A Very Didgeridoo Christmas - 2010

Almost forgot to post our holiday pics!

Front door:





Dining room:


(Tree in progress...)


(All balled up...)

Our fireplace:



Santa wreath on door to dining room:



The Twismas Twig in our foyer:



His & Hers Christmas trees:















This year's gift wrap was my favorite ever:






(I used little party favor pinball games as gift tags.)


There! Now that's ticked off the to-do list. Have an utterly fantabulous New Year's Eve. Cheers!

Indiholigestion....

I just made a word! Indiholigestion - the feeling resulting from being caught in the week between Christmas and New Year, when the decorations are up and the yummy treats are still forming the base of your meals, and opened presents are stashed under the tree for procrastination/"safe keeping". Yeah.

So that's where we are. Didgeridoo Boy was sick all day on Christmas, but I wound up having a fantastic one nonetheless. That's not as bad as it sounds. He was asleep, moaning, and prone to cussing when I asked if he was alright, so I went to my parents' house and had a fabulous holiday without him. We celebrated on Boxing Day - - went to visit his parents and took in the rest of an annual "A Christmas Story" marathon on television. All in all, a damned fine holiday. I was pleased. I have a Hello Kitty toaster.

And isn't this boring?

And guess who's computer isn't cooperating with regards to uploading pictures?

No matter. There will be a new computer soon (back to Mac - hang this PC nonsense), as well as a revamped blog with a slightly different approach. Same stuff, just better looking and more organized. Didge has been after me to pimp it, so I'm going to; but to do that it needs a freak ton of work, and I've been putting off this overhaul for a while. (Do the dog and cat need and advice column? Hmm....)

And this entry just got even more boring, didn't it? Damn, I'm batting that proverbial thousand and then some.

So with that, I'll stop. Have a fantabulous New Year, and we'll see you from better surroundings on the other side.

Tango fail...

The drop cloth is in the washing machine, and Didgeridoo Boy has successfully refused to deal with it. How the hell does he do this? He simply refuses, I comply, and life goes on in the fashion Didgeridoo Boy expects and accepts.

He's trying to sneak cigarettes into the living room again even though I've established a smoking lounge. (The use of discreetly-placed containers of charcoal and my purchase of a Lampe Berger make this possible.) Go into the room, close the door. Easy freakin' peasy, right? He gets angry when reminded to close the door, and slammed it so hard on a power cord for some of our Christmas lights last night that he got the damned door stuck shut. I let him stand there and knock. It was the highlight of my week, pretending to laugh at him "playing with the dog through the door" (it's a French door). He was stuck good and proper, dismayed, impatient. I counted to 130 before getting up and letting him back inside.

In short, give him half an inch, he'll take twenty miles. That's simply how Didgeridoo Boy is wired, and he's explained in many, many in-depth conversations why being reminded of things drums up bad vibes from his past. I get it, but I also wish he'd get that all I am trying to do is have a home and not a bowling alley. I did not grow up in a bowling alley. I grew up in a nice house with a view of a lake from my bedroom window that a famous golfer rented during Masters Week. And while I don't want a conservative home by any stretch of the imagination, I would love our raucously eclecticly decorated home to be clean, free of beer stains, and devoid of cigarette burns.

Ahhh, learning to live together. They say the first year is the hardest, don't they? Honestly, I love him, but it's rare for me to come up against someone this passively stubborn. I'm at a loss. Perhaps the solution is to simply purchase a few more Lampe Bergers and keep the vacuum in good repair.

But....what is he going to do when we get new furniture? Oy...

And what does he do?

Remember how I said I'd given up and given my husband a drop cloth?

He moved it.

Alright. Fine. Let's tango.

Dropping it...

I have an announcement. As of yesterday, I joined the ranks of Realistic Wives. This means precisely what the name of the organization implies - - I know what my husband is capable of, what he might do, and what he will do. I accept crumbs, spills, mystery blots on the clean carpet, the ever-present potential for flatulence, and that he has a desire to do that thing he does out the back damned door and onto the deck. I know these things will be with us, along with snack wrappers on mantles, the strong need to not use a coaster, and his clothes in a heap by his two favorite chairs. (Yes, both. Don't ask me, I do NOT know and I am entering a place of acceptance. I will, by damn, find peace here.)

Didge can't help it. He's not neat by nature. Admittedly, I don't score high in neatness levels, either, but I do clean up after myself on a daily basis. Didgeridoo Boy is not wired to do so, and that's okay. Really. I mean it. I have a high-powered vacuum and an armory of cleaning supplies, as well as a recently refreshed catalog of handy tips that include emergencies. There is not one itty bitty point in fighting his basic composition - it can't be changed. Didgeridoo Boy is made of Didgeridoo Boy, therefore, he cannot be anything but Didgeridoo Boy. And that means shit is going to get all over the place, even into places that I thought it couldn't get into before Didge joined the party.

So, having said that, I also need to announce that I have taken what is, for me, the ultimate step towards fully walking this new path. It's not a man cave. I don't think hiding him is right - why lock the man in a room? Oh, no. I've brought him right out into the real world of the living room. He is grown folk, technically, so he has a space in the grown folk room.

And it now comes complete with a drop cloth. I have given up and given my husband a drop cloth.

Pajama call...

Remember the last of the string of maintenance calls I mentioned? It wasn't the last. This morning's was the last, and this morning's was also a halfway surprise. Why's that? I knew they were coming, but I didn't know what time. And why did I know they were coming? Because I called the service call line for this company around 7.30pm yesterday to tell them we had a little bit of a problem.

And what might that problem have been? We had no heat. A very nice young man came to service the heating system yesterday, and the heat never kicked back on. I tried to get it to kick back on, finally, and nothing happened. Not a thing, save a slight whiff of gas from the furnace and a complete absence of any kind of response sound from the unit. (If silence is considered something happening.) I called the company and told them of our issue, and was told they wouldn't be able to get someone here until in the morning. Got off the phone, broke out the twenty degree sleeping bags from the camping stash, brewed up a pot of chai and put it in a thermos, and "toughed it out" over Anne Rice's The Vampire Armand. Set the alarm for 8.15am and thought that would give me PLENTY of time to make myself presentable.

Alarm goes off. I wake up. Hair in a clippy, wearing hot pink socks, sugar skull print pajama pants, and a black long sleeve t-shirt under my beloved red sweater, I fed Totsi the Dog and Foot Foot Kitty and made myself a cup of coffee. Crawled under my sleeping bag and started to check email. It was about 8.30am.

The doorbell rang.

You are damned straight I had to answer the door looking like somewhat hip refried hell. Or a half awake clown trainee. I'm not putting up a photo so you can decide for yourself, so don't even ask.

(The outage was due to some vital wire having been knocked loose, and on top of that the pilot light had been blown out. But it's not quite resolved - the unit ran for an hour or so and then kicked back off. Another service call placed. Technician coming back. Yay.)

Only a Didge can Didge something up...

Tomorrow will bring the last of a flurry of household maintenance calls, the highlight of which was last Friday's carpet cleaning. That was the big one. That one, darlings, meant something. It was huge. Getting ready for the carpet cleaners meant that I finished long-overdue deep cleaning, and after that? Holiday decor out the wazoo, whatever the wazoo is. Along with the holiday decorating? Long-overdue sprucing up of our abode, so that when the decorations come down, we'll have a reasonably cute space to live in.

But then there's Didgeridoo Boy.

I don't know how he does it. He creates black, greasy smears on the carpet. Food will be dropped. Crumbs follow him. And I find myself turning into *THAT MOM* -- the one who, when you visited the friend's house who had *THAT MOM* made you all but strip naked at the door and put on a white, sterilized robe and dusted everything you touched. Okay, I'm not that bad, but I am on spot patrol something outlandish.

So remember when I said I needed a hobby? I have one that's two-fold: First, I'm on a mission to figure out just how in the hell he can mess up freshly-cleaned carpet so quickly. Second, I'm really coming to enjoy cleaning little grey, greasy spots out of said freshly-cleaned carpet.

Does anyone have an aspirin?

Hellooooo, life lesson...

How to avoid finishing up decluttering and organizing your house in preparation for rearranging/redecorating: Put off having the carpets cleaned.

How to force yourself to finish up decluttering and yatta, yatta, yatta: Schedule carpet cleaning.

Life lesson: It wasn't nearly as much as it looked like, and wasn't worth getting overwhelmed.

And it's TOTALLY cleared the way for putting Casa Didgeridoo into such wonderful holiday shock that I can hardly stand the anticipation.