Someone Remind Me, Please

Ok, I'm multitasking, so if I trail off, I apologize. I'm working on dinner for the following week so I can go grocery shopping. What I really want to do is crawl back in bed and hide for the day.

My house is a disaster. I spent several hours, along with poor Jack who had to deal with me, putting up Christmas decorations. The tree looks great, we made a great kill this year. But, holy crap, could one more thing go wrong, please??? I haven't found the train set. It seems to have chug chugged out to some other, less insane family. Seventy five percent of my lights would not light. And of course, all three of my longest strands would not even give me a little glint of hope they would change their mind and just LIGHT FOR ME AND THE DAMN TREE!! Huh-hum, sorry, I get a little emotional.

So, at 9:00pm, Jack and I went to Target to buy lights.

We walk in and Oooooooo, the dollar section....just a quick peek at all the good crap you can buy for a buck. Hmmmmm, (picking up some doggie toys) I could get these for the weiners....No, wait, I'm here for Christmas lights. Ok, (looking around the store to where the possible Christmas Town has been set up) where the hell are they??? I see random check out girl and ask for directions. She looks at me with this perplexed and lost look on her face and points to the far back corner of the store. "I think", she says. Then I think to myself, yeah, I understand, it must be easy to miss where they set up an entire gigantic section of the store devoted completely to the celebration of the birth of Christ or the arrival of the fat guy baring gifts, whichever you prefer. Sheesh.

Jack and I wander off in search of lights. We find Christmas Land and also the entire row devoted to lighting schemes and there are dozens of empty boxes. Of course, they had lots of those colored lights that I will never put on my tree, but not one single plain strand of white lights on green wire. I tried Herb's antique large colored lights last year and ended up taking them all off and redocorating the entire tree at 10:00 at night. It had looked like someone threw up Christmas on my tree. Just seeing it gave me a headache. Wait, I'm seeing a pattern. It's the lights, they thwart me every year.

I found an extra large "Heavy Duty" indoor/outdoor 200 light strand with green super fat wire and mini white lights and grabbed it so we could make our escape.

Yea, we're home, I can finish decorating the tree. We dump our stuff, navigate through the boxes and boxes of empty Christmas ornaments and then, the ornaments, since they couldn't go on the tree with out the LIGHTS. But we have the LIGHTS and then, this sudden wave of disgust washes over me when I realize THIS STRAND IS POLARAIZED and won't fit into the other strand that is woven through the fricking STAR! When the hell did they decide to start polarizing Christmas lights??? Oooo, I bet that's the "Heavy Duty" part. Dammit!

"TOOOOOOOODD! I need a cheater plug for this light strand, it's POLARIZED and it won't fit!!!!!"

From downstairs I hear, "They don't make them!"

Dammit. What the hell am I going to do?!

Again, from downstairs, "Just plug it in the wall!"

Oh, yeah, I can do that. Then, this morming I realized that I can piggyback the old plug onto the new one so I don't lose the outlet entirely. The stupid thing is, this didn't occur to me last night because I was too upset over the broken ornaments, the broken lights, the trip to Target, the water pitcher that got caught on afore mentioned strands of broken lights and decided to to a 360 flip and dump contents all over the floor, and the fact that my house looked like a total tornado victim. Ross constantly needling me about my choice of holiday decorations and the fact I wouldn't use colored lights and THAT IS JUST NOT RIGHT in his book wasn't helping the situation much and I, basically, lost my mind.

Everything, I later realized, went downhill when the Christmas music stopped, so I think next year, that will be the first and foremost priority. Holiday music must be played the ENTIRE time one decorates the tree. Bad things start happening when the music stops. It must be the cosmic forces of the universe at work, but I swear, as soon as I turned it on after my total CHRISTMAS TREE MELTDOWN, I felt better.

Jack came out of his room, since I sent him there during the MELTDOWN, and we layed on the couch together and looked at the tree. It turned out very nicely, and was glimmering and twinkling softly to The Little Drummer Boy playing on the Christmas All The Time gay lite rock station on the radio.

Then, in true Swenson form, we fell asleep.