity bag. He shoves it to the back of the closet. I remember when I met him he had a big pile of clothes on the floor of his closet. I took them all to the cleaners and got them wearable again, and only much later realized that was pretty much his clothes disposal pile.

The other day I came home to find a pair of socks lying in the middle of the bedroom floor. "What are these?" I asked him.

"Oh, they have holes in them," he said.

"So they're trash?"

"Yeah."

Of course one wonders why they were not therefore in the trash can...just like one wonders why dirty clothes often don't make it to the hamper.

But anyway, his clothes are much more organized and hopefully visible now, and whatever he doesn't want to wear perhaps we can get into a charity bag.

Here's one more Halloween pic I forgot to use earlier -- a creative jack-o-lantern I saw on my way home from work!