My house is a total disaster.
About six months ago, I almost had everything in order. The place wasn't perfect, but except for some actual remodelling that needs to be done and carpet that needs to be replaced, the end was in sight. I had gotten rid of a lot of stuff, and I knew where everything else was.
And then life happened, and the rest of that was put on hold while I tried to deal with a personal tragedy.
And then after that, we went out of town, a lot. My husband has to make a lot of short trips here and there, and he wants me to go with him most of the time. And, unless there's a really good reason to stay home, I go with him.
And on the days that we are not out of town, we somehow manage to forget to do the dishes before we set out again, not do enough laundry, not put away the non-perishables from the grocery store, not find a proper place to put the Christmas presents we've purchased, etc....
So now the place looks worse than it did before I started cleaning.
My husband is a fan of a cable show called Clean Sweep, where someone takes everything out of your house, and you separate all of the stuff into groups of things you want to keep, things that you want to donate to someone else, and things that just need to be thrown away. And then you're not allowed to take anything you want to keep back into the house until you have a proper place for it.
So my husband is always wanting to do this, but he rarely actually sets aside time to put such a thing into practice. But he's decided we need to at least do something like that, maybe just do one room at a time. And he's set aside time to get started on it. He would like to do a room tomorrow.
Of course, it will not get done tomorrow.
Tonight will be the first freeze of the year, and I really can't see either of us standing out in the cold front yard trying to decide what we really want to keep, when all we really want to do is stay inside and keep warm.
It was a nice thought, and I'm glad he really wants to help this time, but I think that the spring cleaning is actually going to have to wait for spring.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
Friday, November 24, 2006
Day After Thanksgiving Shopping
This morning I got up and went shopping with the other lemmings, though I did not get up as early as most of them. No, I didn't even leave the house until after seven, spent about twenty minutes in the store, picked out a few things, grabbed a bunch of snacks and sodas, paid for all the stuff, checked the receipt, and briefly went home to unload some of the stuff and make sure that my husband was awake enough to go to work.
Not even eight o'clock yet, and according to the receipt I've saved almost seventy dollars, which would have been about twice as much as I'd have spent if I didn't decide to go back for three packs of Dr. Pepper. And that was just at a drug store. But it went so well that I decided to go to another one and do most of it again (minus the sodas) on the way to the mall.
Then I'm wondering if I should maybe just skip the mall. I don't really "need" anything there, do I? But I've got my list, and I keep going.
By taking a side entrance and heading for the Michael's instead of the mall parking garage, I get the car parked without too much trouble. It's a nice day, so I can just walk.
There are still people hanging around the mall customer service area. I had thought I was too late for whatever early shopper thing they were doing, but there were still a lot of people waiting for something. But I decided not to stop. Even if I'm in time for whatever it is, well, I don't know what it is, and finding out would delay my getting to the stuff I actually came to get.
There are a lot of people at Bath & Body Works, but not too many. Which usually means that they've already run out of the good deals. But no, there's still plenty on the shelves and someone is bringing out more boxes. So I pick out my freebie that I'm going to get if I spend thirty dollars, and then I go and get four wallflowers, which is the big on-sale-before-noon thing that we all got the email about. So then a try a sample of this and that while I decide what to spend the rest of the thirty-bucks on. I pick up a twelve dollar hand cream, but then someone brings out some candles that are also on sale before twelve, so I buy two of them instead. Then I get in line, and there are about eight people directing traffic and such. There's a couple of people offering to massage your hands with some aromatherapy thing while you wait. Another guy hands out little samples of lip gloss. A couple of others are reminding people that if you spend thirty dollars you get this freebie thing. And they're not just trying to talk people into spending more, they're actually telling people that they're already carrying thirty dollars worth of stuff, so if they want the freebie thing just say which one and someone will go and get it for them. And then when you get to the cashier, she says that there was a limit on the sales items, but they're not going to run out before twelve, so if you want to buy two more and also get a freebie thing, someone will go and get that for you.
Nice people.
So I've got my on sale wallflowers and my on sale candles and my freebie thing for spending thirty dollars and I still get to use my coupon for ten dollars off of thirty dollars. Nice. Two bags of stuff with price tags of over ninety dollars and I got all that for twenty plus tax. And I got two more coupons when I left, so I'm probably not done yet.
This is so much fun.
Next, I had to go and buy a sweater. Just a sweater, for me, to replace something that really doesn't fit right now. It was on sale for about a third of what it normally costs. This was at Sears, and I'm not going to complain, it wasn't near as bad as it could have been, but the much shorter line took a lot longer to get through, and no one offered to massage our hands, or get us a freebie, and there were no lip-gloss samples. So despite only going in to get the one thing, and only stopping to look at the one thing, I was in the Sears just as long as I was in the other store, and by the time I got out I was tired and hungry.
Well, that's okay. I'm probably pretty close to my spending limit for the day anyway. I decide to skip the rest of the list and head out. But if I'd have thought about it a little more, I'd probably have eaten in the mall and gone through the line at Bath & Body Works a second time. That was such a pleasant experience.
I stopped for lunch and noticed I was right next to an Asian supermarket. And that was something I needed anyway. I have this lame idea that I'm going to make one of those online copycat recipes of an oriental salad dressing from a restaurant my friend likes, and if it turns out okay I'm going to give him the recipe card and a bottle of all the ingredients. I don't know what else to get him that someone else hasn't already thought of. His wife is getting something from Bath & Body Works, but somehow I don't picture him happily unwrapping candles and body cream.
So I got all that shopping done before twelve, including the Asian market stuff that I had forgotten about. And then I didn't do anything useful for the rest of the day. Nice.
Not even eight o'clock yet, and according to the receipt I've saved almost seventy dollars, which would have been about twice as much as I'd have spent if I didn't decide to go back for three packs of Dr. Pepper. And that was just at a drug store. But it went so well that I decided to go to another one and do most of it again (minus the sodas) on the way to the mall.
Then I'm wondering if I should maybe just skip the mall. I don't really "need" anything there, do I? But I've got my list, and I keep going.
By taking a side entrance and heading for the Michael's instead of the mall parking garage, I get the car parked without too much trouble. It's a nice day, so I can just walk.
There are still people hanging around the mall customer service area. I had thought I was too late for whatever early shopper thing they were doing, but there were still a lot of people waiting for something. But I decided not to stop. Even if I'm in time for whatever it is, well, I don't know what it is, and finding out would delay my getting to the stuff I actually came to get.
There are a lot of people at Bath & Body Works, but not too many. Which usually means that they've already run out of the good deals. But no, there's still plenty on the shelves and someone is bringing out more boxes. So I pick out my freebie that I'm going to get if I spend thirty dollars, and then I go and get four wallflowers, which is the big on-sale-before-noon thing that we all got the email about. So then a try a sample of this and that while I decide what to spend the rest of the thirty-bucks on. I pick up a twelve dollar hand cream, but then someone brings out some candles that are also on sale before twelve, so I buy two of them instead. Then I get in line, and there are about eight people directing traffic and such. There's a couple of people offering to massage your hands with some aromatherapy thing while you wait. Another guy hands out little samples of lip gloss. A couple of others are reminding people that if you spend thirty dollars you get this freebie thing. And they're not just trying to talk people into spending more, they're actually telling people that they're already carrying thirty dollars worth of stuff, so if they want the freebie thing just say which one and someone will go and get it for them. And then when you get to the cashier, she says that there was a limit on the sales items, but they're not going to run out before twelve, so if you want to buy two more and also get a freebie thing, someone will go and get that for you.
Nice people.
So I've got my on sale wallflowers and my on sale candles and my freebie thing for spending thirty dollars and I still get to use my coupon for ten dollars off of thirty dollars. Nice. Two bags of stuff with price tags of over ninety dollars and I got all that for twenty plus tax. And I got two more coupons when I left, so I'm probably not done yet.
This is so much fun.
Next, I had to go and buy a sweater. Just a sweater, for me, to replace something that really doesn't fit right now. It was on sale for about a third of what it normally costs. This was at Sears, and I'm not going to complain, it wasn't near as bad as it could have been, but the much shorter line took a lot longer to get through, and no one offered to massage our hands, or get us a freebie, and there were no lip-gloss samples. So despite only going in to get the one thing, and only stopping to look at the one thing, I was in the Sears just as long as I was in the other store, and by the time I got out I was tired and hungry.
Well, that's okay. I'm probably pretty close to my spending limit for the day anyway. I decide to skip the rest of the list and head out. But if I'd have thought about it a little more, I'd probably have eaten in the mall and gone through the line at Bath & Body Works a second time. That was such a pleasant experience.
I stopped for lunch and noticed I was right next to an Asian supermarket. And that was something I needed anyway. I have this lame idea that I'm going to make one of those online copycat recipes of an oriental salad dressing from a restaurant my friend likes, and if it turns out okay I'm going to give him the recipe card and a bottle of all the ingredients. I don't know what else to get him that someone else hasn't already thought of. His wife is getting something from Bath & Body Works, but somehow I don't picture him happily unwrapping candles and body cream.
So I got all that shopping done before twelve, including the Asian market stuff that I had forgotten about. And then I didn't do anything useful for the rest of the day. Nice.
Thursday, November 23, 2006
The busiest travel day of the year
Well, that's what the day before Thanksgiving is supposed to be. But I hardly ever travel on that day, because most of my family lives here. In fact, when I was little, one set of grandparents lived an hour away, and the other set lived about two or three hours away, so that we did our traveling on the holiday itself and didn't have to deal with any traffic at all.
But after my husband got a job that involved a lot of travel (mostly in Texas), I did have to deal with the dreaded Wednesday before traffic a couple of times. And yesterday was one of those times. But yesterday's traffic wasn't bad at all, at least where we were.
So Monday we had to drive a few hours away, to the place I spent the first eleven years of my life. There's nothing to do there. It is quite boring. Next month, there will be Christmas lights to look at, but this week, nothing.
Still, I went anyway, to spend a little time with my husband. We drove by my old house. The people who live there now are really into the spirit of things and already have a lot of Christmas decorations up. The two front yard trees are gone now. I wanted to look in the back yard and see if the plum tree was still there and if the storm shelter was made good use of, but I didn't look. Nor did I look in the backyard of the house across the street to see if the Fort was still there. I think it was, maybe I just couldn't see it because it was painted a different color.
We had lunch at The Glass Kitchen, the world's only drive-thru where you can actually understand what is being said because you talk to a real person instead of a microphone. It has never made sense to me why everyone does not have this same design. It wasn't quite as good as I remembered from my last stop in town (I should have asked for a chili-cheeseburger, but those are so messy), and I'm always surprised how small it looks. When I was a kid it seemed like a really big square building, like a Walmart, but no, it's just a little hamburger stand.
After working only two days, we headed home, and stopped at a small town that we used to spend a lot of time at about ten years ago. The Walmart my husband did business from was closed, replaced by a Supercenter outside of town. A Taco Bell/KFC had been added, but it was closed for renovations. More of the little shops on Main street had closed down, and very few of those remaining where open yesterday. We stopped at the soda fountain, and were told that the two old antique dealers from next door finally moved to California, and they both died soon after.
Not much to do there either, so after I finished my ice cream we got going again. There was hardly any traffic until we were almost home. We got to I-35, and there was the traffic waiting for us. Only I couldn't tell that much of it was really from out-of-town travelers. At some point we thought, lets just go ahead and get off at this exit and do a little shopping, and there everyone was, going to the mall. We didn't actually go to the mall, but a shopping center nearby, and we mostly just looked at a few things and stopped for lunch.
So it was not a bad day before Thanksgiving, but it wasn't a really fun day off either. Now I'm off to decide which movie to see after we eat, then plan out tomorrow's shopping.
Happy Thanksgiving
But after my husband got a job that involved a lot of travel (mostly in Texas), I did have to deal with the dreaded Wednesday before traffic a couple of times. And yesterday was one of those times. But yesterday's traffic wasn't bad at all, at least where we were.
So Monday we had to drive a few hours away, to the place I spent the first eleven years of my life. There's nothing to do there. It is quite boring. Next month, there will be Christmas lights to look at, but this week, nothing.
Still, I went anyway, to spend a little time with my husband. We drove by my old house. The people who live there now are really into the spirit of things and already have a lot of Christmas decorations up. The two front yard trees are gone now. I wanted to look in the back yard and see if the plum tree was still there and if the storm shelter was made good use of, but I didn't look. Nor did I look in the backyard of the house across the street to see if the Fort was still there. I think it was, maybe I just couldn't see it because it was painted a different color.
We had lunch at The Glass Kitchen, the world's only drive-thru where you can actually understand what is being said because you talk to a real person instead of a microphone. It has never made sense to me why everyone does not have this same design. It wasn't quite as good as I remembered from my last stop in town (I should have asked for a chili-cheeseburger, but those are so messy), and I'm always surprised how small it looks. When I was a kid it seemed like a really big square building, like a Walmart, but no, it's just a little hamburger stand.
After working only two days, we headed home, and stopped at a small town that we used to spend a lot of time at about ten years ago. The Walmart my husband did business from was closed, replaced by a Supercenter outside of town. A Taco Bell/KFC had been added, but it was closed for renovations. More of the little shops on Main street had closed down, and very few of those remaining where open yesterday. We stopped at the soda fountain, and were told that the two old antique dealers from next door finally moved to California, and they both died soon after.
Not much to do there either, so after I finished my ice cream we got going again. There was hardly any traffic until we were almost home. We got to I-35, and there was the traffic waiting for us. Only I couldn't tell that much of it was really from out-of-town travelers. At some point we thought, lets just go ahead and get off at this exit and do a little shopping, and there everyone was, going to the mall. We didn't actually go to the mall, but a shopping center nearby, and we mostly just looked at a few things and stopped for lunch.
So it was not a bad day before Thanksgiving, but it wasn't a really fun day off either. Now I'm off to decide which movie to see after we eat, then plan out tomorrow's shopping.
Happy Thanksgiving
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