Our First Christmas

It's mine and Eric's first Christmas as a married couple, and I'm very excited about it. We put up some decorations, including a tree, a real tree, so our house is very festive. We have a lot of lights. Not too much of anything else, but we have so many lights, mostly left from the wedding, that we probably wouldn't need to turn on an actual light if we didn't want to. We hardly have any ornaments, but Eric's mom went through their's and we got all the ones that are Eric's, and all of those were close to double what we had. I think before that we only owned 8, maybe 9 ornaments. We haven't bought any either, but they have really cheap ones at Wal-Mart and I think those might be good to buy. Still, despite the low number of ornaments, with the lights and the tinsel, are tree is very pretty. And it helps make the room smell great too. Which is good, becuase when you walk to the bathroom it stinks, every day. Yuck, I'm sure you're thinking. Well, it is yuck, and it's not our fault. Either the person below us or next to us smokes, and for some reason the smell seeps through the vents and stinks up our bathroom. I thought it was bad enough on those occasional times when I would walk into the building and be able to smell it in the hallway, but now I have to smell it in my own house, and every time I go to the bathroom? Which includes when I shower, when I get up and wash my face in the morning, when I brush my teeth, when I get ready for bed. Imagine brushing your teeth but smelling this nasty tobacco smoker's smell. Yuck. We talked to our apartment manager about it and he basically said there's nothing he can do, but it is getting intolerable. And it's starting to stink up the rest of the house. I think we didn't have a problem before because the heat wasn't on, so that might have something to do with it. Still, 5 more months of this, every day? I cannot take it. And we shouldn't have to. This is our home now, and we should not have to smell somebody else's nastiness every day. It's so gross. Think about it-if we decided to live here more permanently than a year, this would be our real home, the place we'd have to live and deal with day in and day out. Obviously we should not have to be stuck with a problem we can't do anything about that isn't our fault, especially not when we already pay so much money for the place.

On other apartment issues-our dryer broke again. This is the second time in 3 weeks. We are NOT happy about it. At least we are not as desperate for laundry this time as we were last time. Also, with the first snow of the year, we figured out that they don't really plow our parking lot, or at least not the whole thing. So it's very difficult to park in it. That also means I think we lose a spot becuse you can't really tell where the spots are anymore. Plus, last night some idiot who doesn't have a parking thing in their car parked in our parking lot, taking the last spot, so when Eric got home from work he had to go park down the street. We thought we had such a great apartment, and now we're starting to get really annoyed. The crappy thing is, our manager isn't very good at his job I don't think. He seems very apathetic, and it's ticking me off. I just want to be able to do my laundry, park the car behind our building, and not get grossed out every time I walk in/near the bathroom. Is that too much to ask? Apparantly.

But back to Christmas. Eric and I haven't quite decided what we're doing yet this year. I don't really know what most of my siblings are doing, but it doesn't sound like many of the older ones will be home for Christmas Eve. Sad-usually almost everybody is at home. I mean, one or two couples gone, maybe, but this year I think it's 3. Again, sad. I think Eric and I will probably do what we did last year-spend some time at home, then go to his house for a little while, then come back to Mom and Dad's. We'll probably be there for dinner this year though, and I don't think we were last year. I don't really remember. Then on Christmas day we'll probably go up to the grandparent's with the rest of the family, because Eric's family doesn't usually do much on Christmas day. We still haven't figured out when we're going to do our own thing, like our presents and stuff. We'll have to squeeze it in somewhere. I'm just really excited to be having our first Christmas together as a married couple.


Aunt Clara had for years labored under the delusion that I was not only perpetually 4 years old, but also a girl.