Day 28: Boxes, Small Balls, Hard Questions

We're in that weird Christmas shoulder season where today feels slightly too soon to start decorating but I can't decide exactly how long I should wait, and inevitably I will feel like I waited too long when I do start. 

I was downstairs sorting baby clothes (oh yes, I have decided to go through all the bins of baby clothes and wash them all and sort them so they're better organized, which is great except it's really highlighting that I have kept a lot, like a lot, like a really indefensible amount, of baby clothes, which I could kind of ignore when I had a few bins stashed here and a couple of boxes stashed there) and flipping through photos and stacking up numerous pairs of Angus's old pajama pants to give away, and was suddenly exhausted and discouraged and wondering if I'm fooling myself that if I keep up with this, next year everything will be orderly and we will be able to find things and maybe even Christmas won't be insane because I'll know where everything is and not have to waste time searching. 

Then I told myself that I got up early for work today and my back hurts and I should probably just have a granola bar and sit down and stop whinging. I probably also told myself to stop whining because I am not, in fact, British, but I felt like 'whinging' would look better there. I'm not even sure how to SAY 'whinging'. Surely the middle part is like 'hinge' and not like 'wing'? I could look it up, but what fun would that be? 

I'm going to whip down to Hamilton again this weekend because I didn't get to see my sister in law and niece and nephew last time, and I had brought down the little Christmas tree I got her last year last time but then forgot to give it to her because it was dark when Zarah and I dropped her off and none of us saw it. So I can take her a few Christmas decorations, since she's not done exams until the 20th so she's there for most of December. I should probably bake some stuff too, but I'm not sure my back will hold up for that. 

I knew that I had bought her some sort of little ornaments for the little tree last year, but I also remembered when I packed up the Christmas decorations telling myself that I was not putting Eve's stuff all together and I would be cursing myself this year. And guess what? I was right! So I told Eve I didn't know where they were and couldn't remember what they even looked like, and I might have to just pick some random ornaments from the ones we have. But then I opened one last bin before finishing up for the evening and *choir sounds, beam of light*...

Since I am now a reformed model of organization and structure, next year there will be a perfectly-packed and easily-accessible box labelled EVE, and I will not have to whinge (wing?) here. 

I have started carrying a Sharpie on my person at all times when I am downstairs, and every time I open a Christmas box I then write on the side in big letters what is in it, because I realized that the number of times I close up boxes and then have to reopen them ten minutes later to remind myself what's in them has probably used up hours, if not months, of my life.

Jesus, what would I have blogged about this November if I WASN'T trying to undo twenty-three years of domestic chaos? Oh, World Trivia Night. We were down half our team for various unforeseen reasons, and we did quite badly - might have been our worst score ever, in fact. Doesn't really matter, we still had fun and laughed a lot and ate a bunch of leftover Halloween candy and some really weirdly-flavoured popcorn. The dismaying part of the night for me was when we all showed up and everybody was so happy because we hadn't seen each other in person for three years, because 2020 and 2021 were held online, except in my head we were TOTALLY in person last year - cue the frozen, horrified expression on my face as "time's lost all meaning" sky-rocketed to new heights. 

I found the difficulty level of the questions a little weird compared to past years - usually there's a pretty steady incline of difficulty, and the last category is a bunch of really tough questions. This year it felt like it ping-ponged between oddly easy and obvious questions and very esoteric ones that had even our trivia heavy-hitters looking blankly around. I'm not sure I got even one question that nobody else would have gotten (my usual way to justify my presence), but it was still fun. The funniest part of the night was probably when I was standing in line to get a Diet Pepsi and randomly looked down and saw that the woman in front of me wasn't wearing shoes, just as she noticed me noticing and blurted "I took my boots off, my feet were too hot!" and we both burst out laughing.

Scanning my posts from last year, apparently I also blogged about sending Christmas cards, arguing with Internet trolls, freaking out over Eve not texting me back (because I was worried about her, not because I thought she owed me a text), and... toast and yogurt. Okay, maybe it's good that I have decrapifying to talk about.