Company Christmas parties and Family Parties

Ah the week before Christmas and all through the land, duel events of torture went hand in hand. Ok, so no it's not that bad, but almost. So, I think I'll go in order for these things, so as to be a least confusing as possible.

Here we go:

Thursday Dec. 18: Hey would you look at that, it's my 5-month anniversary of being married, YAY! So today didn't go too bad at all. I was coming off a very good week of being very useful at work, at least I think so. My first real program worked, and the boss liked it. He gave me another project which he liked my initial design for. So things are going better on that front, and tonight, as a way to make up for the lack of a company Christmas party, the employees themselves got together and rented out a bar for 25 dollars a piece. So I head to the bar with the wife in tow, and it's at this very famous golf course. Everyone has a great time. The wife hears the "mintz" joke from Sergei, the big Russian guy I work with. The wings were fantastic, penne ala vodka not so great, but the wings, so great. Grumpy and Doc came, and it was fun to spend time with them in a more relaxed environment. Awesome was present, ans smelled like really bad Garlic still from his lunch. I ribbed him about it pretty good, and the wife him and me hung out most of the night. Grumpy joined us for dinner which I found very surprising, but it was enjoyable. The CEO dropped by and played LeftRightCenter with the techs and some gals from corporate. This is a silly dice game that appears to have no point, but they were drunk and playing a game, so of course it sounded like the superbowl was going on in there. I thought it was cool that the CEO dropped by. All in all it was a great night. I wish there had been dancing, but one can't have everything. It was such a relaxed atmosphere (cept from Grumpy in the only tie), and I really liked introducing my wife to everyone. The next day I got a bunch of compliments about her, naturally. We got home by 9, and were able to have a little fun before bed.

Slight back track. At lunch on the 18th, I discuss the upcoming weekend with Awesome at the cafeteria during lunch. These were my predictions for the coming weekend where we have to throw a party for my mom-in-law's 50th birthday.

A) My sister-in-law will be within 5 minutes of arriving sitting on the couch on her laptop, and watching bad reality tv. It's just her thing.

B) My wife being the optimistic person that she is, will approach everything we have to do with a great positive attitude. This will deteriorate slowly over the weekend until the realism of which I've tried to warn her finally comes to bear.

C) Mother-in-law will plan 16 hours of stuff to do in 8 hours.

Let's keep these in mind as we proceed, shall we. Moving on.


Friday: December 19: Ok, snow is predicted for today, 3-5inches starting at noon. Yippee.
So I head to work, making sure I have a scraper in my car just in case. Work was a joke today. While the upper management, and even the lower management had to make it look like this was a normal work day, no one was really working. Everyone was waiting until Noon, when the snow would start, and the "official" employee Christmas luncheon. This was the consolation prize we got for them canceling our official Christmas party at the Westbury Country Club. I can understand why they switched it to a catered event in the cafeteria, we did just have a massive layoff, and due to the recession, we're trying to save money. But I think that to at least raise the employee's spirits, have the big party. The cafeteria thing was not that great. There were more prizes, but I didn't win any. Most of them were crap anyway. The food however...was just bad. The penne ala vodka (I know, two days in a row right) was really good, but the turkey roll and mashed potatoes were just bad. They had apple and pumpkin pie which I did not partake of. Normally I would have tried the pumpkin, but it was store bought and looked really burnt. The ice cream was the only dessert I could eat, and it was really bad plain vanilla with no topping. NO toppings! I mean come on. You have a whole tub of ice cream, enough to feed 60+ people, and no toppings! I mean I know we're in a recession, but COME ON!

During all this "merriment", things between the wife and me become temporarily strained. This was because she kept putting off the buying of my mini-sister-in-law's BigWheel trike for like a week and half. Now I know she had finals, and work, and just a very stressful few weeks. I appreciate that, but the Friday before Christmas, and seeing the item sold out on Amazon which was my backup plan kinda threw me, and I may have been overly harsh towards her. Of course this wasn't exactly the weekend to do that with all she was dong and had to do, so it kinda put her in a funk for the first half of the day. This of course made me upset cause I don't like seeing her upset.

My company let us go at 1:30 to try and beat the traffic home. Well after taking a half-an-hour to get out of the parking lot (I didn't know that you needed to disable Electronic Stability Control in order to get traction going uphill), it then took me three hours to get home. On the way I stop and reconciled with the wife in the parking lot of her job. I returned home to see that my sister-in-law had arrived a night early. Interesting. So let's see

Laptop on couch: check
Really bad reality TV: check

Ok, prediction A) is correct.

The rest of the night is kind of a blur. I shoveled the walkway after a "where's waldo" search for the shovel. I then had to shovel AGAIN when the wife came home, cause the plow had buried our cars, and I figured that doing it then would be easier then doing it the next day. I was right, but it still sucked. My mom-in-law's BF brought over his new dog. While the dog is fun, and kind, could there be a worse weekend to be dealing with an unfamiliar animal in the house...*sigh*.

Saturday December 20th: So the wife and I wake up and head to Wal-Mart to purchase the trike. After the semi-lengthy chore of excavating her car (my car is still trapped), and this is with my excess shoveling, we head out. On the way we stop at 7-11 to get coffee and breakfast. That did not turn out so well. My favorite flavor of Cappucino there is French Vanilla. There was something wrong with that flavor today, and between my own and the clerk's attempts to fix it, we not only left without the coffee and went to starbuck's down the road, but really made a mess of the counter. I felt bad for the guy who had to clean that up, I really did.

So we get to walmart, and they are sold out of the Big Wheel, even after telling me they had it the night before. So we get her a similar trike. While we are there, we get some other stuff for the party, and then head home. When we get home, my mom-in-law is already in a tizzy. So we send her, the BF, and his dog away to get something to eat and relax. Once they were gone, then the wife and I went into overdrive mode, and cleaned everything. We moved furniture, cleaned around cat liter boxes, vacuumed things that hadn't been vacuumed in months or years. I mean super-duper heavy duty cleaning. For example, check out the before and after shots of the space.


<-Before After->










While we're doing this we're tangenting off into other things, and so the vacuuming isn't done when they come home with the dog. They took the dog so it wouldn't be traumatized by the vaccuum. Maybe I should have been ore diligent about the vacuuming, but it wasn't like i was slacking or anything. But immediately, my mom-in-law is up my ass, and then my wife chimes in with her. This got me so pissed off that I actually had to scream at them both to shut them up. When I got my wife alone, I then told her how much that hurt me. We've been working nonstop for two hours, and she started to chime in against me instead of coming to my defense. She agreed that it was wrong, and apologized. I was glad for that, cause that really stung emotionally for a moment there. So i finished the vacuuming, and even got to vacuum the back side of my computer. Here's how bad it was:

I know, I know, it's just just shameful. I really have to be more diligent with that. Anyway, so after all this I finally got to rest, the wife made Christmas cookies, MIL and BF shoveled the walk for tomorrow's guests, and SIL slept, then did nothing of consequence. The rest of the night was pretty standard. I felt better later on, and actually got the lights in the den up finally. Nothing like waiting till the last minute right. So I'm off to bed now, and hope that I don't get woken up too early, cause it's 5:30am, and I'm just heading to bed now. I just hope that my MIL will be able to deal with her office before the guests get here. She didn't even touch it today, and it was her main goal for the later half of the day (planning too much, I'm on a roll with the predictions).

goodnight everyone.