ellenmillion

First of all, I really don't care much for the holidays. There are bits I enjoy, but for the most part, the stressy, commercial, panicky pressure of it all is just wearying. I have no gift shopping of note accomplished; I tried looking for my nephews and was crowded out of the store by other customers and overwhelming choices - I don't even know what they LIKE anymore. I figured out some brilliant gifts for Jake, and one by one, they've all been dismantled. Work bought him the big one I was planning, so I figured 'accessories for it!'... to have him talk about returning it because it doesn't do one major thing he needs it to do for work. I ordered a game for him... to have him decide he needed to buy one himself and pick out something ENTIRELY different than the one I'd ordered for him, before finally getting the hint that maybe the week before Christmas wasn't the best time to order himself something. Now, I suspect he expects the one he picked out, not the one I ordered the week before. And I found a really hard-to-get kind of special whiskey that he really likes... to find out that he just got someone else to buy him some in Anchorage and bring it back for him. FAIL. I have no idea what to do now. I have one, stupid small thing, and that's it.

Yesterday, we went into town to go nursery shopping - find a glider rocker and pick up the stroller/carseat that I hadn't bought on Friday. We ended up going to 12 stores (literally). The first store had a selection that... wasn't quite what we were looking for - sort of modern and more expensive than we'd hoped. The second store, no options. Third store, no options. Fourth store was a detour to look for a rug for the living room - struck out there and got the runaround regarding ordering one. Fifth store was Walmart, which frankly makes my skin crawl. The whole feeling of the store is cheap and substandard - they had one cheap glider rocker, on display, but bolted down to a waist-high bench, in a completely inaccessible way. How do you buy a chair you can't SIT in? Who bolts down a CHAIR? Seriously - do they think someone's going to try to walk out with their display model? Sixth store had a really fancy model... for $780. Seventh store had an even fancier model... for $1600. Seriously? No. Stores 8-11 were more strikes (or side-trips, looking for other things we didn't find)- one had REALLY ugly and uncomfortable ones for $700. Store 12 was just to pick up the stroller, because by this time we were both grumpy and exhausted. And not only had the sale for said stroller expired three hours earlier, but now they were out, and the sales assistant gave us some kind of story about how she couldn't order one without a UPC (their display was frankly in shambles - the store is in the middle of renovations) and we went home basically empty-handed for wasting an entire day on slick streets dodging bad drivers in crowded parking lots.

Most of the food plans we made for the weekend backfired badly - we'd planned Mexican food, but the tortilla shells we bought had apparently shipped poorly, so we couldn't peel them apart without ripping big holes in them, to start with. We ran out of staples for other plans.

So, today, I figured I'd like to get the trim all finished in the nursery. A nice, small task that shouldn't take all day and might leave me some programming or reading time. Maybe assemble the swing, when I'm done. I like putting things together.

Now, after spending a couple of hours on the trim several weeks ago, I wasn't really happy with how it looked - one joint in particular. It frankly looked like crap. I put some caulk in the joint - sandable, paintable caulk - so I could fix it up a bit cosmetically. I was discouraged enough to put it off for a while, but retained some hope that I could make it pass muster. But coming back to sand it...? OH GOD. It didn't sand worth crap, just shredded my sandpaper and got all rough and scalloped-looking. It was like trying to sand rubber or cream cheese or something. I checked the caulk tube, and lo... Ellen the genius didn't use sandable caulk. Paintable and waterproof, yes, sandable, no. It looked AWFUL. So, after trying for another hour or so to sculpt it with various tools (knife, spatula... fingernail was the most effective), I took a crowbar to the trim and tore it all out. Which is where I am now, feeling like I've gone nowhere but BACKWARDS for the entire weekend.

I am tired, discouraged, and frustrated. I think I will have some chocolate and take a shower, then go try to get some new trim up and not screw it up too badly.