Last Sunday was spent doing a general cleaning of our study room, our general family room if you must know. It houses our desktop computer, 3 desks, a library of dictionaries and office supplies. Everyone works in that room. Everyone plays in that room. (That is, if hand-eye gamepad coordination is your forte.) All our phone lines are connected to that room. My brother even has a picture of all 6 of us trying to fit in at the same time, each one doing different things.

With all that going around, that room never fails to look topsy-turvy every time, even after "attempting" to fix it up.

Now, pushing that fact aside, you may now meet our study's resident clutterbug - My mom.

Good lord she collects everything. From plastics (even the kind used to wrap flowers in) to cardboards to the scrappiest kind of paper. Everything she keeps in that one room. She even has a large collection of used eyeglass cases, ballpen shells, unrepairable eyeglasses, cellphone cases, and a very, very old kid's microscope.

Now imagine me sorting through all those things in one precious Sunday.

One of my tactics was to donate all the so-called "collectibles" she kept and give them away to the White cross or to some charity. But alas, I could only persuade her because my mom's undying debate was that we or anyone in the family might need that certain type of knick-knack. I just wanted to quit right there and leave all the unfinished cleaning to someone else.

I even thought I had won the battle by compromising with her to at least pick out 1 or 2 items from her collections and give everything away. But to my dismay, when I got back home late from work, everything that was supposed to be due for charity eventually found their way back to the study.

Sigh...a clutterbug will always be a clutterbug.