Friday Fragments

Hosted by Mrs4444.

My mind isn't so much fragmented as mush at the moment, it's been kind of a long week, but I've fished out a few bits and bobs to share. For more end of week shrapnel head on over to Half-Past Kissin' Time!

*****

On Tuesday I had my 3rd singing lesson and my teacher said nice things to me. So I guess I'm not completely delusional and there might be some point to this exercise. Who knows, one day I might even be fit to be heard in public. I'm really enjoying the lessons and the practicing, if I practice when the kids are at home Tom often plonks himself down beside me and joins in.

*****

The first five e-ARC (electronic Advance Reader Copy) chapters of Lois McMaster Bujold's new Miles Vorkosigan book (due out Nov) are online at Baen. I've given in to temptation and started reading but I know I'm going to regret it when I get to the end and then have to wait.

*****

I'm also reading Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens and so should you. 

Mrs Darcy vs The Aliens is a slightly demented sequel to Pride and Prejudice, although it has been described more accurately as "not so much Pride and Prejudice's sequel as its bastard offspring following a drunken one-night stand with the X-Files."

*****

My 11 year old daughter has a friend staying over tonight. After dinner they watched a movie, then they took themselves off to bed and when I went at 10pm to tell them it was time for lights out I found the room dark and silent. Caitlin was still awake enough to whisper "good night" but only just. I'm not sure this is normal behaviour for 11 year olds, I'm pretty sure I'd have been going strong till at least 11pm under similar circumstances at that age.

*****

I have embarked on a campaign to get my house under control and I'm keeping myself on track with the project by posting my progress daily. Here's my decluttering for today:

The kitchen dumping ground, this is where all the stuff that no-one knows where it goes ends up. Plus there's the tupperware cupboard which, of course, explodes into chaos as soon as someone uses the third item since the last it was beaten into submission.

I decided that the first thing I should do was to alphabetise the spice rack. No, I don't know why that seemed important, but it did forcibly bring to my attention the fact that I have a habit of buying cloves and chili flakes as though they're going out of fashion.

Sadly the rest of the kitchen still looks rather more like the first photo than the second, but hey! there's always tomorrow.

Asking for help

This morning I went with my Mum to see the counsellor that she'd seen a few times when things had got a bit too much after she and my Dad parted company. We made the appointment a couple of months ago at a point when I was feeling very concerned about David, worried about my dad and Adam's mum and had begun to feel very much like I had when Tom was very young and Adam had been traveling every second week and I had ended up on anti-depressants for a while.

I'm a little less immediately worried about David at the moment, but everything else is pretty much unchanged and my mood has truly sucked of late. I've felt stuck. Unreasonably teary. Easily angered. Disconnected. Unable to cope with stresses that I would normally take in my stride. I look at my life and think "My life? It's pretty damn good really. So why do I feel so fucking awful?!" I don't think I've been much fun to live with recently, either for Adam or the kids. I do a lot of apologising for my state of mind. Definitely time to ask for some help.

So I came away from the appointment this morning with a recommendation for someone to take David to see for help with his anxiety, a whole bunch of useful ideas for managing Adam's mum's alcoholism and dementia issues, a request for a nice long list of blood tests for myself to take along to the pathologist, a script for the same anti-depressants that I'd had before (and had done the trick before) and a further appointment for myself with another psychiatrist in the same practice. (Sadly I can't keep seeing Mum's doctor, who was OMG just wonderful, because she's winding down her private practice.)

Mum and I then went to Open Day at the school. We were too late to see Tom playing his flute in the band because we went over-time at the doctor's but we saw Caitlin in the Senior Dance group and in the Choir. Classrooms were visited, lunch was eaten, library books were donated. Then, because we also hadn't had time on the way back from the doctor's to drop by my house for me to pick up my car, and Mum had left early to meet up with friends, the kids and I walked home in the sunshine. Which was nice.

Tonight I cooked a rather awesome even-if-I-do-say-so-myself Thai red chicken curry for dinner and Adam asked if I wanted to open a bottle of wine. One of the reasons I don't usually drink during the week is that when I'm tired all it takes is a glass or two to leave me feeling very woozy indeed and once that happens you can kiss goodbye any hope of me doing anything useful. So I felt I needed some outside input into the decision making process:

My tweeps are enablers:

I forgot to take a before picture, and I'd like to point out that Adam helped with the cellar decluttering, here's the almost after pic:

While I was finishing off that particular decluttering task Adam was downstairs helping Caitlin clean up her room. There are no before pics of that either so it may not be obvious from these shots that anything was achieved at all. But perhaps if I tell you I haven't actually seen that carpet in many weeks you'll have some idea.

Tomorrow, vacuuming!

Token effort

I kept falling asleep on the lounge with my laptop on my knee last night as I tried to slog my way through the stuff that needed to be done by this morning. I ended up going to bed for real at 4:30am after doing about 4 hours actual work and experiencing several unsatisfactory involuntary naps.

When I got up at 7:00am I was, as one might imagine, a little worse for wear. I then went to work for 4.5 hours (and finished the stuff that was urgently needed and had appreciative things said to me by my boss), came home and collapsed on the lounge for a while, levered myself back up (with a little help) to do the kid-taxiing run and then resumed lounge occupation when Adam came home to my rescue.

A little while later I once again hauled myself upright and went wandering the house, camera in hand, muttering "What can I do that won't take very long?"

The front hallway seemed a pretty good candidate:

A fish tank maintenance bucket, 2 cat carry cages, Adam's backpack, and several bags of Viking clothing later:

We've been stepping over the cat cages for 2 weeks. How stupid is that? All I had to do was take them downstairs and stack them in their spot in the laundry.

27th Down Under Feminists Carnival

The 27th Down Under Feminists Carnival is up at In a strange land. Deborah has done a stellar job this month (she had some practice being stellar last month too) and there's a veritable galaxy of links to follow leading to some truly fabulous reading.

So what are you doing hanging around here? Go read stuff!

Multi-tasking

Right at this very minute I am blogging, eating dessert and playing Star Munchkin with the family. Before doing this I did my declutter of the day while Adam cooked dessert, Tom practiced his flute, David cleaned up from dinner and Caitlin got changed for bed and put her laundry on.

The Enjo and stuff cupboard

and after...strangely roomy.

When I've finished blogging and one of the family has managed to kill enough space monsters to win the game I will be settling in to an exciting evening of doing about 5 hours work that until this afternoon I thought I had until Monday to complete. It now needs to be done by tomorrow morning.

Wish me luck, and coffee!

(I just got Squidulated and lost a level, but that's ok because I haven't got off level one yet anyway.)

The linen cupboards

I don't know why I thought this would be a quick job. Two hours I spent sorting through, re-folding and organising these cupboards. And that's without dealing with the random piles of stuff strewn around our bedroom and draped over the gym equipment. Oh well, it's better than nothing.

Before

After

What you can't see in those photos is that the larger cupboard also had a whole heap of stuff piled up on top of it and the top is now clear. Let's see how long that lasts shall we?

Less talk, more action

Today we began the first step in the process of getting our house under control and ready for renovations and, hopefully, extensions. We're starting by moving the communal study (3 computer desks) from its current home in one of the upstairs bedrooms to the room downstairs that has until now been Adam's study.

Adam's study is also the wine cellar and had been used as a storage space for some of our various hobbies as well. There was one point a while back when simply getting in through the door had become quite a challenge. Adam had already cleared a lot of stuff out and had got it back to the point where he could get to the desk and use it, but there was still a hell of a lot still to be dealt with. I should have taken before photos so you could get an idea of what this after photo really means but I think my blogging instincts are a bit rusty and it didn't occur to me until I was about to go get the vacuum cleaner.

The view from the door into the downstairs study.

We have 2 computer desks that will be sitting along the wall to the left, once we work out how to get the buggers down the stairs. They'll replace the enormous corner desk that used to be there and which is now stacked in pieces in the garage. It looks like we'll have to take the desks down the driveway and in through the garage. Which means we need to clear a path through the garage first. It's like dominoes, you can't start shifting stuff around in one place without every other part of the house having to give to make room.

Do you like the awesome carpeting job that was done in this room? That's how it was when we moved in 9 years ago, there's quite a few little treasures like that in this house, all things we decided not to worry about when we moved in because we were going to renovate and extend as soon as possible...

The view from the empty corner

Those racks are full of wine that desperately needs drinking, we keep going on wine tasting trips, finding wines we love and buying them at a rate something like 3 times the rate at which we, on our own, drink the stuff. We've been avoiding buying any more for a while now and are almost at a point where another wine region holiday would not be completely ludicrous.

I mean, look! That rack in this next photo is practically empty!

One corner still to be done.

But it can wait, Adam swears he'll get it all organised eventually. The missing door on the cupboard in the corner? Was missing when we moved in. Plus there's a chest of drawers in the cupboard that is jammed in so tight that the previous owners obviously couldn't get it out, and neither can we.

The third desk will sit beside the bookshelf on that blank bit of wall to the right. On both sides of the room there'll barely be enough room to get at the bottles in the wine racks beside the desks which will be irritating, but I'm sure we'll manage.

So there you have it, actual concrete progress along the path from chaos to order. My intention is to blog every day with something that moves us further along that path. I'll still blog other things too, so some days it might be as little as a quick hit with the results of a 15 minute decluttering, other days it will be on a grander scale. By the end of September* I hope I'll have shown you the downstairs study all set up, Caitlin's new bedroom in the upstairs study, the gym moved into Caitlin's current bedroom (and us using it regularly!) and the current gym space transformed into my own little oasis of sofa bed, TV, laptop and reading lamp just outside Adam's and my bedroom. I'll remember to take before photos for the rest of it too.

*Subject to painting, re-carpeting and installation of a new built-in wardrobe happening in a timely manner.