Post-Thanksgiving post

Also known as: Facebook, Twitter and Plurk are interfering with blogging! Guilty as charged, man. I am totally updating my Facebook, Twitter and Plurk pages way more often than this blog! It's just too easy. With the others you can just write a one-liner to say what you are doing and you're done. With this, there's a little more pressure to construct a finely-crafted piece of personal literature, which, lately, I have little time for, especially since it's a big holiday month. It just seems to get way busier this month, I don't know why. So, I apologize for not posting much.

A tiny bit of Thanksgiving-related content. The rest is ranting content. So yeah, we went to my brother's house this Thanksgiving. I had been to North Carolina previously, but not anywhere near my brother's town, so this was the first time seeing his house. Let me just say I am thoroughly embarrassed and a little more than slightly jealous because my brother and his wife have been living in their house almost exactly as long as we've been living in our house, and their home is fully furnished! Sure, we have a couch and a leather chair in the living room as well as other random pieces of furniture appropriately distributed about the house, but each room is incomplete as far as the decor. At my brother's house, each room seemed to be a furniture showroom that spoke, and each room said to me, this is what your house could look like if it were furnished. It was comfy and homey. A homey home. They even had their Christmas tree up and the fireplace on! Now, I have had friends and family over to our house here in Georgia, being only slightly embarrassed at the sparse decor and clean laundry sitting in piles on the plastic-covered carpet of my oldest kid's room, and the two fireplaces which, because of their non-use are now glorified gravel holders. But I got over it long enough to have people over. I sucked it up. I let people look at my closets as I gulped. There's worse things than this, I thought. It takes time, I told myself, to furnish a house. It takes time to get the furniture you want. After all, it took 12 weeks for that leather chair we have (which I love, but 12 weeks!?!?) to arrive. It takes time to get anything done -- let alone furniture shopping -- with small children in the house. After seeing my brother's house, I thought to myself: I just don't ever want to have people over at the house again until it looks like a freaking furniture showroom. But that, dear friends, is not realistic. Who knows how long it'll take before we can get furniture. We thankfully have a roof -- a beautiful roof -- over our heads, but do we have a nice homey home like my brother and his wife? I just don't think we're quite there yet. With that sad, but all-too-true thought, I remembered some of my mom's advice to my aunt upon hearing that her daughter's future in-laws (a.k.a. pretty rich people) could visit her small apartment "in the 'hood": Just make your house neat. It'll have to do.