So… we’ll be getting visitors soon. Friends and relatives will be in town, and many will want to come visit our little piece of Heaven in Beautiful Bear Swamp. We’ve had several months to prepare for their arrival, but there are still some last minute things to do of course. Things like painting the shed. Weeding the garden. Getting the carpets cleaned. Making sentence fragments. You know, all that cool stuff that should have been done months or at least weeks ago, but we have lives and important things to do like enjoy time with grandchildren and visit with friends that live nearby oh and cooking and cleaning and all the other life stuff that, if enumerated completely and in great detail, would make for a much longer run-on sentence; so maybe I’ll just stop pretty soon but maybe not right now, oh well yes I think that’s enough.
Don’t you agree?
We’re putting on a bit of a shindig to celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary. Fifty years!! How did that happen?? Well it happened just like they say in those recovery places: one day at a time. Sure doesn’t feel like it’s been that long. On the other hand, it really does feel like my Beautiful Girlfriend and I have been sweethearts / best friends / lovers for basically all our lives. Childhood memories are but a flash in the pan these days. Of course, we became best friends when we were children (we were both 17), so practically speaking we really have been together all our lives.
We grew up together!
Thankfully, the chores we’d like to get done before our visitors arrive will not even remotely resemble the absolute chaos that often ensued while preparing for something like our kids’ high school graduation open houses. Those were The Before Times. One of my “favorite” memories was the last minute disposal of a very large pile of lumber. Well, OK, it sat outside and exposed to the elements so long that much of it became a very large pile of rotten wood. They’d toss boards and planks into the dumpster at work, and Kenny would go pick “the nice ones” out and take them home. Into the carefully stacked lumber pile they’d go; waiting for that Kenny guy to do something with them. Surprisingly, some of it actually got used! And of course much of the pile was ignited a few days before graduation as a hefty onslaught of carbon molecules ejected into the atmosphere.
Ya, we burned it up. Holy Carbon Footprint, Batman!
Then we looked inside the garage where the food tables were to be placed. “OH HOLY CARP!!” we exclaimed in unison. “HOW ARE WE GONNA CLEAN THIS MESS UP IN TIME?!?!?!” Not sure who did it (it was me), but some noodle-headed wombat very gradually touched off a clutter bomb in my garage. Shelves somehow got (very gradually but effectively) filled with boxes of nails, tools, extension cords, drain snake thingies, air filters, spray paint… the list could go on and on. Not in any special order mind you. Well let’s hear it for my brother-in-law. He gave us a marvelous solution: “Run a rope between the studs and hang a big new tarp across!!” It’s a truly amazing way to make a mess invisible. Those were very stressful events, those graduation open houses from 1996 and 2001.
Is the mess from the aforementioned clutter bomb still there? Yes. Yes it is.
We’ll need to rent a refrigerator to house all the leftovers from the shindig. And yes, you really can rent a refrigerator!! So it’s gonna go in the garage… in front of a new tarp. There will be “restricted areas” where visitors are not welcome to tread. They won’t know it, but we sure will. Thankfully, there’s no pile of rotten lumber. The house is pretty presentable inside. The shed needs some paint, and there are other jobs to be done; but we’ll be OK. We’ve gotten better at just realizing that this is just part of who we are. We’re not slobs, we’re Americans, and we have too doggone much stuff. We are better at not shaming ourselves for any woulda – shoulda – coulda nonsense. All that does is spoil an otherwise great day. So we’ll tidy up where we can, and hide the rest (hee hee).
I’d really love to work on this procrastination disease I’ve worked so hard to acquire over the years. But that will have to wait till tomorrow or the next day.
Oh, and if any of you visitors are reading this, please erase the preceding text from your brains.
Thank you.
Maybe we could get Grampy to come help!!