Ack

I haven’t posted anything in ages, I know.  There is a lot going on right now that’s keeping me away.  Work on the house, work at work, and a couple of top secret items I can’t talk about just yet. 

And, yes, I know it’s lame to reference a top-secret item without actually giving up the info, but I just can’t yet, okay?

Thing I can talk about, though, include, the fact that a man named Dickie is currently working on fixing the render and repainting the front of my house, following which he will fix our hallway so it looks nice and also fix the walls in our much neglected second bedroom.

Jeremy is in Bangladesh right now for work.  But he gets back very soon.

My grandmother has been moved from the hospital to a nursing home, where she will probably stay for the next few months as she recovers from her recent surgeries.

And it’s October, a month I have been dreading, because October marks the anniversary of the month I spent in Michigan last year when my dad was in the hospital.  It feels impossible that this year has gone by so quickly and so slowly.  I’ve got plans in place to get through November (NaNoWriMo , lots of time off work, Gillian Welch concert) but have made no contingencies for this month, which was kind of stupid of me.  Hopefully the building works on my house and prep for NaNoWriMo will keep me distracted.

And on a more frivolous note, Oliver tried to eat my toes yesterday morning.  Apparently rather than sleeping I should have been unlocking his cat flap and letting him out into the world.  My cat can really be a jerk sometimes.

 

Do not want

I’m too lazy to even make a list today!  How pathetic am I?   Answer: very. 

My motivation has just disappeared. I don’t want to do anything except eat cookies and watch tv.  Except maybe take a bath while reading a book.  But not a book with any cultural value, oh no, I only want to read tawdry pulpy novels of very little worth, thanks.

This lack of motivation would be okay if I didn’t have butt loads of stuff to do, but I do have butt loads of stuff to do.  Butt loads of butt loads, even.  I have a house to clean.  A bookshelf to move.  Work that I get paid to do to do.  Novels and short stories to write.  Sweaters and afghans to knit.  An allotment to weed.  Dr’s appointments to attend. Dishes to wash.  Yoga to yog. Laundry to be sorted and done.  You know, stuff!  Butt loads of it! 

But I get home from work and all I want to do is nothing.  This is no good.  I need to get out of this rut of nothingness.  But how?

What do you, dear reader(s), do when you are feeling demotivated and lame?  How do you get yourself off your ass and actually get the butt loads of stuff done?  I need your help, because every time I start to make a plan my brain shuts down and that is no good as I really need it to turn on and never shut off until my house has all those cartoon clean sparkles glinting off of it and my laundry is all folded and pressed and there are three books with my name on the spine sitting on my bookshelf and all that other stuff I said up above that I am too lazy to list again.

Jumble sale

1. Do you know how you can tell I’m feeling lazy?  I do a list of unrelated items on my blog.  Other clues include, but are not limited to: Spending all day in bed reading trashy books, ordering curry for dinner and eating the leftovers for the next three days, and the state of my kitchen.
2. Somebody found me by using the following search term yesterday “is sal paradise a reliable narrator?” and my answer to you, intrepid internet surfer, is NO Sal paradise is absolutely 100% not a reliable narrator.  He spends the whole book hopped up on goof balls for goodness sakes!  Not to mention all that cheap wine.  Seriously, dude is not to be trusted at all.
3. Vienna, I have lots to say about the trip to Vienna, but will be brief as I don’t have my photos handy.  It was a really surprising city.  I expected it to be pretty and sort of cold (not temperature wise but attitude wise).  I was right in the first case and totally wrong in the second.  Vienna was one of the friendliest and most comfortable cities I’ve been to.  People were super nice and helpful, the city itself was very manageable and easy to get around.  And, of course, it is beautiful.  Really breathtaking at points to be honest.  I would like to go back, maybe in Autumn or Spring and see more of it.
4. While we were in Vienna we went to the neighbourhood where Jeremy’s Bubbie grew up.  The door to her old building was open so we went in and poked around.  Then we walked down her old street to the square where more of the family lived and then poked around the park, Augarten, nearby and imagined her and her sister strolling through and checking out boys.  Of course maybe the two of them were more serious-minded than all that but I choose to think that even if they were they still had the occasional frivolous stroll through the park and giggled under chestnut trees together.
5. November is officially the month of action.  I’ve already requested a bunch of time off so I can make a serious attempt at completing NaNoWriMo.  I want this to be the year of the first draft (you know like I’ve been saying every year is the year of the first draft, but this time I mean it).
6. On that note, if anyone wants to form a posse of support, cajoling and critiquing for November, please give me a shout.  Yes, writers do work in a vacuum, but it also helps to know there are other people in similar vacuums toiling away at the same time as you and with a similar goal.
7. The allotment has been much neglected due to reasons involving travel and arthritis and laziness.  This week that must change.  Our tomatoes are almost ready.
8. Arthritis is a demon.  I’m taking a new medication (sulfasalazine) and am only on a half dosage so far and it makes me feel horrible.  Nausea and headaches and super itchy skin and, so far, it’s not helping the arthritis even a tiny bit.  That will take 3 months at full dosage.  Apparently once I make it through the first month and move myself up to full dosage it should get better, right now it just makes me feel miserable.  But I’m pushing through and doing my best and trying not to bitch TOO much (I still bitch about it a little though, maybe more than a little even).
9. Oliver’s face is back to a normal size although he does still have a sad shaved patch.  This has lead to many off colour jokes that I will not repeat here.
10. I promise not to be so lazy next time and to provide a real and proper update about something interesting and funny, scout’s honor (insomuch as someone who never made it past Brownie in the Girl Scouts can give a scout’s honor).

(re)focus

I’m feeling grumpy and out of sorts lately.  There are a variety of reasons for this.  Some of these reasons very boring and mundane and not worth going into.  Other reasons are kind of big and worthwhile and almost cosmincally large (almost typed comically there) and not appropriate for this space, at least not yet.  I’m sure some of these things, both big and small, will come up later, just not now.

In the meantime, I’m thinking it’s worth focussing on some good things to bring my head around to a more positive and genial place.

1. Yesterday in my yoga class I was able to put my hands in prayer position behind my back!  First time ever that I’ve been able to do this.  It was awesome.
2. I thought I’d lost a new dress and skirt that I bought on Saturday, but just now I located them for sure.
3. The allotment is doing really well.  We’ll have runner beans and peas and carrots and tomatoes and cucumbers and radishes soon.
4. The radishes will probably be first.
5. We already have zucchini!
6. Tending the allotment always makes me feel like the witch in Rapunzel with all of her delectable home-grown produce that tempted Rapunzel’s biological pregnant mother and caused all the trouble.
7. I always think that witch gets kind of raw deal, I mean, yeah, asking for a baby in return for stolen veg is sort of disproportionate, but Rapunzel’s folks shouldn’t have been stealing her stuff in the first place.  I bet if they’d just gone round to hers and asked nicely things would have turned out much better for everyone.
8. Tonight we’re going to see Jeffrey Lewis at the Lexington. He’s pretty awesome.
9. We’re going to Vienna the weekend of the 12th
10. Jeremy’s uncle gave us the address of the apartment where Jeremy’s Bubbie Susie grew up.
11. Also there’s a butterfly house in Vienna.  I love butterfly houses.
12. Our dining room in clean and tidy for the first time in approximately 3 years.  Let’s not talk about the second bedroom.

 

Out of Order

This week my brain is not working.  Despite the coffee I’ve been pouring down my throat everything feels like it’s running at half speed.  I’m distracted by next week’s  flight plans and my short layover time at Dulles Airport (is an hour enough time to get to my connecting flight?  I DON’T KNOW) and my recent plan change regarding checking luggage as a result of the short layover time.  The plan change being that I will not be checking luggage, just to be safe.  Also worrying about Jeremy remembering to get someone to watch Oliver if he (Jeremy, not Oliver) has to travel while I’m away, and worrying that if Jeremy does DIY work on the house while I’m away there will be no one to spot him if he uses a ladder and what if he falls and hits his head?  Nobody would know for days!

All this compounded by a fruitless trip to Zone 6 (ZONE 6!!) for work that was a massive waste of time, and a house that still refuses to clean itself and I am just feeling . . .  I don’t know, sort of off kilter and not quite functional.

Perhaps I need more coffee

Bank holiday underload actually

So Jeremy had a mad case of the man flu this weekend and I was feeling pretty grody myself so we stayed in.  Wandered around the house pathetically in our jim jams and did not do even half the things we were going to do.  By Tuesday we were both feeling healthier so we did get a start on the fence building (with supervision from Ivan, the kitten who lives 2 doors down, and Oliver, the bossy cat who lives with us) and that project os about 70% done.  We just need to reset a couple arris rails, that’s right I know what an arris rail is! And attach the rest of the feather boards, that’s right, feather boards!  I’m a DIY maniac, me.

We should have it all completed on Saturday.  Very exciting huh?

Days go by

Tomorrow I have to wake up at 4:30 to get the bus by 5 to get my niece to the airport by 7 to get her flight back to Detroit by 9.  She’s staying up all night, I am going to try to catch a few hours of sleep though since I will still be working for a half day on Wednesday. 

Tonight we’ll be seeing The Lion King.  Today she’s checking out Oxford Circus and will probably spend the last of her vacation cash at Primark where all the clothes are well cheap, yeah.

In a week she starts university which is weird, because a week ago, maybe two, she was only about 5 and now she’s this nearly grown up person.  That said she is a nearly grown up person who bought a Pokemon poster on Saturday (and a Robert Pattinson poster too.  Are there support groups for relatives of Twi-hards? Something like alanon but related to sparkle vamps?) but still nearly a grown up!  Very scary. 

It’s been fun having her around and hearing her thoughts on everything from our hometown to the evils of wearing black and navy blue together.  Of course I am also looking forward to being able to walk around the house in my undercrackers again but that’s how I feel whenever I get to the end of having a houseguest.

The rest of the week will be spent working and catching up on sleep and maybe some debauchery at the weekend.  But probably not too much.  I need a rest after touring all the most crowded corners of London.  Also I’d like to spend some time with Old Blue the typewriter while I listen to the Cyndi Lauper greatest hits double CD I just bought (and maybe the new Arcade Fire and Janelle Monae too).  And maybe I’ll make waffles again.  I’m getting pretty good at making waffles these days.  But I might just go out for a fry up.  That involves less cleaning.

A simpler life

I keep thinking I want to simplify my existence.  You know, have less crap in my home, make more of my own food, grow things in my garden, sew, knit more, make jam.

Don’t ask me why or how I got this idea, but jam making has always seemed like the most domestic thing you can do to my mind.  10 years ago this would have put it solidly at the bottom of the list of things I wanted to spend my time doing.  But now, it just sounds nice.  Like meditative nice in a way that domestic chores can only truly be if they aren’t born out of necessity.  The choice to make jam is the thing.  I don’t need to do it as the only way to preserve fruit through the winter, like a pioneer would. 

But sitting here in my privileged city based world, with grocery stores around the corner I seem to have developed this desire to become more connected to the process of creating the things I consume.

All that said, I don’t know how practical this desire is.  The fact is I can barely muster the energy to look through my post when I come home from work.  My house gets cleaned on a quarterly basis (if it’s lucky).  And I just tend to sit in the middle of all this sloth talking about all the things I want to be doing without ever actually doing any of them (with the exception of some intermittent knitting).

So I’m not quite ready to start making jam yet.  First I need to get my home in order so it can be an appropriate place to make jam and bread and set aside the necessary space for other endeavours.

But how do I do that?  How do I get out of my current habits of poor housekeeping and negligent benevolence in the garden?  I keep hearing it’s all about making it a habit and staying on top of the little things, but seriously, about the only habit I’ve managed to develop since I was 18 was smoking, and I never even managed to get that up to a pack a day like any of the truly respectable chain smokers in my peer group.

How do other people manage to stay on top of this stuff?  And how do you get out from under it in the first place?