so this is a crazy week in the milinovich house. not only do we have the normal insanity of maintainting a livable household with a toddler and an infant, but we have several other things to attend to. tonight is our annual church conference, which means, among other things, that our district superintendent will be walking through the parsonage this afternoon. what this means for me is, well, not a whole lot. what this means for shannon, however, is cleaning up every dust mite, whether real or imagined. i believe she is cleaning away the potential of dirt. she is really into this cleaning thing. when i dust, i use my hand to brush away the most visible offenders. you know what i mean - the quarter-inch thick layer of dust on your dresser. this i wipe with my hand. shannon, on the other hand (no pun intended), removes everything from the dresser and uses a rag with some cleaning agent on it. this is far too much effort for me.
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its not just the church conference. as you know i have also been working on all of my ordination stuff, and i have been finishing it up these last few days. today i am sending it away to the conference office so i will be done with it. but that has meant alot of late nights and early mornings. and stress. and editing. and editing again. so that's been a fun part of the week.
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but its not just the church conference and the ordination paperwork. a long time ago we scheduled an open house for this sunday so that people from the church can come to our home and see the parsonage and what we've done with the place. it will be 3 hours of eating and entertaining, so, once again, the house must be free of each grain of dust. not only this, but shannon wants the entire house decorated for Christmas by then. and so it will be. we will go get our tree on saturday. she was up most of the night last night decorating and chasing off invisible dust particles. i was in bed. why? because i was exhausted. why was i exhausted? because i spent all afternoon and some of the evening removing guinness-level amounts of leaves from our yard. and i don't mean guinness the dark irish beer. i mean guinness the record book. i could seriously be in their book next year. all i had to do was call them and have them come to the house with a fancy record-capturing camera. i would lie in the leaves, like an autumn 'where's waldo?' and they would capture the breath-taking scene and save it for other leaf-owners to gawk at and be envious about. but no, that's not what happened. instead, i raked and blew and drug those stinkers for hours on end, placing them in the woods. as i moved them they mocked me in terrible leafy harmony: "we will blow right back on your yard in a few days. see you then!" it was miserable. but the lawn looked really good last night. this morning? not so much.
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but its not just the church conference and the ordination paperwork and the open house. in all of her infinite wisdom, shannon decided that she would host a pampered chef party tomorrow night. so she is cooking and preparing and shopping and buying things and going to the store which means that she has to open the door which means that millions of dust particles are flying into the house which means that we have to go through the dust-particle-elimination procedure once again.
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and so that is our week. advent is here, you know. a time of looking forward. a time of anticipating a future time when there will be peace and justice. advent is a time of hope. and so i am hoping. i am looking forward to a future time when there will be no more leaves to rake. no more leaves to mock me in their crunchy chorus. when they die, they just stay on the tree until next year when they turn green again. come, o glorious future, come.
greg.
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