Christmas Cheer

What goes on here ten days before Christmas? Novelty. BBBH and I are engaged in cleaning the interior of the house. No, I don't mean "deep cleaning" that you fastidious ones are thinking. I mean attempting to make the house "presentable" for those who call and are more interested in us as friends and family than they are in the state of the housekeeping.

I spent the better part of two days getting my "office" straightened up. You have to understand the system. It works like this. Anything that needs to be "filed" or used in the office is taken upstairs when a trip that way is being made anyway. These items are stacked on top of the desk, and the pile grows, and grows, and grows until it takes most of a good morning to sort through and file the stuff accumulated there. The resulting packing of the file folders reminds me that it is the time of year to go through the folders themselves, discarding material no longer required to be kept. But that is for another day.

So, the desktop is clear and now it is time to get a wheat scoop and a dust rag. (The dust is layered so deeply on the horizontal surfaces that a scoop is required to get it down to a level where the cloth will be effective.) There are four bookcases, two tables and two desks in this room; so the job is not completed in one day.

Day two. Finished the office! And what, you might ask, has Beautiful been doing all this while. Too tedious are the tasks she has accomplished for me to enumerate them, but suffice it to say they have involved mops, buckets, washing machine and dryer. And she fixed my meals somewhere in the interstices of her busy schedule. ( I like to pronounce that "shed-yule" to emphasize the quality of the efforts we expend around here.)

Bring on the Christmas celebrations!

Disclaimer: BBBH says, Oh, Honey, people will think we are slobs. At least tell them about the kitchen. Okay, here it is. Neither of us will walk away from the kitchen while it is in need of attention.