Prepare everything. Prepare the carpets, shore up the door-frames, disassemble the trampoline. Lock the cupboards, bolt the doors to the spare rooms, and make sure ALL the ornaments are up high.
That last one is mostly because my brother is going to be bringing his great dane- as if we needed extra large bodies on this house- but I guess with all the nephews and nieces getting older, we need to start preparing for Christmases with grasping little hands in the house as well.
And especially, above all, we need to prepare for Great Aunt Yelena taxing the air con to its limit. Air conditioning services are great, right? Thanks to the Central Cooling Authority we don’t even need to worry? Well, they haven’t met Great Aunt Yelena. Her body runs a few degrees hotter than everyone else’s, or so it seems. It’s like she constantly has a life-threatening fever, but has as much energy as a lady twenty years her senior. Touch the controls for the air con and she watches you like a chameleon settling both of its eyes onto a juicy cricket. Turn down the settings and she’s up like a truck when the air horn is blown, guilting her way out of any repercussions by saying she’s an old lady and she needs the room at just the right temperature…
One room would be fine, except she claims the main sitting room as her domain and that’s where we have to be to open presents and have the family times. So the air con is on full blast, we’re all shivering, and there’s Great Aunt Yelena, smiling like she’s lounging by the pool. Oh, you want to be the one to look up the best air conditioning repair in Canberra when you run the machine ragged? Of course not…we’re the ones hosting, it’s our house. It’s as close to a cold Christmas as we’re likely to get.
-Chris