Daily Dose

Today wasn’t my first day back to work but it was my first REAL(ish) day back to work. Most of my co-workers are still on vacation but it seems like the community is back to blogging and back to BlogHer. And I was busy, busy, busy all day long.

And I do mean ALL DAY LONG.

I’m still busy but I figured if I didn’t take a three minute break to blog then it’s possible that I might not blog since I still have to load up the trash bins and get them out to the street and work on my filofaxes and do some laundry and check my email and play WWF. Not to mention battle this head cold that’s kicking my darn ass.

I did a good job of taking cold meds, on schedule, today — that helped me get through the work day. I should take cold meds more often rather than trying to avoid cold meds and doing a lot of moaning because I haven’t taken cold meds and I feel like crap because of it.

Is this making any sense? I’m just typing without looking at the screen because I’m watching the Ceiva digital frame to see if there are new photos yet (I don’t think there are… which is the problem with this damn frame. My daughter and son in law do not send new photos often enough. If I’m going to start at this frame all day, I need new photos every day.)

And now my three minute break is over and I’m going to go take some cold medicine and text my daughter to see when I’m gonna get new photos.

Happy 2nd day of January.

At about 1pm, I didn’t think we were going to get anything done. We’d had a nap and I did not want to get out of bed. Those black out blinds TW installed last week are doing wonders for my sleep — I’m getting almost too much sleep. Nice change but when my to do list was calling, that was not a good thing. Oddly enough, TW got right up and was busy while I was trying to pretend half of the day wasn’t gone.

I did get up eventually — I turned on Spotify, loaded up a Christmas music playlist and got to work. But, the second song was Andy Williams singing Happy Holidays and all I could see was Mom of Ali and I almost had to call it quits for the day, I was too busy laughing to get anything done. I fought it and cursed Mom of Ali a lot and all was well again.

Here’s what my to do list looks like now…

1) Wrap some presents. A lot of presents (so I don’t have to stay up til the wee hours on Christmas eve.) – I wrapped 15 on Saturday night and have plans to wrap another dozen this evening.
2) Clean out the cold room to access the Christmas decorations (and find the bloody wintery clothes. I keep buying winter clothes because I’ve procrastinated this for so long. Not kidding.)
3) Do about five loads of laundry. I did all five loads but after finding the winter clothes and blankets, I’ve got five more to go. Two in progress now. Gah.
4) Make sugar cookies.
5) Clean Off My DESK for godsakes. Though TW’s side is kind of messy. I’ll get that fixed up after I wrap gifts tonight.
6) Go to Whole Foods. And Trader Joe’s. And the gift shop in the mall across from TJ’s to look at their Filofax supplies and buy a book — we bought three books.
7) Move stuff around in the fridge and small freezer. The doors are barely closing and once people start getting into them, it’s going to be chaos. I think I’ll have to do it again tomorrow though…
8) Figure out whether I’ve moved all of the files I need from my old laptop to my new laptop. Carbonite is not as friendly as I thought it was… sigh.
9) Find the Christmas movies and put them somewhere that the kids can access them but Buster cannot. Interestingly, most of them were already together — right in front. I wonder if Elly did that when she was going through the movies a couple of weeks ago?
10) Find the extra sheets, pillows and blankets for the big kids and find somewhere to put them that Buster won’t eat them. hahaha, never happen (the latter part of that.)
11) Take a whole lot of trash out to the bin before the snow starts. It doesn’t look like we’re going to be hit as hard as originally forecast but there’s nothing worse than trying to fill frozen snow covered trash bins when you could have done them BEFORE they were frozen snow covered trash bins. I got trash out but the lids were frozen solid … at leas there wasn’t a foot of snow on top of them.
12) Get my car washed? Yea, I’d like to do that but I’m guessing I missed my window of opportunity and the car wash is not going to be open due to craptastic weather. Poop. I should just scratch this off the list now.
13) Figure out what time the kids are due to arrive — and get ready to start tracking their flights (which will no doubt be delayed due to craptastic weather.)
14) Convince Buster butt that people who come to visit are not going to kill him if he looks at them — or if they look at him. Gah.
15) Find a book to read, from my stacks, because I don’t seem to have any library books that interest me… thank goodness it’s almost time for some new reading challenges. I found a library book that I’m going to give a try. I’m not sure it’s going to hold my attention so I’ll just revert to something lighter that I picked out from my stacks.
16) Find the three gifts that came ages ago — I don’t remember seeing them when I inventoried the gifts last week. Hell. Where did I hide those things?
17) Find the gift cards I brought into the house yesterday. Why didn’t I put them with the other gift cards? What was I thinking?
18) Visit Joy.
19) Run some caramel apples down to our landlord.
20) Yell at Buster for eating things he shouldn’t eat x20… which is what I’d best go do right now… Work in progress, though he was pretty good today — all things considered. Knock on wood.

My to do list is not shrinking. For every thing I cross off, I seem to add two more things and I only have one day left to get this stuff done… oy.

1) Wrap some presents. A lot of presents (so I don’t have to stay up til the wee hours on Christmas eve.)
2) Clean out the cold room to access the Christmas decorations (and find the bloody wintery clothes. I keep buying winter clothes because I’ve procrastinated this for so long. Not kidding.)
3) Do about five loads of laundry.
4) Make sugar cookies.
5) Clean Off My DESK for godsakes.
6) Go to Whole Foods.
7) Move stuff around in the fridge and small freezer. The doors are barely closing and once people start getting into them, it’s going to be chaos.
8) Figure out whether I’ve moved all of the files I need from my old laptop to my new laptop. Carbonite is not as friendly as I thought it was… sigh.
9) Find the Christmas movies and put them somewhere that the kids can access them but Buster cannot.
10) Find the extra sheets, pillows and blankets for the big kids and find somewhere to put them that Buster won’t eat them. hahaha, never happen (the latter part of that.)
11) Take a whole lot of trash out to the bin before the snow starts. It doesn’t look like we’re going to be hit as hard as originally forecast but there’s nothing worse than trying to fill frozen snow covered trash bins when you could have done them BEFORE they were frozen snow covered trash bins.
12) Get my car washed? Yea, I’d like to do that but I’m guessing I missed my window of opportunity and the car wash is not going to be open due to craptastic weather. Poop. I should just scratch this off the list now.
13) Figure out what time the kids are due to arrive — and get ready to start tracking their flights (which will no doubt be delayed due to craptastic weather.)
14) Convince Buster butt that people who come to visit are not going to kill him if he looks at them — or if they look at him. Gah.
15) Find a book to read, from my stacks, because I don’t seem to have any library books that interest me… thank goodness it’s almost time for some new reading challenges.
16) Find the three gifts that came ages ago — I don’t remember seeing them when I inventoried the gifts last week. Hell. Where did I hide those things?
17) Find the gift cards I brought into the house yesterday. Why didn’t I put them with the other gift cards? What was I thinking?
18) Visit Joy.
19) Run some caramel apples down to our landlord.
20) Yell at Buster for eating things he shouldn’t eat x20… which is what I’d best go do right now…

My sister sent us a four pack of caramel apples from Harry and David. That was awesome and we’re very appreciative. (Elly, so far, has been most appreciative and ate one within 3 minutes of arriving home on the day they arrived.)

Today, TW was going to pick her mom up at the nursing home and found a box from Harry and David on the porch — the same exact kind of box the caramel apples came in. I laughed and said “Surely it’s not more caramel apples…” Sure enough, another four pack.

I opened up the packaging to read the card and discovered — these weren’t meant for us. They were for a family in Massachusetts. From a family we don’t know.

I checked the mailing label and it was definitely addressed to me, so the error wasn’t with FedEX it was Harry and David’s accident.

I emailed them this evening to let them know that there was a mix up. I got a very quick reply from Harry and David so I’m pretty sure they’ll fix it all up for those folks, quickly. Thank goodness — I’d sure hate for the family in Massachusetts to be caramel apple-less this Christmas.

If it weren’t for the Christmas card rolling in (thanks, y’all) and all of the packages being delivered by UPS, FEDEX and on rare occasions by the US Postal Service, I wouldn’t believe it was Christmas time.

The only decoration in the house is the snowman plumber that TW bought in hopes of scaring Buster butt enough that he would stop going into the bathroom and eating all of the things. That worked for about two days and then he just carried the snowman plumber into the living room so he could drink almond oil and eat used tissues in peace.

I looked at the calendar an hour ago and realized that Michelle and Chris will be here in 9 days. NINE DAYS. I’m looking forward to that but I’m so not ready. I guess the gift shopping is done — and if it’s not, someone will find a box of dollar bills or something to make up for the lack of thoughtful gifting (good things all of the kids like money, right?)

I need to make a serious to do list and get some SHIT done. I would probably have more success with that if I stopped watching videos about organizing your calendar, organizing your Filofax and and organizing your life. Less snow would also help.

I don’t know which I’m doing. Mostly just sitting around wondering what the hell?

Packages keep arriving, quite often with things I forgot I ordered (even though I remembered ordering them once I opened them.) Other packages have not arrived but at this point that could be because I didn’t actually remember to order them.

I can’t seem to get the present closet cleaned out and inventoried because there’s too much other shit to do.

It’s cold, really cold, and neither of us have any winter clothes out. PEople keep telling TW not to stress about that — that the winter clothes will be there when we have time to find them. Those folks aren’t banging down our door to shovel us out of the snow in 1F (with a windchill that I don’t even want to think about) which makes me kind of want to tell them all to #suckit. We absolutely ARE correct to be stressing over the lack of winter clothes. Shoveling the snow in tshirts and long sleeved tshirts and light weight jeans in 12F was bad enough. Gah. So yea, I’ll be up early tomorrow looking for something warmer to get us through another day until we can find the REAL winter clothes boxes.

At least I got my library book back in time today — that’s a big deal since I keep accruing fines when I’m normally a stickler for getting my books back on time. Let’s call today a win, for that reason alone.