Eati, drink and be merry!

Hello Internet!  I know, I know, where have I been, right?  

Well, I'll tell you.

(But before I do, I must briefly gloat.  It's 8:30pm.  The monkey is sleeping, and I am IN BED, with a nice big glass of boozy yumminess and no work till MONDAY!!  Whoot whoot!)

So, my Dad's side of the family, being the logical folk that they are, like to get together for the family christmas gathering well before christmas, to avoid any other familial conflicts.  This year the party is this coming Saturday, and it's at MY HOUSE!!  2 days from now, about 35 family members will be descending onto our wee abode here on the roof to eat, drink and be merry for a few hours.

So...I've been getting ready for it.

Now I wish I could say that our house is in a state of constant readiness, so that guests can pop by any time and we can offer them something warm and tasty to eat, a comfortable bed to sleep in, and a toilet that's been scrubbed sometime in the past 6 months.  Very Martha Stewart like.  In reality?  I've been cleaning shit up for THREE WEEKS now, and I finally am ready to let all these people into my home!

While our house is hardly a pigsty, there is always stuff that "gathers."  They gather in what that annoying Fly Lady calls "hotspots," which are like big magnets for stuff to pile up on.  Dudes, my whole damn HOUSE is a hotspot!  So we've been chipping away at them, and at the same time made some major furniture movements, and after 3 weeks of toil, this place looks DAMN FINE, y'all!

My other new best friend, the cleaning lady, came by today to put the finishing touches on it all.  Tomorrow all that's left is a few more christmas decorations and some stuff in the basement that needs dealing with.  Oh...and the FIVE baskets of clean laundry that need to be folded.  The Laundry Fairy arrives tomorrow night (hi Mom!) but I'm going to try like hell to get them done before she arrives, because even Laundry Fairies need to chill some times!

Despite all the schlepping and hard work, it's awfully nice to give this place a thorough once over, at least once a year.  I sure as heck don't have time to pull this "hosting parties for 35 people" off on a regular basis, but I'm looking forward to seeing everyone on Saturday.  

Hope they all drive their small cars, because I have NO idea where they're all going to park, with all that fricking SNOW out there.  (We had just about as many cars here the day we got married, but I realize that not once during my wedding day, did I think to give a rats patootie about where people were parking.  So maybe I just won't care on Saturday either!)