Piles

Around our house, Tom does most of the household chores. He has, however, assigned me one job which is solely my responsibility. That job is the mail. Oh, the mail. How I loathe it and dread it and every week we bring in more to add to the piles. In general, we receive relatively little, but for some reason I am unable to maintain any type of organization/sorting of said mail. I hate doing it. Here's why:

• I must shred everything containing our names (per Tom and his paranoia...although I can't really argue with him anymore as we found a man going through our dumpsters)
• Our shredder is shit
• Our filing system is um, shit
• I secretly enjoy the piles of mail (especially the J. Crew catalogues)

You see, these piles of mail let people know that people live in a given area. If some visitor/burglar dropped in they would want to know that we are still in residence. This is what the mail tells them: "Hello. We have mail, so we obviously live here." Not that we want to TELL burglars that, but perhaps it would scare them into thinking we could, at any moment, return home. I think it's best to leave the piles - for protection.