It’s like a hurricane outside tonight. Hope Santa is wearing his Gore-tex.
Lydia is conked out but the cats are wild as jackrabbits. No presents were eaten this year though I suspect Renton has had some nibbles of wired ribbon.
We’re all ready for Christmas here. Actually, I think I’m ready for sleep.
I ran up to J.C. Penney yesterday afternoon to pick up a few things. When I got to the checkout counter I was momentarily surprised because the cashier woman strongly reminded me of my mother.
She certainly didn’t look exactly like her but just very specific things cried out to me: the shape of her mouth, her hands and how she had her fingernails done up in the exact same nail color my mom used, she even smelled slightly of my mother. Must have been a perfume.
Ohh, do you know how hard it was to keep myself from going around that counter and just melting into that woman’s arms? So hard.
I give you The Tree, 2009:
Lights: 2600 total, tied for last year
Lydia: surprisingly has shown a healthy respect for the tree thus far; she knows not to touch it — she just gets a kick out of naming what all the ornaments are
Cats: had been at their BEST behavior until the first presents went under the tree; I caught Renton in the act of chewing ribbon not ten minutes after I finished wrapping
Ever since my laptop had a brief stint in an exercise class, it has been tethered to an old CRT screen (and, more recently, a sweet flatscreen monitor Steven scored from work) in the third bedroom that has always been dubbed ‘the office.’ Thus, I have also been relegated to the office whenever I have been on the computer. Ahh, to remember the glory days of cruising the web or blogging from the dining room, couch or the comfy bed. C’est la vie.
So here I am in the office. It’s cold in here right now, pretty boring, and CHOCK FULL OF STUFF. We filled it with Stuff when we first moved in, then when we had to make a bedroom for the impending Lydia we filled it with more Stuff from her room.
It’s amazing what we have in here. I see a laptop bag I can’t use right now since my computer is essentially grounded, a small filing cabinet we definitely use, a larger filing cabinet we’d love to use but can’t find the damn key to unlock the thing, a box of pictures, a huge shelf of books, Lydia’s excersaucer, the old CRT screen that should really be in the basement, Lydia’s infant carrier, a buttload of books . . . and that’s just a sample of what I see in the room itself. The closet is much more fascinating — it’s where we keep our DVD collection, games, and my My Little Ponies, among other things.
What in the world will we do with all this Stuff? It’s all important Stuff that I don’t want to be banished to the basement, but it can’t stay here anymore. We need room at the Inn, so to speak, and I don’t think Lydia will be willing to share her crib come next June.
Another kid? Yeah.
But what shall we do with the Stuff?