Ahem. Anyway.
Work yesterday was relatively quiet. It wasn't dead quiet (we're expecting that for most of the weekend), but it was quiet enough. We had all the help we needed, and each of us had about five or six issues to work on. Compared with double that (or more) on our busy days, yesterday was nice. The building/company is still open today, though Daisy and I are off -- along with probably about half of the daytime employees and four or five of our 2nd and 3rd shifters. Again, I'll remind you that Daisy and I are off only because we took PTO for today, just like we did for my birthday. If I ran a company, I'd never have my employees work on Christmas Eve. But I don't run a company, so....
Last night I came home and ate dinner while Daisy holed herself up in our bedroom to wrap all of the presents she had to wrap -- all of mine (of which, looking under the tree, is an ungodly amount), and the parents' gifts from her/us that I didn't already wrap -- so this morning, I walked out into the living room to see this:
If you don't think that's a lot, consider the fact that we have a seven-foot Christmas tree and note the size of the ornaments on the tree for scale. I...yeah. I don't know what's in about 80% of those packages, as the ones I wrapped are stuffed so far behind them that you can only see one in the picture -- the gift bag on the far right. How we're getting all of these over to the parents' this afternoon is beyond me. It's going to take several trips up and down to even get the stuff loaded into her car -- and that doesn't even take into account the two pies she made last night for tonight's dessert.
Anyway, while she wrapped the gifts, I absolutely passed the fuck out on the chair in the living room. I awoke sometime around 3AM -- when she was still baking pies, mind you -- and shuffled to the bedroom, where I woke up this morning shortly after 8...as she was coming to bed herself. Yeah, the woman stayed up all night baking pies and wrapping presents, and that's after she spent all day yesterday cleaning the house. Completely cleaning it, as in steam-cleaning the carpet in every room and scrubbing down the bathrooms, even. I don't know where she gets the energy for any of that.
I've been told that Daisy needs to be awakened by 2:30 so that we can load everything up and get it over to the parents' before we go to the Christmas Eve church service at 4:30. We did this last year as well, though I'm not sure if I wrote about it here. It was nice, non-denominational, very laid-back and all-accepting. That's the only reason I agreed to it last year, and ended up enjoying it. I'm sure the parents know that I'm a lifelong atheist, but it's not something they ever bring up in conversation (probably because Daisy, at one point, told them not to). But they do know that I put value in family and togetherness, peace and love, above pretty much all other things -- so I'm sure that supersedes any opinions about my views of religion. So, that's our plan for tonight -- get Daisy up in a little more than two hours, load the stuff into the car, drive over to the parents', go to church, come home and eat, and then bed.
My mother seemed surprised when, on the phone yesterday, I told her we'd be spending the night at the parents' so we could get up there on Christmas morning -- until I reminded her that I'm no longer six hours away, but about six minutes (traffic permitting).
Tonight for dinner we're skewing non-traditional, as apparently we're making taco pizza as well as snacky-like foods. I don't know what, however. Tomorrow I don't think we're doing anything special at all food-wise, and of course Daisy and I have to return to work on Friday, so by tomorrow evening we'll be back home anyway. Because we don't want to be anywhere near any sort of retail establishment on Christmas Eve or Day, we stopped at Walmart last night on my way home from work to get a few tiny essentials we needed (cat litter, cigarettes, parsley for cooking today, etc). Anything else can wait until at least Sunday or Monday before we go get it.
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