The Best Laid Plans … Get Shot to Hell

I woke up this morning with a good long list of things I was going to accomplish before the little kids showed up at around 11am-ish.

1) Fold laundry and get more laundry into the washer/dryer.
2) Unload/load the dishwasher.
3) Get some work done.
4) Take some stuff out to both cars (a bag of odds and ends from my old car — things like lip balm, bandaids, pens, notepads, etc. and the battery charger & emergency kit for the Funhouse car.)
5) Dump the dead pumpkin on the porch.
6) Get the Flamingo Santa to stop blowing off the porch.
7) Move the Gazelle into Prince J’s room.
8) Get some odds & ends out of the living room/dining room so there’s room for the tree and Christmas decorations.
9) Put the rake and hedge clippers into the garage.
10) Make the surprisingly good salad and deviled eggs for our Thanksgiving dinner.
11) Get the tree put together in the stand and the box carried out to the garage.

I did all of those things, except #s 10 & 11 by about 10:15 (except the rake/clippers were in front of the garage, waiting for me to open the garage and put the Christmas tree box in there…)

At 10:15 I told TW I was going to make the surprisingly good salad and deviled eggs but first I was going to put the tree together. She laughed and said she’d been thinking about doing that, too. So we got to work on that together. All of the pieces were out and TW got the first piece into the stand. As we’re both reaching for the next pieces, I noticed my piece had some fur stuck to some branches. “Oh. Someone made a nest in our tree…”

I went into the kitchen to get a plastic bag and a towel to clean that up and as I was cleaning it, TW said someone had nested in her piece, too. About that time, I noticed not only nesting material but the creature that nested had snacked on some of the wires (it’s a pre-lit tree.)

Hell.

I said, “I guess if we plug this in we’ll either short out the whole house or catch the house on fire, right?”

TW said, “Right.” and suggested we just put strands of lights on it and not use the pre-lit strands. This caused me to roll my eyes. We really want a tree with six strands of dead lights and six strands of live lights. That will look awesome, won’t it? No. Not happening.

I wondered whether we could strip the pre-lit strands off… TW said it would take a long time. I fiddled with one and realized she was right.

Hell.

It was 10:25. I jumped online to see who had trees on sale… everybody has trees on sale, but would they have the size/type we want? No way to know except to get in the car and find out.

Target is closest so we jumped in the car and by 10:40 we were checking out but we did not have a tree. They only had a tiny tree with multi-colored lights. (I impulse purchased a couple of things and since there was no line to check out, I went ahead and bought them.)

We dashed across the street to Lowes. They had trees but nothing we loved that wasn’t $400. I convinced TW that we should get the 6′ multi-colored tree for less than $100 since we have a puppy who eats everything. We’d be a lot less annoyed if she ate a cheap tree than if she ate a $400 tree. TW reluctantly agreed — she had little choice since we had to get the tree done TODAY before Prince J goes back to college.

We got it home and it was TINY and we were all getting really depressed. I sent RJ up to Elly’s room for the LACK table to stand it on, thinking if we made it look like it was taller, we’d like it better. And we do, but it’s still tiny and not full and not a tree we love. We only put about 1/3 of the normal ornaments on it because it’s just so small.

And, we have to figure out how to keep the tree on the table with a hyper puppy around. So far, she’s been relatively good but as soon as we turn our backs, I know she’s going to go for the tree. It’s a lot more interesting than slippers or the couch or any other things she consistently chews on when we turn our backs.

I did manage to get the surprisingly good salad and eggs done while Prince J and TW drove across town to pick up the annoying, evil 14 year old who refused to go to breakfast with the rest of her family this morning so was not dropped off here when her dad dropped her siblings off. (I hate 14 year old girls.)

We managed to celebrate Prince J’s 19th birthday (he got his first iPhone, yay!) and celebrate Thanksgiving and get everything cleaned up from the tree decorating, birthday celebrating and Thanksgiving celebrating in record time.

I even found the missing reindeer stocking for Johnny Mac Pippin.

Let’s call today a win, even if it wasn’t as perfectly managed as I had planned.