"Look! My business card collection." "Why did you have a business card collection? And don't put that in the pile, we have no room for this stuff."
"And my postcard collection."
"Nice. Put put that back, we're not bringing it. And let's go. You can go through your closet another day."
"My old James Madison phonebooks!"
"Oh my God. Please don't bring those. Let's go. PLEASE."
Because the upstairs bathroom in our house features a very charming but slightly impractical old-fashioned clawfoot tub, J who is, let's say, slightly taller than me, immediately ruled out ever trying to take a shower there. Luckily our finished basement also features a full bathroom, with a normal-person-sized shower, and he uses that. I thought that the showering would be it. That he'd wake up and wander downstairs for a shower before coming back up, into the light, to finish getting ready.
Instead, he's done his best to turn the downstairs bathroom into a fully-fledged Man Bathroom, with a geometrically-patterned shower curtain and blue bath mat and he totally loves it down there.
Meanwhile, I spent hours cleaning and sprucing up my bathroom, as I now refer to it, before doing anything else once we'd moved in. Because I really wanted it to be a nice place to hang out.
And now we talk about our bathrooms, and after living in a very tiny house in North Carolina, and sharing a very tiny bathroom, this is really new for us, and I don't know how far it will go. This morning I discovered that J had taken the one bottle of saline solution we have from my bathroom and put it downstairs in his, and I found myself thinking, as I marched it back upstairs, "Who does he think he is? You can't just steal from me like that. This is war."