Ho, Ho, Home Depot

Here's a new holiday ritual to add to our family scrapbook: repaint the living room.

Somehow, it's 10:30 pm and I've just cleaned my trusty angled sash brush of the remaining primer, having sanded, rinsed, repaired, de-greased, rinsed, and primed the two big window, two large doorways, and all the baseboards in the living after rolling up the rug, pushing the couches into the middle of the room, distributing all the other furniture and toys into the rest of the house.

How did this happen to my Sunday?

Well, I was thinking:

* my sister is coming to bake Christmas cookies next weekend
* that means I should get out the reindeer aprons and the recipes
* these things are in the Christmas decorations boxes in the attic
* next weekend is effectively the very end of November, so the decorations should be done anyways
* God, I really don't want to see my ugly living room pink walls and dark trim and ugly leftover curtains in all the Christmas pictures this year.

And so the painting, I guess. Because once the decorations go up, there's too much holiday bric-a-brac to do any renovating. The fall doo-dads all got packed away when I took the living room apart, and in the window between harvest theme and snow theme comes, of course, 'back-breaking labour' theme.

While I was at Home Depot replenishing the painting supplies, I also picked up 6 custom-cut window blinds. I'm increasingly losing patience with the cheap-o, too-short sheers the previous owner installed for the sale. Besides, they don't open all the way. So if I get bored with painting, I can get out the drill and the level and install my shiny new curtain-replacements.

Once all that's done, then I can decorate for Christmas. It's going to be a busy week, I think.

Happy holidays! Here's a paintbrush!

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Pynchon holds back my Christmas Elf tendencies as long as he can, but he gave me license to just go with it, as of today. So you know that he spent the afternoon putting up our outdoor Christmas lights.

We didn't manage to put them up last year, our first holiday in our new home. I didn't know what or how or anything, but I've taken 18 months to think about it and so today Pynchon installed a bunch of permanent hooks along the roof-edge of the porch and strung our multicoloured lights out from the light fixture and all around. Munchkin helped him, enthralled. My heart broke a little, from the happiness of listening to them as I painted.

(Yeah, I was inside the house and they were outside. I could hear them breathing. Our main living room window, that fronts on the porch is a single pane of 90 year old glass. Sigh. And my neighbours probably just heard that.)

Let the festive season begin!