Here there be dragons...

"I'm telling you stories. Trust me." - Winterson

If it weren't for the last minute, nothing would get done.

December 23rd.  Christmas-Eve-Eve.  Not a thing really, but in my world...

My plans were ambitious but doable.  Theoretically.  Take care of the horses; Rebecca kindly agreed to give them their afternoon feed, so I could leave as soon as stalls were done.  Move a load of stuff to the new barn and check all the ponies there.  Go home.  Power nap (mandatory after the 4h sleep or so the night before).  Go to convenience store and photo store for two outstanding gifts.  Bake cookies.  Do laundry.  Create gift I've been thinking about for weeks but hadn't put into actual existence.  Clean Bilbo's cage. Wrap all presents.  Put away aforementioned laundry.  Figure out what needs to go where for the next couple days.  Clean room.  Sleep.

Anybody else think that's really like three days worth of living in one?

Let's revisit that thinking with the aid of that nasty bastard Reality.

The first few steps actually went okay.  Both barns took longer than expected -- no surprise given the complete lack of power and excessive amounts of ice (anyway we could switch those?).  But all good -- was home about 3.  Putz around for half hour or so and then decided to crash for 20 min power nap and be good to go.  I am the queen of the power naps.  But I also know that if I miss and go for 30 mins, I'll be useless for the next couple hours.  So I set an alarm.  Usually.  Why not today?  I have no friggin idea.  Maybe my subconscious was just that desperate for sleep.  Because I didn't wake up at the useful 20 min mark.  Nor the deadly 30 min mark.  Nope, it was a little over an hour.  Oops.   And while I wasn't as out of it as 30 mins would've made me, I was a long way from alert and ready to go too.

So enter "waking up" time.  Play on Facebook, answer some emails, text some friends.  Actually got a solid start on the project xmas gift.  Then it's time for a dinner break.  Excellent.

Anybody remember the original list?

Right.  So after dinner I tossed the first load of laundry in (yeah for multitasking) and ran to the two stores.  Got the first item.  Second was sold out.  Boo.  Oh well - that's the third or fourth place that was sold out and it was only a stocking stuffer.  Decide it could be forgone. 

Return home and take care of Bilbo -- it's quite a process really, but all good.  Switch laundry over.  Alright, world is good.  Start to make cookies.  Intending to do a batch of shortbread and a batch of ginger snaps.  Start with shortbread since all those ingredients are also in gingersnaps so if the bowl isn't *perfectly* clean inbetween cookies, it's not tragic.  bahahah yeah, Martha Stewart I am not.  But you have to give me credit for planning :)

This is when I remember I *hate* making shortbread.  Takes *forever* to turn into something that resembles dough, and you pretty much have to molest the bowl Gollum and the Ring style to stop it from flying all over the kitchen.  More cleaning I didn't need.  But eventually have something workable.  I knew they'd turn out flat -- hadn't beat them nearly long enough, but way longer than I had patience for.   Esp as I might've been texting a couple people throughout.  That just slows everything down, but makes it way more fun.

So while it was baking I started putting together ingredients for ginger snaps.  These I make every year as they're my xmas favourite.  All good, except when it's finally their time to bake, the dough is a disaster :(   Seriously.  Completely useless.  I was very unimpressed.   No idea what I did wrong; it's not as though it's not the same recipe I make every year.  But after a few minutes of text-venting my xmas sorrows, I decided I couldn't make it any worse and randomly threw more ingredients in.  Perfect!

This should've been a disaster.  By all laws of Lauren cooking, this should never have worked.  But it did.  They're awesome.  Xmas is saved!   hahaha okay, arguably a little overdramatic.  We'll put it down to lack of sleep.

Cookies done, clean the kitchen as much as possible (read, until dish washer is full >;-P).  Close everything up to go upstairs and...   Oops - forgot the last load of laundry.  Ah well, realistically I still have a fair amount to do.  Toss it in dryer and continue my travels.

Xmas present involves printing photos and putting in frame.  Easy enough since I've found the files, know what I want to do with them, and have sized/coloured/etc everything.  All I have to do is hit print.  Right.  Except that for whatever reason, the printer deigns it'll only print mini-sized.  Wtf???  We're now into the wee hours of the morning, so deeming discretion to be the better part of valour, I switched computers to one I knew was on speaking terms with the printer and tried again.  This one was happy to print but...  Out of ink.

Oh no.

BUT -- happy coincidence.  This happens All. The. Time.   And as a result, I keep back-up ink.  All good.  Except I have 3 of the 4 cartridges I need *sigh*  Fortunately the 4th one is the least important for these photos, so I hope the Christmas Elf will help it last through the few I have to do.

First one prints.  Gorgeous.   Second one prints.  No problem.  Sweet.  Third one?  Yeah - take a wild guess?   Randomly decided to make the font size tiny.  Same font and size as the other files, but no -- it has to be mini-sized.  This is the kind of game I did not have time for.  So instead of actually resolving the situation, I just made the text huge so when the printer mini-sized it, it came out okay.  Actually *loved* the result.  Pretty excited about it :)   Have been thinking about it for ages, but just hadn't gotten around to actually doing it.   Oops.

Go rescue laundry but decide entirely too tired to actually do anything about it.  It can live in the basket and on the floor.  It's all good.  Take a look around the room I planned to clean.  Deem that instead of cleaning, closing the door is an acceptable solution.  Future Lauren can clean.

Sweet - time for bed.  Wait.  Wrapping.  Lots and lots of wrapping.  Three stockings worth and a handful of other gifts too.  Frig.  Contemplate letting Future Lauren do that too, but realize she'll probably be pretty tired and, realistically, C doesn't have any good wrapping paper to steal and moving all wrapping supplies over would be entirely more effort than just wrapping them there.

With a sigh the wrapping commenced.  And eventually concluded.  Some of it is of the more interpretive variety.  Towards the end, scissors may have become deemed an unnecessary waste of time.  If my next career leans toward gift wrapper, none of these will be in my portfolio *g*  But, it was done.

And in the end, I even managed about three hours of that wonderful thing called "sleep".  It was on the list, and it got done!  Woohoo.

Christmas Eve, by comparison, was a breeze :)   And now since Santa will be here in less than half an hour, I'm off to sleep.  Or at least lie in bed and let my brain spin wildly.  Close enough.   Merry Christmas!

0 comments:

Post a Comment