I always think of this as retreat week. We do a month of prep work for Christmas and the event lasts about 48 hours for us starting with the children's service at the Episcopal church, moving on to dinner at my house if my in-laws come down or my neighbors' house if they do not. After dinner and gift exchange there is still wrapping to do back at our house and it's a race to get the kids to bed so we can start. As in most houses, Christmas Day starts often before dawn. Present opening is painfully short, considering the time it took to do the wrapping. We have a few hours to rest an enjoy our gifts before driving down to the South Shore to see Piper's family, then often we will continue on down to my mother's in Connecticut. Its a marathon, and when it is over and we are back at our own house, the after Christmas cleanup begins.
This year my in-laws went to NY to visit the boys cousins. Piper an I took this opportunity to skip almost everything this year. It is Monday now and we are at my mother's but we were able to take our time getting here. We had a nice dinner and did a gift exchange, and tomorrow I will run down the list of things my mother needs me to do around the house before we race back home.
We are not exactly comfortable in this house full of antiques. Pumpkin is afraid of the sound the radiator makes and I do not understand why the street in front of my mother's house always seems so menacing at night. The room we are in has an enormous window which faces the street. It's a main road, but still eerily quiet, but even with the curtains drawn I feel exposed and vulnerable. Even the dog is totally unsettled.
Our retreat week is going to be different this year. This is the first year in twenty that Piper hasn't had the whole week off. In his industry it is commonplace for a plant shut down during the week between Christmas and New Year's. His new company doesn't do that, so he will take Monday, Tuesday, and Friday off and go in Wednesday and Thursday.
As much as I can with the boys in the house, I'm going to do the typical mental housecleaning that one does at the end of the year: taking stock, setting goals, making lists.
I'll also continue with the physical housecleaning I've been doing for the last month or so. So far I've gotten through most of our too-small bedroom closet. I also need to clear the desk in my study and the office space between the kitchen and living room. The work is slow-going because I am trying to make reasonable decisions about what will fit where with the greatest amount of accessibility and the least amount of maintenance. It's an interesting exercise; after going through our closet, I bought nothing in the way of clothing for Piper for Christmas. That's unheard of, but I could clearly see that neither of us needed anything.
Throwing stuff out is the hardest part of this for me, unless it's obviously out of date. I did finally get rid of a Benneton sweater from the 80s that I remember loving utterly, but that I hadn't worn or even seen in years.
Since leaving my job, I've quit sending shirts to be laundered, but now I have a pile of laundry to be ironed. I don't mind the ironing, it's about the only thing I can stand to do when it comes to housework, I find it very meditative.
I'll certainly need that meditation time to reach some decisions about my next steps career-wise. If I am going to try to switch gears I have to get serious about my rewriting my resume to reflect that. Unfortunately, I think most career changers get their break through networking, something I suck at. I sent a whole bunch of resumes out right before the holiday, I'm hoping to hear back about some of them after this week is over, but I suspect I'll have to change my resume before I get any bites.
Out with the old, in with the new! What will be your focus for next year?
Check out this video...
His honorable Jim Dear speaks with Melissa McGinnis from Greenopolis TV about the 1000th trash truck to be ran off of liquefied natural gas, which services his community of Carson California. This momentous effort helps to keep the air clean by reducing green house gases and carbon, since the harvested gas from landfills burns at a much cleaner rate than regular diesel gas. http://youtu.be/rbhIiwtmUks
Posted by: alex | December 28, 2011 at 11:45 AM