it's 4 weeks till christmas ... you may now proceed to panic!

Day 1 of Christmas decorating is over... I think.
It was over 30 degrees C [ about 90F ] and in my storage shed it would've been well over 40 [ 100] so a large part of today was spent lugging stuff down to the house and then having a little lie down to recover before the next lot...and dusting... there was a lot of dust flying around. This was load number 8.

Now I don't do well in hot weather [ fibromyalgia doesn't help ] but it's my choice to decorate for Christmas. No one made me start today except my self set agenda.
Normally I know exactly where all the christmas boxes are, but the shed is in the middle of a major reorganisation. Spiffy new shelving has been acquired. It will be a model of neatness and a-place-for-everything-and-everything-in-its-placeness... but not at the moment. Anyway, at this point, all the boxes have been located [ I think ] and the verandah stuff is in place. I have staked out the ground level fairy lights... still hoping to con someone into climbing up a ladder and doing the rest :] Not sure who, but I didn't have lights the last two years and I'm determined to have them this year.
So
the rumpus room is substantially done ...except for the 2nd tree ...and the swags ...
and about 80 santas.
The christmas quilts are mostly piled up in the living room and the cats are helping: Oakley is providing the quilts with extra insulating properties by covering them in a thick layer of long ginger fluff and Sophie is wrestling several xmas trees and swags into submission just in case they look like making a mass break for freedom and the great outdoors. No one can accuse Ms Sophie of not helping the annual Christmas decorating effort.
The coffee mugs have been swapped for the xmas ones but the chrissie china is still up the top of the pantry. I don't get it down and into service until Dec 1.
The rest looks like a bomb site but that's normal at this stage
I take reference photos every year so that I have an idea of where to put most of it but of course nothing is static. There are new purchases to be fitted in, new quilts on the walls to be worked around. Some of the older stuff that looked ok last january now looks tired and worn out.
All this normally takes a week. Maybe 10 days.

You may have noticed by now that there is a teeny weeny obsessive component to my personality.


Edited later to add:
Went into the kitchen at about midnight to find a seething mass of about a million gazillion ants all over the benches. Now, I have to say, that even though where I live in the bush is inhabited by what seems like just about every known species of ant, I have probably had less than a dozen inside in the two years I've lived up here. Why I don't know. They just don't come inside... until tonight!
My brilliant powers of deductive reasoning are telling me it's gotta be one of the xmas boxes from the shed. So half a can of flyspray later, there are a million gazillion little anty corpses. Guess I'll find out tomorrow if I missed any.