It's clean

The Fancy living room and the dining room are clean. All surfaces cleared and all surfaces (including windows) cleaned and/or polished.

Well, not the floor. I can't clean the floor tonight because I am unable to vacuum in the living room at night. Just a little bit annoying.

There's no overhead light in the Living Room, and the wall outlets are very sparsely distributed. This means that even though I plug in lamps where ever I can, half the outlets are taken up with the stereo system, and the room is dim and dark. Not romantically dim, just annoyingly dim.

I've lived here since 2002 and I have learned my lesson regarding vacuuming this room. If you vacuum while any of the lights are on, blammo, tripped breakers. Not just the breakers in the Living room of course. The stove in the kitchen trips too.

So no vacuuming after 3:00 pm.

I know what you're going to say next -- That sounds dangerous! Have an electrician come in to check the problem!

Yeah, well, I did. Except he came during the day, and even with my plugging in a vacuum, two fans and turning on all the lights, nothing tripped. Great.

However, when he went outside to look at the main box, he found that our service was coming from the street to the meter illegally. (Or it was set up so that you could splice the house off the meter and never get charged for electricity. Too bad I didn't know about this sooner!)

So instead of fixing the living room problem, we had to move out for three days while he ripped the service, redid some odd conduit stuff in the garage and replaced our main panel.

Three thousand dollars, not including the trip to Disney land we took to occupy ourselves. And look, I still can't vacuum my floor after dark.

Have I mentioned how much I hate this holiday?

Here I sit in my decluttered, dusted and reorganized living room, and I should be patting myself on the back for my work. Instead, I'm looking at the dust on the floor and thinking, "I'll never be able to get back to this tomorrow. I've still got three major rooms to go before Tuesday!"

Really and truly, it would be so great to spend one holiday one time doing something I like to do with people I actually want to be with. Or by myself. God, that would be amazing. A couple Negronis, a turkey dinner, a hotel room with a fluffy comforter, and me. Just me.

The vacuum can stay at home.