File under Fire

Tired of waiting for somebody--anybody, really--to help me, I decided to move furniture in the living room. It had to be done before I could even consider putting up a tree, and by golly I'm going to have a tree. My favorite thing about the holiday season is that you get to bring a tree into your house and hang lights and shiny things on it. The traditional tannenbaum makes me as happy as a little girl.

So that was two hours ago, roughly. So far, I've moved the couch and the coat rack to their intended positions as determined by Jill the Organizer. This involved shifting a lot of junk around. There are a couple of problems, one of which I've solved in my head. It involved disassembling a small table that currently lives in the dining room and moving it into the living room, where it will become the new, though probably temporary, home of the teevee and various devices. This leaves the dining room approximately empty except for horrid white melamine bookcases and Rubbermaid Roughneck Totes filled with stuff that's destined for another home, if I get my act together and put it on ebay.

I have not yet solved the problem of how to get the Executive Desk the hell out of the living room. If anybody in the DC area wants an Executive Desk--once used by an actual executive!--and can come get it, I didn't pay for it, so I'll gladly give it to you. I am not joking. All you'd have to do is get it out of my house. I don't know exactly what good it would be to anybody who isn't an executive, but perhaps there's somebody out there who has some secret fantasy involving an Executive Desk; my fantasy is that the one I have magically vaporizes, or morphs into an island for my kitchen.

The hall is full of boxes of junk that need to go down to the basement. At least there's space down there now. I'm going to work on that next, and then I'm going to move the floor lamp across the room. I'm going to water the Plants That Won't Die and, uh, arrange them as artfully as possible, probably on the Executive Desk for the time being. I'm going to move the big armchair in front of what used to be the fireplace, because its permanent spot is the same place where I want to put the tree.

My back is holding up surprisingly well, so I think the rehab I've been doing must be working a little bit. The downside of all this activity is that I've skewered Lola's reality because the couch isn't where she expects it to be. She's currently sitting on the floor about five feet away from me. She looks slightly stunned.

Anyway, my break time is over. If I don't get the trash out tomorrow, it probably won't go out until 2001, since nobody else ever remembers to put it out. I'd really like to get the living room in some semblance or order before bed, and then I plan to sleep exceptionally well. So there.

before - after