Hostessing!

I'm putting on my Hostess hat this week!

Full disclosure: I am an awkward human being. I am bad at hugs. I don't know what to do with my arms when I dance. I smile when I get nervous, which goes over poorly when I try to express sympathy. And we never hosted much when I was growing up, so it's not in my blood.

But I really like hosting things, regardless of all this. And this week we're having people over to dinner THREE times!

Which is great, except that my house is pretty much always like this:

I just now noticed the cat in this photo. And yes, he's pretty much always like that.

So whenever we have someone over, I have to spend hours finding homes for all the clutter. It's exhausting, mentally more than physically, because I am also a bit of a hoarder. And today I just don't have that mental energy.

Don't go in the basement

For your own safety. The cat reigns down there, so it's all danderiffic, and there are a lot of shifty piles on the verge of collapse. And spider webs. We had a spider population, but they were all eaten by the house centipedes, so now just their webs are left.

Also, I'm totally about to hide the clutter down there, so please just stay upstairs if you visit and we can have coffee and wine and pretend that we have it all together.

It's going to be a wonderful time!

I dusted, I'm about to throw food in the crock pot, and I have three kinds of seltzer. We have a bar full of liquor - even if the bar is on an old desk. Roomba is vacuuming for me. I even cleaned the coffee table. There may be beard bits in the bathroom, but that is totally the Husband's fault, and I can never seem to clean them all up by the time he shaves again. We have multi-grain Tostitos because we are so hip (and the kids like them better).

But mostly, it's about good company

And after hanging out with a baby and Thing 1 and Thing 2 for days on end, it's super fabulous to have adult conversation! Come, join me, and see what it's like wine-and-dining with

-A Real Housewife of the North Shore

Fiona and I

Winter has officially arrived, with weekly snowfalls and frigid temperatures. It's one of the features of New England. And despite the fact that my car, Tres, performs only marginally better in the slick weather than my Ford Mustang did (before I totaled it in a way-too-dramatic fashion during a snowstorm), winter is a feature of New England that I enjoy. And by enjoy, I mean enjoy the New England way - that "I'll complain about it frequently but you'll never catch me moving to California" way.

The New England Way!

Winter is like a battle to win each year; something to come out of the other side of comparing chilblains and sore muscles from shoveling and swapping tales of how high the snow was and supermarket skirmishes for the last bag of ice melt in the store. Last year, we all got to share our tales of woe about ice dams and leaking roofs, and my lesser-used pots found a use collecting the interior rainfall.

Hopefully that aspect of winter stays in the past...

But this year has already reunited me with my now-familiar acquaintance, who I finally decided to name. She is Fiona, and she's a 60-year-old broad who lives in my basement. She's been here as long as the house itself, and she's growly and temperamental, an artifact of a bygone era who plans to live forever. And I'm cool with all of this, because she keeps us warm.

What's the name of your heating system?

Yes, Fiona is our furnace - or, more accurately, our boiler. She runs on oil and a measure of determination and is simple enough for even me to understand the basics of. She's got dials that do things and dials that have stopped working and sit there unused. The real secret of Fiona seems to be knowing which dials to trust. Last winter, we had ongoing issues with Fiona that the service team could not seem to figure out. Every time they came to the house, the heat worked fine. They'd leave, and Fiona would refuse to kick herself into gear. So during this time, I spent countless hours hauling my pregnant butt up and down the basement stairs, trying to figure out what Fiona SHOULD be doing, and whether or not she was actually doing it, and if not, why not... and never resolving the issue.

Fiona, doing what she does best.

During our plumbing adventure this fall, my father located a broken wire that he fixed, and that seems to have resolved at least one of Fiona's issues. She now fires up reliably. But every month or two, she hums new tunes, quite literally. This month she switched to a new one quite suddenly, which caused me to run up and down the stairs several times to check on her, but she seems to be doing just fine. The husband thinks I am insane, so it's okay if you think that, too.

Just keepin' on

Now that winter's arrived, Fiona and I are trying to kick it into high gear inside the house. I cleaned my desk and the junk drawer. Fiona got a new tune and kept the house toasty despite the single-digit temperatures. We're tight, because it's just us two girls during the day...  

I might need to get out more, but it's just so cold. If you want to brave the cold, you can come visit us; if Tres and I aren't running taxi service for Thing 1, Thing 2 or the Baby, I'll be here keeping Fiona company. I think she gets lonely down there in the basement.

-A Real Housewife of the North Shore

Post-Holiday Funk

Full disclosure: I am writing this post while drinking my coffee so that I can bravely tackle the Christmas lights next. Every year it's the same; the lights come down and they sit forlornly on my kitchen floor for days (sometimes weeks) until I get it together enough to carefully roll them up and put them away.

Insert lame joke about how they're hanging over my head here

Part of the problem is that I insist on putting them away in their original boxes. I've debated ending this practice, but that's just pushing the chaos of tangled wires to November, and I try to keep the Hanging of Lights Fun to a maximum. So every January 'tis the season for re-packaging hundreds of lights...

I think this is why people make New Year's resolutions. They're like mental coffee, spurring you into action in the dark days of winter when all you really want to do is curl up in front of a toasty fire with a blanket and slippers and sip something that warms you up from the inside. (Maybe this is just a Northeast Thing? I don't know if the same sentiment rings true if you live in Arizona.)

The gingerbread's been eaten, the lights are down - if not away - and the carols have all been wrung out of us. I somehow let New Year's slip by without making a resolution, and now I just feel purposeless. I've managed to be just good enough at being a Housewife that I can't dismiss continuing on in this fashion as an option. I don't really want to add daycare, after school care, and a 9-5 to my daily repertoire. But I also can't see myself being a Housewife for the next couple years, so it's going to have to happen at some point. Is it time to find a job, or do I refocus on writing, like I did in November? Can we afford to continue to have me stay at home?

For now, I'll resolve to write at least one post a week. Unless I get that job, because then I won't be "just"

-A Real Housewife of the North Shore