Letting the sun shine in

As it's just gone past the New Year it's time to take care of some housecleaning. My mother always did this. Although she usually actually cleaned the HOUSE and didn't use the term as a metaphor. I did that too though. With the hubster gone for the better part of the week things got done. This morning I got up and could actually SEE out the front window for the first time in three weeks. Because the tree is dismantled and rests snugly in it's new plastic tub. The ornaments are wrapped, the lights are down and wrapped and the wreaths are off the doors and waiting for their bag to be brought up. Now we have to haul all of this back to storage. Without the use of the car. I have to figure out whether or not to try and drag this stuff up there on a bus or call a cab. At the price of bus fare anymore, it's a push.

The kitchen is clean, the floors vacuumed and the laundry sorted. The older I get the more I crave order. And the more I enjoy getting the Christmas stuff OUT of the place and getting back to normal. I understand why my mother used to take everything down on New Year's afternoon. That's what we did while we watched football. We turned on the bowl games, my mother put a ham in the over and we spend the say watching football, eating sandwiches and potato salad and chips and dip and packing up the inside while my dad took down the lights and by New Year's night we were done.

There's something to that.

But at least everything packed and stacked in a corner, ready to go. If I were ambitious I would just go downstairs, take all the stuff that's been stuffed willy- nilly into the storage bin over the parking space out and re-organize it, I've a hunch we could get the Christmas stuff all in there if I did that. I dunno. Maybe.

We bought two bins for the tree because we thought we couldn't get it into one. We were wrong. As we already brought two of these huge things home on the bus, taking one back should be easy. Should. We spent Friday night doing this. Me and the boys. It takes two buses and $12 in fare to get to the Target 3 miles away. Well, actually we went to Lowes but the Target was right next door and cheaper. By the time we actually got there and found we could get a plastic tub big enough for the tree we were starving and cold and damp. Yes, it was foggy. We succumbed to the siren call of Home Town Buffet. Two out of three of us HATE Home Town Buffet. But they were grilling steaks, which smelled divine. AND they were right there. And cheap. And it occurred to my younger son that we shouldn't go to Target hungry.

So, well fed we headed to Target where we decide to buy TWO super size plastic containers on wheels. They're about four feet long. We drag them through check out and across the mall parking lot and to the bus stop across the street - the one that has no bus bench. There's a bus coming in about 20 minutes which will take us to the airport and a very quick connection home.

The bus is right on time. We drag ourselves up from the curb we were sprawled on and wrestled the wheeled containers onto the crowded bus, where we stood them on end in the aisle and prayed no one needed to get by. As the automated bus voice announced we were at the airport my older son got up. We told him to sit back down, this wasn't our stop. And it wasn't.

Problem with that was, it also wasn't our bus.

This dawned on us three stops later as we were on the other side of the airport and realized that the bus was NOT going to turn right on the street we had passed a half a mile back and we frantically hit the signal for the next stop. The next stop was one of those middle of the block ones. No corner, no light, no bench. So there were were, 10pm on a Friday night, trudging down an access road that runs the length of the airport dragging two plastic big enough to hold a body down the sidewalk.

We got back to the airport stop about 20 minutes later, having well missed our connection and now having to wait for the next bus which arrived 40 minutes later.
We got home about 11:30, at which time my son and I decided to disassemble the damn tree. After all of that we were NOT going to leave it up one more day.

Which is when we discovered we only needed one plastic bin.

The other one sits in my living room, mocking me. I could return it, but the thought of dragging the damn thing BACK to Target is not appealing. I keep looking at it, wondering if I should find a need for it. But then all I'll have is MORE things to store. I'm storing enough crap to fill a septic tank as it is. More space = more stuff I won't take out of storage. This will NOT do anything for my sense of order and well being.

OF course, the stack of bins still sitting in the living room isn't helping either. But at least I'm not looking at that lame ceramic Christmas tree in the middle of the coffee table. And now I'm wondering what ever happened to all that Christmas stuff my mother always used. I mean, I know the candle choir boys finally sort of melted. They didn't melt entirely, but they were sliding downward, the last time I saw them the angelic little faces were beginning to resemble "The Scream". With halos.

So we start over again. Fresh and tidy, full of resolutions we won't keep. I've pared those down too, I only made one this year. I resolve to launder my undies over the week-end and NOT end up standing in a cold bathroom on a winter morning frantically blow-drying a pair of panties 10 minutes before I have to leave for work.

It's been 10 days now and I've managed to keep that one. Although the year is still young.