I scheduled a 90 minute planning meeting for this morning, and I have NO INTEREST in running it! At least I only have to run half, but ugh. I'm tired of being in charge. I guess that's a sign about what I should look for in my next position, huh?

-t, my mother would routinely put presents in "safe" places and then forget where ... and sometimes about the present itself. Which is why I sometimes received sweaters for my birthday (in May) and odd stuff in December. I think it's a family failing - I was in the closet and found a shawl and warm scarf I'd forgotten about and my grandmother once put her engagement ring in a "safe" place and never found it again.

I put my dad's Christmas gift someplace safe one year, and spent a goodly part of Christmas morning tearing my room apart trying to find it. I did, eventually.

I tore up my house Monday night trying to find the gift card I had gotten for my sister and then put in a "safe" place. My roommate was like "you can probably call them up and find out if it's been used or get a new one" and I was like "no, I know it's either here SOMEWHERE or I managed to throw it out thinking it was junk mail because it was in an envelope!" Luckily I eventually found it.

Our house is so small that the only place I can "hide" presents is my closet. So that works out fine, because I'd probably lose them if I had more places they could be hidden.

This seems like the time to mention my trick of having a Word doc on my computer titled "Where I Put Stuff". This is why I know where my birth certificate is, among other things.

(For several years after I moved in with Tim, I also had a Word doc named "Tims toilet paper preference," because he's on Team Over, and -- shockingly, even to me -- I have ZERO preference for how the TP is hung. So I never remembered which way to hang it when I put a new roll on. Now I do, but for a while there, it was World War TP in this house.)

Toddson, my mom did that so much that it's traditional. Also traditional was the digging a present out of the stocking to hear "Oh, shit, give that to your sister."

I was a terrible present-shaker and peeker as an early teen. The year I was 12 or 13, my mother decided that she would label all the presents with false names. She was reading the Palace Walk series of novels by Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz at the time, so everything has the names of characters from that series. I turned out to be Khadijah.

he he ... have you seen the ad from Petco? it's Christmas morning and a boy is checking out his present, shaking it vigorously, and his parents are sitting on the couch watching. The mother asks, the father says he wanted a guinea pig ... and you see the kid bashing the present against the floor. The mother looks worried, the father says he thought it would be good for them to pick it out together ... and the kid's overjoyed to have a gift card for a guinea pig (no guinea pigs were harmed in the production of this commercial).

Has anyone else seen this? photos of animals fished out of the deep sea - WARNING - one picture is of an enormous marine Jillifont!

The one year I went snooping to see my gifts, I found a book I was super excited to get! And then Christmas came and went, and I didn't get the book. OK, no big deal, it must have been for my birthday. Next day, my birthday comes, NO BOOK. They forgot to give it to me, but I couldn't say anything because then they'd know I was snooping. I got it eventually.