tabling the issue

It's that time of year again when Jennifer starts to very thoroughly clean the house so that it's all nice and pretty for when her Mom and brother come to visit for Thanksgiving.  When we're not having company she keeps the house pretty clean, but there is definitely a philosophy that anything that is in a pile is "cleaned up."  But when we're having people visit, Jennifer seems to decide that the piles around the house ought to be put away somewhere.

The major pile migration happens from the dining room table.  Most of the year Jennifer thinks the dining room table is where you keep the mail.  There are piles of magazines that she never finds time to read, piles of catalogs she's never going to order anything from, and piles of bills that would never get paid if it weren't for the wonders of automatic bank transfers.  Then there's the pile of "stuff that actually has to be dealt with."  But for Thanksgiving the table has to give up pile holding duty, because certain people seem to think it ought to be used for actual dining.

The other issue that comes up this time of year is that Jennifer starts to think that she should have better furniture in the dining room.  The table and chairs that we have are the ones that she bought right after college.  The table is perfectly fine, if a little small.  The chairs are not terribly comfortable, but they were the only thing she could find at the time that didn't cost a small fortune.  Then there's our "china cabinet," which we think was originally a bookcase.  We're about the 5th owners of this piece of furniture, and it's had something of a hard life.  The top is kind of warped b/c it got rained on or something at some point.  And the whole thing is a little wobbly because at some point one of the previous owners cut off parts of the legs in order to get it to fit through a doorway when they were moving.  Every time Jennifer opens the doors all the dishes in the cabinet rattle and clink and make her wonder if one day the thing is going to tip over and break everything.   And then there is the couch that we keep in the dining room.  When Jennifer bought the new living room furniture she fully intended to get rid of the old stuff.  But she couldn't move it by herself, so she stuck it in the dining room until she could get someone to help her.  Since she was getting rid of it, she let us use it as a scratching post.  It's also conveniently located under a window so it's one of our favorite napping spots.

So every year around this time Jennifer thinks that it would be good to have a regular size table for Thanksgiving.  But by the time she thinks about doing something about it, it's getting so close to the holiday that she knows if she goes shopping now she won't actually get the table until after Thanksgiving.  Plus, she'd have to move our couch, and we don't like that idea.  So, each year she thinks, "oh well.  Guess I'll deal with that next year."