Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Spending Time with Henry

I'm going to have a go at one of those liberating, rambly posts that I used  to enjoy writing.

It's 00.35 and I should have been asleep 1 hour ago because my body is fighting a cold virus (quite successfully) and I am unable to function mentally right now. Text looks wrong, I can't string proper sentences together and I keep forgetting how to spell halfway through words.

Today, as with yesterday and the day before, I spend every single free moment of my life cleaning the house. My birthday party will be on Saturday and I have friends arriving from Thursday onwards and basically sleeping in EVERY single room in the house. This means that the spare room, to which all of my sewing and knitting paraphernalia has been relocated over the course of about two years had to be CLEANED OUT. This took me an entire season and a half of Peep Show to accomplish, and even then it wasn't/isn't done. I am quite proud of myself for managing to organise all my fabric and wool. It's quite a feat. I should really take a photograph.

Then there's the spare front room, into which all of my clothes, books, jewelry, junk, stationary, crap, bits and things had been transferred at Christmas so that my brother and sister in law could have my bedroom. Happily that is tidy now, despite having Lucy on Skype for a few hours while I repeatedly cried "What am I doing?! What am I doing? I don't know what I'm even doing!" because the enormity of my task was just ridiculous.

Tomorrow, I will clean my bedroom, the bathroom, the hall, downstairs and put the Christmas decorations away.

And so, my friends, I have once again come to these conclusions:

1: I have TOO MUCH BLOODY STUFF
2: I don't understand punctuation well enough
3: .......................


OH MY GOD I'VE GOT AN OVERDUE LIBRARY BOOK AND IT IS STRESSING ME THE FUCK OUT.

Tuesday, January 4, 2011

BongBong

Usually at this time of the year I'm all excited about the challenges of the New Year's resolutions. This year I'm finding it hard to get started. Apart from bringing the doggie for daily walks and trying not to swear, I've not had a chance to have a go of my other ones. The problem being that the Christmas period doesn't just suddenly stop on the first of January. My sister is still staying in our house and I know that if we have to go out to do anything (eg, buy food, meet a friend) it will inevitably take all day.

The first part of my day is pretty good. I get up, I eat, feed and walk the dog, come home, shower. Standard morning fare. But you can't just abandon everyone in the house to go composing in the music room. For one thing, in my house people will listen which is annoying and interrupt which is beyond annoying.

We were supposed to travel to Northern Ireland to visit a friend for three days but I just sort of put my foot down. (Very carefully...) I really do want to go visit Margaret but my run up to Christmas literally went like this:

CUMBRIA -> AMSTERDAM -> BERLIN -> EDINBURGH -> CHRISTMAS


I'm tired. And worse than being tired, I feel I'm behind on my actual life. Until I get some time on my own and space to get things done, I know I'll just feel panicked and stressed. I make a to-do list before I go to sleep every night for the next day and I find that I don't have the space to get anything on the list done. Time for piano practice has run out as I have a lesson tomorrow. Oh well. In at the deep end, I suppose.




It will be interesting to spend time with the woof on our own for the first time. My dad, sister and I were invited to lunch at our friends' house on Saturday. Their son-in-law just happens to be some kind of champion dog trainer and we just happened to have Millie in the car so we got a lesson in heeling and staying and sitting. We're also going to train her to poo/wee on command. (The word is "bongbong." You say it every time they go so they make the association. Amazing.)

I'M LOOKING FORWARD TO TOMORROW, YES, YES, YES!!!

A celebratory gif. My friend Jonny made this of us in the graveyard in Edinburgh:


lol @ Elaine getting hit with a snow ball on the right.