I've had the two big boxes of Christmas related tchotchkes sitting in the corner of my living room all week, but I just can't summon up the interest, energy or wherewithall to actually put any decorations up beyond the DIY tree (which I'll admit, looks a little sad this time around).
I did take my little gay pink tinsel tree to work and put that up, so I'm about 50% more festive than I was last year... but beyond that, nothing.
I might have to dig around in the boxes for one or two things I can put out, but overall I can't be bothered taking a bunch of stuff down, putting a bunch of different stuff out and then having to take it all down and out the old stuff out again all inside of a month.
Yes, I know, bah humbug... I'm not against anybody else doing it, and I'll be heading down to Ma's place early tomorrow morning for the annual trimming de la tree... so yeah... just not massively bothered about getting all yuletide up in my apartment.
I attempted to start the cross-stitch I want to give to Tink's girls and that I should really have started working on in about August this week, only to discover that this whole "fabric painting Aida cloth" thing is harder than it looks, and I'd completely screwed up my first attempt by using far too much paint.
That meant I had to abandon the first try and paint some more fabric, which seems to have worked out a whole lot better. However now I only have a week and a half to do the two pieces (well, a week really so that I can get them framed up as well). It shouldn't be too hard, it'll just be fiddly.
As far as work is concerned, well, there's a level of frustration there too... there was some minor tantrum activity from the person originally responsible for the stuff we had to rework fairly quickly last Friday... but you know what, a) you weren't here, b) you screwed it up... deal with it.
Then I had a lot of additional work to deal with instead of my actual work. Well, some of it was actual work, but demanded a lot of my time and concentration because I had to reorganise a sizable badly constructed document into sensible content... which in turn meant I discovered something that ended up being pretty damn important to The Nut House that we were unaware of. And not fun kittens and rainbows stuff either... no idea how that's going to pan out.
But the other vague sense of aggravation is Newbie... she's nice enough (although not even in the same ballpark as Pixie) but she's just not always present. And mostly I mean that in a physical sense. If I turn around at any point, then it's a 50/50 bet as to whether she'll be there when I turn back again. Yes, okay, that's an exaggeration, but not by a hell of a lot.
Part of it is that she just doesn't think... or doesn't think outside of her own little bubble. And I get that... she's half my age more or less. But it does make things more difficult at times.
All of which means that there's a very low background level of frustration... more so when I know she's goofing off (not that we don't all goof off, but there's a time and a place) or just isn't where she should be.
At some point there will be a conversation with La Ninj about it... probably over the Christmas break.
Otherwise work is just really damn busy.
I did manage to carve out a little time mid week to go through the Fringe guide though... and I was pleasantly surprised. Initially it didn't look promising, but I ended up with more things in my short list than I have the last couple of years, and while I still need to make a couple of final decisions about stuff, it's looking promising.
Today was more about getting things done as quickly as possible and keeping cool wherever possible.
We started with the usual supermarketry... I'm having the same kind of obsession with salad dressings currently that I had with soups over winter. Although to be honest this is much more of a "throw stuff in together and hope for the best" kind of thing... but pretty much all of them have been successful. Which is the long way around to say that not only did I buy a couple of different pre-prepared dressings, I also added to my collection of vinegars.
Otherwise it was a fairly average excursion.
After getting back and unpacking we headed out to the Flinders Street Market... they were having a Christmas Bazaar in conjunction with Etsy. But if I'm going to be really, really honest, it was 80% the similar stuff we've seen at individual markets or at other places.
I did find a couple of things for Ma and also couldn't resist a little red furry monster from the Little Green Cat stall.
But otherwise, same old same old.
From there we headed to Good Guys to find Ma a replacement evaporative cooler since the one she has is on it's last legs. And you would think that on a weekend forecast to be over 40°C they would actually put additional staff in the fan/cooler section. Yeah, not so much. Eventually they got the concept and Ma asked appropriate questions until she didn't have any more, so we let the salesman go serve someone else while she made up her mind.
Which she eventually did, and a different very personable and chipper (yeah, chipper is the word, he wasn't perky but decidedly chipper) young man did all the ringing it up.
Last stop was Ikea... I needed frames for the cross-stitch (or will if they get finished in time), Ma had things she wanted frames for and we hadn't had the opportunity to rummage through their Christmas section (the red and gold was good, but overall nothing thrilling).
So we mostly wandered around the ground floor, managed to fill up a bag with a collection of stuff and that was pretty much that.
We grabbed some lunch on the way back, then went through the Fringe shows I'd shortlisted and ditched a number of them from the Ma and Me list to the Just Me list. So depending on how many of those I keep, I may be seeing almost half of next years shows solo.
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