December 1st---Time to Kick off the Holiday Season!

To get you in the mood:

12 Days of Christmas

I'm in the mood. The house looks like Christmas now. I've taken the pictures and written the post---it publishes tomorrow.

It's been a crazy, busy week. Mindy closes on her new condo tomorrow (we were able to bump it up 2 weeks) and now Butch wants to get her moved in before Christmas which is stressing everyone out. We are all so busy during the holidays. I sat down with Butch yesterday to figure out what he has in mind. I had already sort of fought with him about it on Tuesday. I decided that I needed to figure out what he envisioned before telling him it was impossible. Plus, I'm always up for a challenge. And I'm not afraid of hard work. If he wants to do it, we can, but I needed for him to know exactly what that would entail.

There is so much that has to happen before Mindy can move. She is having ceilings put in---the place is a high-rise downtown---all "urban, modern" with concrete floors and ceilings. The floors will just be sealed with a clear sealer, so it will still look like a concrete floor. She's also having a tile backsplash put in which has to be shopped for along with a refrigerator and smaller washer/dryer. She has a washer/dryer, table/chairs and 2 living room chairs that need to be sold and/or moved somewhere, a huge lounge chair picked up from Steph's, all her stuff here moved (a lot of my leftovers I've saved) plus packing and moving her apartment. She's hiring movers this time since she currently lives on the 3rd floor with only steps and moving to the 10th floor with a small elevator. No way am I hauling!

Anyway, I told Butch that if he really wants to get her moved before Christmas which really means before the 22nd since that's when the Lapps family arrives, then I'd be "on board" with it as long as he realized it would be mostly he and I doing all the work. I then showed him my December calendar that has exactly 3 open days---I have something every day---and now I only have 2 days as another friend "booked" me on one of the 3 I had left. I told him that we could cancel "family baking day" on the 17th and spend that weekend devoted to everything move related. That's the only weekend for Mindy too. She has two friends coming from New Orleans this weekend until Tuesday, so she can't do anything. Next weekend is "out" for everyone. And she might even be traveling for work later in the month.

I think Butch has given up on the idea as the apartment had to be notified yesterday if she was planning to move by the 1st. At least now we can get her moved in a much more organized way. We can get all the work done before Christmas, have the drapes from her apartment moved, my "old" bedroom drapes re-made for her living room, mom's room divider painted (wait until you see what I have in mind for that), appliances delivered, all the stuff she can't move figured out, and then do the actual moving in January. That way, I can go with my original plan too---un-decorate here on the 27th before leaving for St. Louis on the 28th. If I couldn't do that, it would ruin my trip having that awful job hanging over my head. I don't really like the decorating anymore. Even as I'm putting the stuff up, I'm dreading the "take down." At least Butch didn't suggest canceling our St. Louis trip. If he had, here's what would have happened: I would have left him behind to "deal" with it all while I was living it up in St. Louis! I haven't been "home" since August and am looking forward to seeing the fam.

I'm feeling much more relaxed about the whole thing. You know I have a vision of how things will go. Mostly it never turns out that way, but I can still dream. In my mind, I see having the movers come and me having everything unpacked, put in place and decorated by the time Mindy gets off work. If you recall, when she moved back to Nashville last fall, I was in the midst of everything in St. Louis after mom died. I got home on Sunday and was sick in bed the next 4 days. I saw Mindy's apartment for the first time on Friday. It only took me about 6 hours to get her unpacked and decorated. Yeah, that's how I want it to go. I have lots of "cheap" ideas that I can't wait to do. Stay tuned...