Prioritizing sparkly ornaments.

As anticipated, this weekend did not result in happy Christmas decorating times. At all. I ended up spending most of my Saturday at either Costco or Walmart. On the bright side, I got things done. For the record, many of my Christmas gifts this year are coming from either Costco or Walmart. I love cheap WWII DVD box sets. I'm trying to buy my father in law's love and this year it just might work.

Between giant discount shopping and going to an engagement party Saturday night I really had no time to get all Christmasy on our place. It was almost depressing. What I did do, though, was clean our floors. Three times.

Apparently top of the line vinyl faux-wood flooring is not the easiest to clean. Whoever thought grooves in flooring was a good idea is in desperate need of a reality check. Even though I think our floor is attractive (as far as flooring goes), it's a nightmare to clean. It actually hides dirt really well, which is good since I only need to clean our floors every three to six months. Disgusting, I'm sure. I've never really noticed how horrific it was until Saturday night. I may have gotten a touch of the insane cleaning lady bug. You be the judge.

My mother in law bought a steam cleaner. It's basically a higher end Swiffer wet that actually works and only uses super hot water to clean the floors. Genius! My mom used it on her floors upstairs and said it was great. The MIL uses it on her hardwood and loves it. My vinyl wasn't having any of it. Some of the nasty got off our floors (there wasn't too much "nasty" to begin with, though) but not much.

Eventually I got tired of the supposedly amazing steam cleaner wasting my time and busted out the mop. I was committed. It was also after 10 pm, for the record. I'm hardcore like that. Except, of course, the mop didn't do a great job. Sure, it got up more dirt than the steamer, but not enough. The front door area and kitchen floor still looked a bit darker than the rest of the place. That's when I took things into my own hands and grabbed the Scotch Brite pads.

I'm officially heartbroken to say that the only effective way to clean our floor is to do it scrubbing on hands and knees. When you get that up close and personal with your floor you start rethinking every decision you ever made. Why do we wear our shoes in the house? Why do we eat? Why do we let Mom's dog come visit? How do two people make so much gross?

Eventually I had to call it quits. There's a visible difference in the lack of dirt on our floors, but they certainly weren't clean enough to eat off of. The more I scrubbed, the more dirt I found and the more disheartened I got. It was okay, though, because all I had to do was look around the rest of our place and see how thrown together it all is and I started to feel better about my floors. Who needs clean floors when they slant downwards, there's wall paint on the ceiling, and a chunk of roof is cut away to fit a smoke alarm? It's our first place and I'll take it, and I'm using it as an excuse for my (significantly less) dirty floors.

All I have to say is that whoever invents an easy floor cleaning spray deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing peace to relationships with homes and their cleaners everywhere. I will also name my first child after them, assuming their name isn't gender specific and they don't mind being pushed into middle namedom.

So yeah, that's a long way of telling you Christmas didn't really happen Saturday. It didn't happen yesterday, either, because there was a lot of time spent at church being churchy and then setting up for an evening function. Which we went to. We basically spent all day at church with a brief interlude to check out the salmon run. I hope to share that with you later this week.

Yesterday was also an emotional day. By the time I went to bed I was absolutely spent from having so many emotional ups and downs. I think Karl, the emotional rock, was feeling it a little, too. Except he didn't cry because he's a man and only does that when he gets married.

But tonight? It's on. I've opted out of going to yoga for the fourth week in a row. It's called prioritizing. I'm going to go home and run, vote, eat some dinner, and then Christmas it up like there's no tomorrow. Because that's how I roll. At least tonight, it is. I keep recognizing that I need more joy in my life and it's time to stop putting that off. Priorities, people. Priorities.


And just in case you haven't done it yet, there's still one more day to enter my awesome giveaway. Remember, your odds of winning are phenomenal. Just like the prize. Obviously.