Horror-days

You know…I love the holidays.

And I hate them.

I love the people and the presents and the food.

I hate the added layers of crazy.

I hate the planning. I hate the way my husband will suddenly, after dumping all the arrangements into my lap for weeks or months with a cheery wave of his hand and a “I guess we’ll need to do, I dunno, something about this, huh?”, will suddenly turn into Captain Officious and start peppering me with questions. Did I book this, did I bake that, did I have time to buy this and that and this and that, here’s an email about the check and a card with a reminder about this other thing and what are you doing what are you doing what are you doing you should be blah blah blah.

I haven’t yet found a good way around this. If I try to dump everything right back into his lap, he just ignores it. Or he’ll continually try to shove it back onto my plate. No, no, you’re so much better at making hotel reservations…

And no matter how much we wrangle, there’s no getting around this particular part of the fun: When he decides that matters must be taken into hand, namely HIS hand, and he starts charging around interrupting me every eight seconds with questions I don’t know the answers to, demands I’m so ignoring, and exchanges he apparently thinks are going to mean something to me.

He also does a play-by-play of everything he’s doing.

“I’m getting a box! For the White Elephant!” Great. You do that.

“I’m going to write a note to go with it!” Fine. Knock yourself out.

“What do you think, should I say blah blah blah, or yadda yadda yadda?” Don’t care. Working. Hourly employee, working from home after long week of rotten hours…meeting in thirty minutes…talk to hand…

“You know what?”
“You know what else?”
“Did you?”
“Will you?”
“You need to…” (Wait…did he just start telling me what I need to do? That’s it. I’m calling my people to call his people…)

Of course, this weekend is going to be…very interesting.

WE are going to Los Angeles to pick up my mother-in-law. I don’t usually announce these things until after the fact (you know, as in, “Hi, we just got back from not being home!”), because I surely would hate to come home and find out that somebody who knows me personally and knows where I live came over and lightened the Den by what little we have with any street value…but…here’s the thing.

The Den?

Is not going to be empty while we’re gone.

No. In fact, there may well be more people here while we’re gone than usual…because the annual north/south holiday migration has begun, and the Den is ideally situated close to I-5 (the major north/south artery connecting San Diego with Seattle and points even further north).

We tend to have a lot of overnight guests this time of year, as people now living Here journey There to be with family.

Which of course is adding a whole new layer of officious to the officiousness today, because Mr. Man is charging around trying to make sure that our guests tonight will be able to find everything without our smiling presence.

Blankets, sheets, pillows, extras, TV remote, towels, food, etc. etc. etc. etc.

And guess who he thinks is an active partner in all this?

Oh yeah. That would be me.

To be fair, I was taking today off, originally. Today, and Monday. To clean up before and after a weekend of Crazy.

But then that whole hospital thing happened, and my hours this week were weaker than a teabag steeped in lukewarm water for thirty seconds, and my task bar is full and my paycheck is empty so instead, I’m working at least half of today, possibly a bit over the weekend if I can swing it, and then charging back to the office Monday like my tail is on fire.

Honestly, the light paycheck bothers me less than the fact that my team is having to do everything themselves. We’re in the middle of a rather big flurry of activity, and all my crazy is making their lives crazier than they need to be.

Not cool, man.

Also, just like Thanksgiving did, Christmas is sneaking up on me. I just can’t get my arms around the fact that it is next week.

I keep thinking I have at least two weeks. Maybe three. Something like that, anyway.

This is, of course, really funny considering that I used to be the Franklin-Covey time-management guru who was always really on top of what day it was, and how close it was to some random holiday nobody ever heard of, and what the weather would be and what tasks would have to be done on such-and-so a day…

Been a long time. I don’t even have a current time-management “system,” which is of course a large portion of my problem these days.

And I’ll get right on that.

As soon as I put out whatever is on fire over here…hmm…appears to be luggage of some sort…