Christmas Decorations

Last week I was planning to go walking today, but the weekend’s flare put an end to that plan, so I was hoping for a restful day, pottering around town and home.  In the end though I was feeling well enough to walk into Blackpool from Starrgate and I had a good reason, to buy fashion magazines for Anna that weren’t for sale in St Anne’s.  The day got away from me though, with job after job piling up and basically keeping me on my feet from 8:30am to 8:30pm, too long when I’m just coming out of a flare, so I’m pretty tired.

The day started as usual with a trip to Caffe Nero, although I drove today, which meant that when I’d finished my digital chores at nine I did a big shop on Sainsbury’s and had the car to do the heavy lifting on the way home.  After putting the shopping away and doing a load of washing I then drove to Starrgate and walked into Blackpool.  I’d planned to have a rest break at the library, but no magazines took my fancy so I went to Smiths, bought Anna’s three fashion magazines and walked home again, stopping only long enough to get a bottle of pineapple juice from M&S.  I really enjoyed the walk, but was starting to get weary by the end of it.

When I arrived home my priority job was to put up the Christmas decorations, but when I got up into the loft it was such a horrible mess, with boxes and clothes strewn everywhere that I had to first spend an hour cleaning up.  I collected up all the clothes, which were getting pretty damp and dried them, folded them and bagged them ready to take to a charity shop and then cleared a route to the Christmas stuff.  The loft is the most depressing place in our house, just a massive pile of stuff, a mix of rubbish, one day it might be useful stuff and precious resources for school, but it’s hard to know which is which as very little of it is mine.  Despite endlessly asking Debbie and the kids to only put things up there, if they also take something out the pile just seems to grow and grow.

Anyway the decorations were eventually sorted through, the tree assembled, the house vacuumed from top to bottom to clear up the thousands of artificial pine needles that always fall off the tree.  It looks pretty good. 

Tessa informs me that I’ve made her white shirt grey in the wash which is annoying for both of us.  What no one seems to realise is that I do about 500 loads of washing a year, washing probably 10,000 items of clothing that all need to be dried and folded.  Of those 10,000 maybe four or five suffer from colour runs/year, I think that’s pretty good going.  Of course everyone else thinks they could do a better job than I do but in practice they can’t even be bothered to separate their clothes into the right baskets, empty their pockets, pick their clothes up off the floor, dry their towels etc etc.

As soon as the decorations were done I walked into town to buy Anna some glossy paper to print the last of her portfolio, which proved a trial in itself as no one seems to know how to use the printer to do anything except print on normal paper (including me).  Half an hour of experimenting and an hours printing finally got the job done.

Next up was food, making dinner for Jennie, Tess, Anna and Debbie and myself and a batch of smoothies for tomorrow as well as fruit salads for supper and Debbie’s lunch for tomorrow.  While I was cooking Jennie arrived home and had a huge rant about a communication breakdown at work, it was a minor issue in the scheme of things but she was really angry and taking it out on me for some reason too.  In all my thirty years at work I don’t think I ever got as angry as she gets every other day, even when I was dealing with mistakes and risks in the hundreds of thousands and often millions of pounds, and I certainly never brought that sort of anger home with me.

Anna left me doing her printing and the washing up and putting away for her and Jennie, the second batch of the day, to go and visit Thom’s Grandma, which was nice but annoying too.  I struggle mightily to get Anna to even send or reply to even a text message from my Mum, but Thom’s family seems to get all of her attention, it does make me very sad.

I normally like being active all day and doing stuff for the family, it’s very rewarding, but there are rare days – like today – when it gets a bit much.  Not so much the doing, which I enjoy, but the complete lack of appreciation for the last ten plus years of endlessly cleaning up, tidying up and generally taking care of everyone else 95% of the time, on top of earning all the money and the DIY with rarely any recognition.   Debbie even annoyed me today when I found her on her knees straightening the twigs of the Christmas Tree and then explaining to me that they get bent in storage – well yes I do know that Debbie I’ve been putting the tree up for many years, I’ve just been flat out all day and straightening twigs didn’t make it to the top of my to-do list!  Then she also says “when I do the washing I separate whites and colours”, I’m not sure whether she even remembers that she’s not done the washing more than a couple of times a month for close to a decade.

Rant over – it’s been a good day, with enough annoyances to bite!