Alternate title: I Gotta Lotta Problems with You People!

Thirteen grievances on Festivus:
  1. The string of lights second from the outlet on the Christmas tree decided to stop working and keeps all the other strings from lighting up... after the Christmas tree was fully decorated. So now there is one string of lights lit at the very bottom of the tree.
  2. I dreamed last night that our house was overrun by fleas. (random!)
  3. My mother sent one of those birthday cards that plays music a few weeks ago. This one has the Jingle Cats singing Happy Birthday... and my kids keep taking it out of the trash can when I'm not looking. How many times can one hear "meoooow... meow, meow, meeeoooow" set to music before needing to be institutionalized?
  4. Yesterday, I spent four hours cleaning the house just so I could feel like I'm not wallowing in filth and squalor for a change and today it looks like all my work has been completely undone.
  5. My skin feels like it might crack and peel off my body - apparently I've gotten used to the Washington humidity.
  6. Every time one of those "buy her diamonds to show her you love her" Christmas commercials comes on the television, my husband rolls his eyes and makes a "Pffffffsh" sound. (He is incredibly indignant about the jewelry industry and it's attempts at manipulation.) Me? What I want for Christmas is for him to stop making that sound.
  7. The Dormouse and I make Cake Balls to give to neighbors the other day. (Because I love saying "cake balls.") But I accidentally cooked the sugar out of chocolate when melting it, making the cake balls unacceptable for giving out to others, but not inedible. Since I don't let the kids have a lot of sweets, guess who's eaten most of them?
  8. The Small One prefers to communicate through non-stop whine alternated with long periods of screech, rather than signs or words.
  9. Despite the fact that The Large One has a vocabulary of several thousand words, she seems to prefer the Whine Method of Communication as well.
  10. I have some really good books that I wanted to read over the holiday but I can't get through a single paragraph without being interrupted.
  11. More than one year later, I'm still blaming my current dress size on "baby weight."
  12. My new favorite show, Leverage, requires me to actually pay undivided attention to the television from the first minute to the last... which is nigh impossible in my house.
  13. Molasses (I really hate that stuff)
  14. (special bonus Festivus Grievance) That the KoH taught The Dormouse to whistle.