I may have been a deranged squirrel in my past life

I'm weird about a lot of things. I mean, aren't we all? Don't we all have quirks that a lot of people find completely strange and annoying but maybe one or two people like our moms or our partners or our best friends just think are the cutest thing ever?

Here's one of mine:

I save things.

Not in the nice way, like I have mounds of my kids' artwork in large Tupperware containers. No. I'm pretty brutal sorting that stuff out.
Tad will be like "Oh, we have to save this one!"
And I'll say "No WAY! She made that with stickers! That's not original at all!" And chuck it in the recycling. 
Or he'll hold up one of Coen's and say, "We have to save this one. Look at this monster he drew!"
And I'm like "Absolutely not.  He traced that!" And out it goes. 

No. I have this weird thing about saving other things...like food, household energy... And saving uses of things.

Like when Tad changes the sheets on the beds, like he did last night and I feel it is not soon enough to change them.  To me it's like wasting a use of both the washer and dryer! The sheets don't NEED to be changed yet!  Now we're using our appliances and we are just ONE use away from TOTAL BREAKDOWN!  The sheet washing thing has become such a joke in our house simply because of my insane reactions to seeing the "dirty" sheets tumbling down the stairs and marching up to rant and rave about how it's too soon. Now every time Tad changes the sheets, the kids yell jubilantly, "Mommy!!! Daddy's changing the sheets again!!!"

Also, I get insanely mad when someone opens the electronic minivan doors if it isn't necessary.  Seriously. That. is. weird.  I mean, I will go to such lengths as opening the back hatch and crawling through to the front to avoid opening the electronic doors, like I'm afraid of wasting one of the opens.  Like there's a limited number and I don't want to run out. I'm the same with the garage door.  I get SO mad when Tad closes the garage door and I'll be leaving soon.  YOU WASTED A CLOSE! I want to scream down the alleyway.  But I'm pretty sure I have a grasp on how that might look so I refrain. 

I have a cupboard in my house that is filled to the bursting point with back up boxes of cereal, crackers, granola bars, etc...  I'm not one of those emergency preparedness people either. I mean, if the world turns into a Margaret Atwood novel, I will be one of the first to die, I assure you.  But I just have this thing about having back ups.  But then on top of it, I get annoyed when someone in my family opens the back up box of Mini Wheats when we already have three perfectly good boxes of cereal ALREADY OPEN.  It sends me to the boiling point.  What is that about?

For example. This morning, I was in the shower and I could hear cupboards opening.  It entered my mind that Tad was probably looking for things for the kids for breakfast and I already knew what I wanted them to have.  I rushed through the rest of my shower so I could get out, to make sure he gave them the zucchini bread and not the oatmeal bars. (The zucchini bread was home baked so it has a shorter shelf life than the oatmeal bars which are store bought, so OBVIOUSLY, we should eat the home baked stuff first) So deeply I held this belief that I  practically ran, dripping, from the shower, hair still soaking wet. I saw the oatmeal bars on the counter and quickly swapped them out with zucchini bread. 

Later in the morning, when we were all getting in our cars, ready to go to work and school, Tad called out to me, "Alie. I promised them oatmeal bars and thought I packed them but they aren't here. Can you go get two?"
"I packed zucchini bread instead!"
"They don't want zucchini bread, Alie. They want oatmeal bars. I promised."
I tried to suppress my weird rage as I stomped back to the house to get the oatmeal bars, stopping only to say, "Are you guys sure you don't' want zucchini bread?"  Solemn head shakes were my answer.
"What a waste!" I muttered as I returned.
"It's not a waste. I'll eat all the zucchini bread myself." Tad said.

As they pulled away I thought, what the heck is my problem? I mean, who gets this mad about saving things? I decided I must have been some sort of backward squirrel in real life. Like maybe I was a squirrel in the Great Depression and I hoarded newspaper clippings instead of nuts and all the other squirrels told their children to stay away from me.  Probably.