Here comes the herd

It’s the night before the night before the night before Christmas, and hoo boy, the creatures are stirring. Kate and I baked multiple batches of 6* different kinds of cookies over Sunday and Monday, managing to thoroughly trash and resurrect the kitchen, Lazarus-like, **twice** in 2 days. (Surprise cookie hit this year: Oatmeal Ginger. Once again, Trader Joe’s Baking Ginger (basically little pieces of crystallized ginger) proves that there’s basically nothing baked that can’t be improved with ginger.)

Since we’ve got many, many relatives descending on us in a couple of days, we overcame nagging bourgeois feelings and hired the same woman who helps clean John’s house to come by and help us out. Knowing she was coming, Kate and I kicked ourselves into gear and finally unpacked, stashed, hid, and otherwise dealt with a solid 90% of the remaining boxes and piles we’d been ignoring since we moved in. (It’s a mixed blessing, living with one’s SO and discovering that you have very similar blindspots (inertia spots?) about particular types of clutter. We’ve had boxes and piles for several months now; at least we haven’t been fighting about it!)

Ellen came by, regaled us with stories about her 7 and 8 year olds, commented to Kate that she could tell we’d been cleaning and was always amused that people tidied before she came over, and then did a stunningly good job of making the house unrecognizably … clean. We’d cleared most of the surfaces, which was critical, and now, right now, everything is lacking the minor dust bunnies or cat-hair-icebergs that we’d just gotten used to as part of the background. I want to shrinkwrap the house until our folks show up, if only to prove to them that it looked like this.

• Well, 5, really, unless you’re willing to count “Peanut-Butter Chocolate Chip” and “Peanut Butter” as two different cookie genotypes, which I am. Call me a lazy taxonomist of baked goods.