2 Days, 7 States and 3 Beds Later, I'm back in DC!

I've had one hell of a week...I left Chicago on Tuesday to begin my long trek home to DC for the holidays. I drove to Columbus through 7 hours of snow, ice, rain and fog and stayed with my aunt and uncle for the night. I then took off the next morning after a sleet storm had passed and made the last leg of the journey. It wasn't nearly as bad weather-wise, but it was vvvv long.

The next morning, I accompanied my mother to her doctor's appointment for her spine surgery then went shopping in Middleburg. We arrived back home around 6pm, when I went directly into the kitchen to make the homemade salsa I promised to bring to the holiday dinner party a friend was throwing the next night. After the salsa was made and my belly was fed, I went up to bed only to be awoken at 3.30am with horrible stomach pains. I couldn't decide if I was going to puke or poop and ended up spending the next hour in the bathroom doing a little of both. The whole of Friday was spent in my PJs, staying as close as possible to the bathroom for the frequent calls that nature made to me. By 4pm, I decided to get my ass in gear and get ready for the dinner party where we were having Christmas Enchiladas and other various spicy foods that my stomach was not going to be too please about. I guess I could have not eaten, but who are we kidding?! Me pass up delicious food that I did not have to cook?! Hell to the no! In any event, I had planned to indulge in some Christmas spirits, but given my stomach issues and having had a ton of Christmas Enchiladas, I decided to forgo the Christmas Bevvies and headed home around 9pm.

Yesterday I went bopping around town running various errands. Nothing too exciting or glamorous. Hell, nothing in the 'burbs of DC is exciting or glamorous, but I digress. Last night I went to a friend's house for a few drinks, then headed to Captial Hill to catch up with some other folks. It was a fun night, from what I can remember of it, but I realized that I am just too old to whoop it up in a bar and over indulge. I can't drink as much as I used to and the suffering the next day just isn't worth it. I say this every time I go out and have a few too many, but it just doesn't resonate with me. Obviously. So, today was recovery day...a slight headache that went away with the help of a dozen or so Advil and my head feels like someone scooped out my brain and replaced it with cotton. I've suffered through a heck of a lot worse, but if I had my way, I wouldn't be suffering at all. Good times, good times.

The Five Days of Holiday Preparations

Once again, I've slacked on the blog front. I'm not going to provide any excuses because, frankly, I really don't have any other than laziness. I have all the time in the world to blog, but I just don't have the motivation these days - I think it's because I don't have much to talk about. My life is pretty boring given that I'm not working nor do I have a love life. I have friends (thank God), but they have their own lives which I try to plant myself into as much as possible, but even I know when to draw the line and butt out.

So as a result of having no life, I decided to decorate my place for Christmas. This is the first time in my adult life that I have ever decided to take on this task. In the past, I've been too busy traveling for work every Monday through Friday, then going out to catch up with friends and family on the weekends, to bother decorating for the holidays. There never really was a point to it for me since I would only be able to appreciate the tree and decorations on the weekends through my hang over induced stupor. This year, however, I decided to invest the time and hundreds of dollars into decorating...and I'm still not sure if it was worth it.

It started the weekend of Thanksgiving when I was in Columbus. My aunt talked me into getting a tree this year despite my protests of having no decorations and not wanting to spend money due to my unemployment status. My aunt, whom I love to death and is one of my closest confidants, decided we'd go to the WalMart to purchase my decorations on the cheap. So on Black Friday, like fools, we walked into WalMart. It was like a whirlwind cross between the Amazing Race and Supermarket Sweep - we split up and grabbed up everything we needed so that we could get the hell out of the utter craziness of Black Friday in the Smalltown, OH WalMart. We bought the ornaments, hooks, lights and tree stand - all for $60 and in less than 30 minutes! That was Day 1 of Holiday Preparations.

If you know me at all, you know I'm meticulous on what things should look like - colors, theme (if any) and style. I decided to decorate my tree with silver, purplish/burgundy-ish and limey green decorations. Luckily WalMart had the silver and purplish/burgandy-ish ornaments, but they didn't have squat in the limey green department. So, when I got back to Chicago and on Day 2 of Holiday Preparation, I set about trying to find the limey green ornaments. It was fairly simple, but not very cheap. I went to Crate & Barrel where I found four ornaments in the shade of green I wanted, but that was it. The sales associate at Crate & Barrel suggested I look at CB2 (the less expensive sister store of Crate & Barrel). I went to CB2 and sure enough, they had pleny of ornaments in the color I wanted. I bought a ton of them, and between the two stores I somehow managed to spend $115...who knew ornaments could be so expensive?!

On Day 3 of Holiday Preparation, my first stop was at Target to find cheap stockings (one for me and one for Mopsy) and a tree topper. My original thought was to hang the stockings on the mantle of my fireplace using scotch tape. It may not be 'pretty' per se, but it was cheap and would do the trick. However, when I was perusing the aisles of the hoiday decor, I came across these stocking hangers that I couldn't resist. They sit at the edge of the mantle and have a hook on which to hang the stockings. My total Target purchase was $25 - not bad, but remember, I'm supposedly trying to stay on the cheap.

Next, I needed garland. Now, I wasn't going to use just any garland. No - not me. I had to have something fitting with my color scheme and with some sort of flair. I decided I needed ribbon that matched the purplish/burgandyish and limey green of my ornaments, and I figured it would be easy to find. What I fool I was. I went to JoAnn fabrics thinking they would have wired ribbon in the exact colors I would need, but alas, that was an incorrect assumption. I ended up finding two sets of ribbon (unwired) in the colors I wanted, but I would have to customize it myself. I bought all the ribbon I needed and some iron-on bonding agent, and decided I'd bond the two colored ribbons together myself so that one side was purplish/burgandyish and the other side was the limey green color. After $20 of ribbon purchasing, I had everything I needed for my tree except the tree itself.

Finally, I was off to purchase a tree. Originally I was planning to get a tree from the lot around the corner from me - they have a ton and I figured that would be the easiest. Luckily, my wise friend JK told me that I should go to Home Depot for my tree. The lots tend to charge $20/foot, where as Home Depot had 6 - 7 foot trees for $35. Again, I was on the cheap, so off to Home Depot I drove. I found the perfect tree, had a friendly sales guy trim the trunk and tie it to the top of the car. I drove that tree home and carried it up to my loft. Then I tackled getting the tree into the stand. That was a FREAKING BITCH to do. I was cussing like a merchant sailor trying to get the damned tree into the f'ing stand. Let me correct myself, getting the tree into the stand wasn't so bad. It was getting the damn tree to stand straight up in the stand that was the shitty part of the whole experience. The tree kept leaning to the side, no matter how many times and directions I maneuvered it. I finally gave up once I realized the tree wouldn't fall over, and left it alone overnight so that the branches would drop.

So, now we're at Day 4 of holiday decorating and around $260+ poorer. This is the day I decided to hang all the decorations I purchased. I started with another attempt at getting the tree to stand straight. I was on the floor trying to tilt the tree to just the right angle so that I could adjust the stand in order to have the tree straight. This went on for over an hour before I decided to say, "Fuck it," and pulled a tacky MacGyver move. I went into my jewelery making kit (yes, I design and make jewelry, but I'll tell you more about that another time) and pulled out some wire. I wrapped the wire around the tree and tied it to a post sticking out of the brick exposed wall, thereby making the tree stand more at an 85 degree angle rather than at the 65 degree angle it was originally. While 85 degrees is not a perfect 90 degrees, I was willing to admit defeat, note that my tree was going to be somewhere between ghetto and fabulous, and moved on.

I then tackled the lights, and everyone knows what a pain in the ass the lights are. I wrapped all 9 1/2 feet of lights on that 6 ft. tall tree and realized I still needed more lights. F that - I was sticking with 9 1/2 feet. Hell if I was spending another dollar on this God forsaken tree...I unwrapped all the lights and re-wrapped them so they were evenly distributed around the entire tree. It still needed more lights, but fuck it...now for the garland. I strung the ribbon around the tree thinking that 8 feet surely would be plenty since it was only going on the outside of the tree, not outside and inside like the lights. But no, I still needed more - the ribbon only made it half way down the tree. I actually considered running out to JoAnn Fabrics again to purchase more ribbon and bonding agent, but again stuck to my guns about not spending another penny on this shitty-pain-in-the-ass tree. I reassembled the ribbon on the tree so that it would pass for decent and moved on to the decorations.

Hanging the decorations was the easiest and most enjoyable part of this whole process. I placed each ornament in just the right place, making sure that the three colors were equally placed amongst the entire tree. Once I was satisfied at how the ornaments were placed, I noticed that I had a ton of silver and purplish/burgundyish ornaments left over. So, I took those ornaments and placed them in various bowls and vases throughout the loft. I also hung my stockings on the mantle and did other little touches here and there. Three hours after starting this process on Day 4 of Holiday Preparation, I stood back and admired my work. I successfully bought, assembled and decorated my first very own Christmas tree and decorated my apartment.

As I called it on my Facebook page, here is the fruit of my stressed out, curse word filled labor:



Day 5 of Holiday Preparations was spent shopping downtown for presents. I managed to find and purchase 99% of the presents I needed in that one three hour trip. This was a feat - never before had I finished my holiday shopping in one day, much less three hours. Yesterday, I bought the last prezzie so now all I have to do is wrap and drive the 13 hours back to DC and the holidays can begin!

Loft Living

Okay, I've slacked off again. However, I have good reason for not posting lately. After doing my celebratory "I got a job" shopping, I spent the weekend hanging out with friends and packing up my old place – a major chore I dreaded doing, so I spent all weekend doing bits at a time. I still hadn't heard back from anyone about my contract on Friday, but I wasn't too worried as I wasn't expecting to hear anything until Monday. Monday came and went and not a word about the contract. The bad news came on Tuesday morning when I received an email from the company that hired me, stating they needed to retract my offer. Obviously, my immediate response was, "SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT!" Turns out that nine client projects the company was expecting to complete in 2009 were canceled. As a result, they decided to put a freeze on hiring until they could figure out the market impacts after the new year. So, basically I was screwed and back to square one. I didn’t have a job, had to be out of my apartment on the 1st, was still trying to get Mopsy back to full health and still had a six hour drive ahead of me to Columbus. Happy fucking Thanksgiving!

Well, Thanksgiving with my mom, brother, sister, aunt, uncle and two cousins (not to mention Mopsy, the Columbus family's dog Ralph and their 3 cats, 2 donkeys, horse, bazillion chickens and rooster) was really great. Amazingly enough, no one fought (primarily my family) and no one got in trouble with their parents (primarily the Columbus cousins). The only thing that could have made it better was some drinking. Okay, that makes me sound like an alcoholic...what I mean to say is that we could have used some champagne or wine. However, my uncle really is an alcoholic and therefore my aunt bans all alcoholic bevvies from the house. It sucks because my mom and siblings and I like to think that a family that drinks together stays together. I guess you could say it’s our motto. 

So I left Columbus on Saturday and made the trek back to Chicago - and thank goodness I left when I did, because from what I heard, traveling on Sunday SUCKED. When I arrived at my apartment in Chicago, I immediately began loading up my car and moving stuff to my new place. It took me four trips, three hours and a lot of cursing to complete my move. The next step was the walk-thru...so Sunday I was over at the old apartment doing some light cleaning (luckily I'm kind of OCD about keeping my place clean, so there wasn't too much cleaning required) and completed the walk-thru in 20 minutes.

Now I'm settled into my new place. I picked it because it's pretty. Yes, I am a superficial person and judged the loft by its looks. Heck, you can see for yourself that the place is pretty awesome from the picture to the left. I've always wanted to live in a loft – it always seemed like the cool thing a 20 or 30-something would do. However this loft, while cool, could use some thicker walls. Sunday night I discovered that the walls are so thin that it sounded like my neighbor was sitting on the couch right next to me while he cussed out the Bears (they played a pitiful game, so I don’t blame my neighbor for yelling at them). It’s going to be rather tricky should I throw a party here (which is plausible given that the place has a kegerator) or ever have a sex life again (fingers crossed).