Living with someone is never easy.

Living with someone who doesn’t have the same standards of courtesy and common decency is extremely taxing.

For example, I had been on a family vacation to Australia. I had a wonderful time with my family – and my partner even came along. The holiday was time well spent, as I have not seen much of my parents in the past few years and my partner enjoyed being out of the country for the first time.

During our Australian visit, we took a tour of the Yarra Wine Valley, as my parents (and my partner’s parents both enjoy wine). Along the route, we stopped at several small vineyards, most of which do not have American distributors. I enjoyed some fantastic wine and even learned how to taste distinct flavors. (Let me just tell you, tasting pepper in a cabernet sauvignon was a REAL shock!)

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At any rate, I purchased a bottle of crisp, oaky white wine from a small family-owned vineyard. It was an AMAZING bottle! And a lovely reminder of how much fun I had with my family and my partner that day.

Upon returning to the States, I placed my bottle of wine on the wine rack in my apartment. The wine rack usually holds olive oil and a pepper grinder. My household doesn’t usually consume wine, but favors beer and mixed drinks. Occasionally, one might find a cheap bottle of wine on the rack, but not often. At any rate, after I placed the bottle on the rack, I pointed it out to my roommate and said, “Hey, this was a fantastic bottle of wine. I am going to give it to my partner’s parents as a wedding anniversary gift.” My roommate agreed that was a fine idea.

Not long after that (we’re talking less than a month), I woke up one morning feeling a bit thirsty, so I went to the refrigerator to get the water pitcher. BUT WHAT DID I SEE?!?!?!?! A VERY, VERY, +VERY+ EXPENSIVE BOTTLE OF UN-IMPORTABLE ++OPENED++ PARTIALLY CONSUMED, AUSTRALIAN WINE SITTING NEXT TO THE WATER PITCHER!!!!!!

At that point, it was about 6am. My roommate had been out the previous day consuming mass amounts of cheap alcohol (as my roommate is wont to do on weekends) and was probably feeling particularly hung-over that morning. I knew my roomie was in bed and probably not exactly awake. So, I screamed at the top of my lungs several profanities, which I strung together in a most unmannerly way and punctuated each phrase with a guttural scream. I am quite sure each screamed punctuation pierced through my roommate’s head. I felt much better after that and I am not sorry I gave my roomie a severe headache.

Now I have to go shopping for another present to give to my partner’s parents.

It will never be comparable.

And I could just KICK my roommate in the shins. Hard. REALLY HARD.

It’s coming up to the end of the year and I’m starting to look back on what I’ve accomplished during 2007, and have I done all that I hoped I would.  Fat chance!  Well there are some areas where I have done really well, especially in the professional field where I’ve now managed to create a nice little freelance niche and finally I’m starting to get paid for my efforts.  Ok, so there’s still some work to do in that area in terms of increasing the financial reward for my work, but it’s coming along nicely. 

My boys are doing well, developing more or less as they should into little people.  Neither of them can read but one knows his alphabet and the other is starting to read short words.  Both of them are verbally bi-lingual and both can count to the age appropriate amounts in both languages.  They can even put their laundry where it needs to go – this is probably one of my major accomplishments of the entire year!  I’m still happily married to my partner so I guess that part of life is also going well!

Where the wheel seems to fall off my achievement wagon is in the self-improvement area, particularly the weight lose and taking care of self bits.  I have lost some weight this year, more than any other year, but still nowhere near what I’d hoped to.  In the rundown to Christmas I have no illusions of losing more weight, instead I’m just going to try and do the best I can not to gain weight and put the weight loss dream on hold until the New Year.  As far as taking care of myself is concerned, I think that’s a pretty big failure and something I must address in the New Year.  All of these self-improvement books and programmes telling parents to put themselves first are all very well, but they do make those of us who try but always seem to manage to still come last when it comes down to how much time is left for how much needs to be done feel like we’re doing a lousy job.  Next year I swear I’m going to find time to put make sure my socks match every morning and start to feel like a professional person should, instead of dragging a comb through my hair as I zip up one jacket and push two kids and a partner out the door every day!

Ok so I know they don’t have anything against me personally, it’s more of general hatred of parents!  Nor is this financial destruction of parents confined to Disney (but in my case, Disney is a major offender!)! Yesterday I was out Christmas shopping and as the mother of two little boys I was obviously wandering around a lot of toy stores, Christmas wish lists in hand.  

My attention was grabbed by some pretty faerie dolls and some glitzy pink princess stuff, but unfortunately nothing anywhere close was on the lists – but I did note a rather nice collectable Barbie that I thought would look nice in my collection and thought that if my funds lasted that far, perhaps I could treat myself to a Christmas present this year.  After-all I reasoned, the lists aren’t too long.

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Mental note to self, financial cost of items is not relative to length of list!  I soon realized that merchandisers have turned Christmas shopping for kids into a nightmare.  Now I love Christmas, I love the tinsel and the carols, I even love the shopping and wrapping.  But I draw the line at paying £10 for something that costs £5 if it isn’t associated with a movie or TV programme.  Problem is, when it’s on your child’s list in blue crayon and underlined 3 times – drawing the line is a fantasy and you pay the £10.  I wonder if merchandisers have children.  I wish them at least a half dozen so they get the message about what their marketing does to stress levels on a parent struggling to make Christmas wishes come true on a fixed and limited budget!

I wandered through aisles and aisles of cars and trains picking up this, putting down that and eventually realized that I wasn’t going to get the 2 major items on the list from that store so bought what I had and trudged to the checkout.  There a non-cheery assistant shoved my purchases in a bag and demanded the right amount of money whilst mumbling that she was too busy to check with another one of their branches if they had the missing items I was looking for in stock, and ignoring the way I wished her a merry Christmas through clenched teeth!

Three stores (not connected to the first store – if they can’t be bothered to make a call, they aren’t getting my £50!) later I had another beef with the merchandisers.  Why is it necessary to make a big commercial ding-dong about an item, and then have it in short supply?  Huh?  If you’re going to spend all that money on advertising, then at least spend the money to make sure there’s enough of them around!  I did get one item eventually, thanks to one helpful store ringing around several branches and locating me one in a nearby town, and the other, well that’s going to be left for another day when perhaps I’ll have found my Christmas spirit which is currently lost in a pile of receipts in a bag in the closet!  Oh, and unless there really is a Santa, the Barbie doll doesn’t seem to have any chance of coming my way any time soon either!