I guess it's over.

Christmas, that is.

Usually I leave my tree up longer than this, but to be quite honest - it was annoying me. The boys all got remote control cars for Christmas *shoots dirty look toward The Dude* and they have been running them all. day. long. And of course, there's nothing more fun and exciting than to run them into the tree.

The dead tree, no less.

That has a lot of breakable ornaments on it.

And it's dead.

Needless to say, every time anything bumped into the tree, needles started falling everywhere. So it was time. I was going to wait until the kids went to bed to take it down, but once I get an idea in my head I tend to rush right into it (not always a good thing) and so I got to work. It took a few hours, as usual - mainly because I am extremely anal about how the ornaments get put away. But still, I got it done.

And then of course I had the joy of dragging it outside and tossing it to the curb. Literally. It's now sitting out there, waiting to be picked up and turned into mulch by the city. At least I don't have to deal with actually getting rid of it by myself.

Once I got the tree out of the house, I started cleaning up the living room and re-rearranging it to get the furniture back where it belonged. That was another reason why I really just wanted to get the tree out of here - with the "holiday arrangement" of the furniture, we had no choice but to sit on the loveseat to watch movies - and I *hate* the loveseat. OK, maybe not hate - but it's really not comfortable for both me and The Dude to sit on at the same time, because I usually end up stretched out with my feet in his lap while we watch movies. And the loveseat just didn't work for that. So now, we can watch movies comfortably again. It's the little things in life.

So I still have a few more things to put away in the living room, but for the most part it's clean. Or it's clean enough. I do want to mop the floor, but that'll wait until tomorrow. Or maybe the next day. We'll see.

We won't even talk about what the kitchen looks like right now, thankyouverymuch. I'll deal with that tomorrow, without a doubt. I'm not even sure how I'm going to get in there to make breakfast yet - so I might end up cleaning up in there yet tonight. 

In other news, this is never a good sight. 

I knew that The Dude had left for work, because he had sent me a message on facebook telling me he was leaving. And then about 15 minutes later, his boss called here looking for him. He's been having issues with his truck, so I loaded up the kids and took off. We found him about a block from his house, where the truck had died (again). However, we think we figured out what's wrong with it, we were able to get it started and get it back to his house, and I got him to work (although he was late). So tomorrow we work on fixing that - but it looks like it's going to be a really cheap and easy fix *crosses fingers*. The last thing we need right now is more unexpected expenses, since he's now dealing with a broken tooth and is most likely going to be making a trip to the oral surgeon, just like I did. Hopefully his visit goes smoother than mine did though.

Speaking of which, I need to balance the checkbooks and consult with the notebook to make sure that I'm still on track. I am bound and determined to stick with my plan.