Clump #277: Fifteen minutes of list-checking and strategizing; day five of seven-day holiday pre-crunch challenge.

Today I performed the de-clumper’s equivalent of a douse of cold water to the face: set the timer for fifteen minutes to analyze “the list.”   Confronting my holiday to-do list is now feeling like looking straight at the sun.  Ouch!  Avoid at all costs.  But I did it and feel much, much better.  I don’t mean to scare you, but we’re now in the holiday season … no more smug sense of doing things way early.  It’s time to dive right through.

(As an aside, the photos above and below were taken at Longwood Gardens.  Forgive me, I can’t stop.  Also, If you want to impress a slightly jaded sixteen-year old, tell her/him to smell a jasmine flower, like the one above.  Oooooh!  I wish I had a scratch and sniff app here.)

Speaking of a certain teenager, who I don’t believe reads this blog, I will add a section on “dumb presents I have purchased.” First, a bubble calendar for someone who loves to pop bubble wrap and might have a little problem managing time.  You pop a bubble for every day of the year.  The only question is whether, like eating potato chips, you can stop at one.  I might have to include more bubble wrap to quell that urge. Have you ever seen anything so ridiculous?  Packing bubble wrap in bubble wrap?

Well, maybe more ridiculous might be the gift of soap-on-a-rope I gave to my husband last Christmas, documented in previous posts.  It served its purpose for several hilarious moments.  Now we realize it has an obvious fault line where the rope is, or was.  Who ever thought this was a good idea?  And the soap is not very good.  So … sorry, but goodbye.  The soap-on-the-rope is broke.

In conclusion, aim for useful gifts, but, if not, make sure they’re worth their weight in fun.