Today's task: Clean.

Sean and I have celebrated 3 Christmases this Christmas holiday and the apartment definitely shows it. Sean only had 1 week off between Christmas and New Year's, so I didn't want to waste our time off spending it cleaning. We instead spent the time playing Settlers of Catan at least 5 times a day. I bought him a version of chess that involves rolling dice because dice introduce luck into the game and with chess, especially against Sean, I need all the luck I can get. Luck should makes things easier, but even with luck, he still beat me in 5 turns. All this to say, our board game for break was definitely Settlers.

But now break is over for Sean at least and I cannot distract myself any longer from the disaster site that is our apartment. I just finished packing most of our Christmas stuff into a bin and then went to tackle the project of packing our artificial Christmas tree back into its box. Let me just say, I have no idea how the tree came out of the box. After much folding of the branches into what I believe is the proper direction, I finally got it into the box, but then had to squeeze it together to get the top of the box to close over. And the only tape I have is the traditional scotch tape used for wrapping presents, not closing boxes. We'll see how long it stays closed.

And as I sit to write this I realize that our stockings are still hanging on the wall and have to find a place in the full Christmas bin. I am, however, excited to have a bin full of Christmas decorations. I didn't realize how few decorations I actually have to decorate for Christmas. We fortunately were able to get a Christmas tree and I had received some decorations from one of my wedding showers, but we had no angel for our tree. I went to do some last minute Christmas shopping on the 23rd and went looking for an angel, since I was out. Target only had one angel and she was rather scary looking and Michaels was sadly sold out. This situation was somewhat remedied on Christmas Eve when the family came over for service and then afterwards for our Christmas pjs. My parents had found this "lovely" star to go on top of our tree. It was the only thing they could find and I appreciate their effort, so it went on top of the tree. Next Christmas, however, I will be on the hunt for a Christmas angel.

Better go back to cleaning. Woo hoo!