wrapping presents round two

My boss called me this afternoon and told me to take the rest of the week off. I have to admit, I am happy because she is going to pay me. My first paid week off in four years. Since we moved to Michigan, I have not received paid time off. If I took time off, it was without pay. So I'm pretty excited about this.

I decided to get started by wrapping the Christmas presents for my family. We'll be seeing them this weekend, so I had postponed wrapping all of their gifts until this week. No time like the present... (yup, I had to use that pun). So I got all of them wrapped and then I got all of our wrapping paraphernalia gathered up, sorted and put back in storage. This of course needs to go back up in the attic. Which is a lot neater today. Bill cleaned it out yesterday. It was quite a feat, started by the new tv. See the old tv box is up there, with lots of other boxes hiding inside. After clearing the path to the box, Bill decided it was doing a good job of keeping all the other boxes together. He then proceeded to clear out the miscellaneous boxes that had been piled at the top of the stairs. He also went through his electronic mess. The answer is always, "yes, we do have the proper connection for ___." And one can easily find it now that he put them all together.

There was only one accident. While he was chucking trash down the stairs, I came in to hand him back a box to throw said trash in. He had just let go of a cd which slammed into my head, edge first. Those things hurt! Of course a warning could not have been shouted because the cd had been launched well before my head entered the doorway. It was perfect timing. we laughed about it. The goose egg on my head has finally gone down and the headache went away after I took a couple of ibuprofen. I think I'll survive.

time to wrap the presents

I realized this morning, while going through my mental checklist, just how many presents I have to wrap. It's actually less then any other year. I will wait to wrap my family's presents until after Christmas, just to alleviate some of the stress. It's also a lot less because as much as I like giving, I realized I may have gone a bit overboard in years past. Is 20 presents each too much? Yes. Yes it is. So this year I scaled back. That was difficult. Extremely difficult. I'm not even sure how well I did because I stuff everything into the closet and don't look at it again until I pull it out to wrap it.

Just now Atticus broke into the closet and found his present. Not only did he find it, pull it out and start playing with it, but he opened the plastic bag that had been tied without ripping it. That is a huge accomplishment! He usually starts with his teeth and asks questions later. Sneaky, stealth little kitten.

Back to the wrapping party I'm going to have later, after work. I had decided to wait because of Atticus. He likes to eat paper, so I figured if there was less time the presents sat out wrapped, there would be less time for him to eat the paper off of them, ensuring that I would have to wrap them all a second time. This of course, meant that I had to wait until after our weekend out of town. Which brings me to my post. I eventually decided I could wait and wrap them all tomorrow. I don't have anything else to do, once we serve breakfast at church to the homeless, stop and buy coffee at our favorite coffee shop, re-caulk the shower, make a cheeseball, make lunch, and go to Christmas Eve service. Sure. There's plenty of time to wrap all of our presents. I better start this afternoon. I am not a procrastinator and this is starting to get too close.

Plus I'm dealing with a cat that is clearly bent on making it onto Santa's Naughty list (he finally got kicked out of my office after his third attempt at breaking into the closet just in the time it took me to write this post).