Whinge, whinge, whinge.
It’s no good – I’m still feeling a bit down in the dumps. Last night I ended up ranting about lost dungarees (two pairs thereof), a lost hat (which I knitted, last winter, and which I’m very attached to, not least as it’s the first hat I managed which really worked, and it involved Noro yarn), general housework dudgeon, and the overwhelming feeling of never managing to finish anything.
To wit:
- housework;
- hunts for something-or-other I’ve misplaced;
- sorting out what the hell to do about my mother’s piano (currently being ‘rented’, where ‘rented’ = the rentee isn’t paying the money, and nor is she returning my calls, and I’m worried that when I do finally manage to contact her, she’ll tell me she doesn’t want the piano any more, which leaves me scrabbling around trying to re-home it, which is, frankly, a daunting prospect);
- the copy-editing I’ve got to do;
- the tax return I need to complete;
- the huuuuge list of crafty things which my brain tells me must be done if I am to attain the status of A Good One (mother, wife, general human being);
- the tiling I started weeks ago, which I’ve yet to finish because the next bit involves a tile cutter and I feel as if I need a longer stint at it than the small person’s snooze allows.
ARGH.
I just want to clear the decks, start again, have some energy, and I’m not really sure where to start, or why I’m feeling this so aggressively at the moment. The small girl is sleeping more consistently than she ever has, and generally life is good, if rather disorganised. We even came up with a solution to me ending up doing the grocery shopping every week (which gets a bit dull after a while); it involves Quercus going once every other week, and us getting a delivery of shopping in the off weeks. The irony? I haven’t sat down and done the ordering part, which means it’s not going to happen this week. It’s partly lack of time, but I’m aware that it’s also partly lack of enthusiasm – the time I do have free is very short, and largely in the evenings, when all I seem capable of is sitting, lump-like, on the sofa. I was going to say ‘all I want to do’ there, but the truth of it is that that’s really not the case; what I want to do is spring, gazelle-like, into action, a flurry of knitting, baking, creative, productive energy.
The small girl’s bedtime routine is fairly settled, but I am struggling to keep on top of it, to keep things on track, and she is going to bed probably a half-hour later than is ideal for her; we are not routine people in that this is a pattern which has been largely developed by her, and which we merely facilitate because it seems to suit her (and us, normally), but a half-hour is a big deal when you’re only twenty-six months old, and I feel shifty that her teatime often seems to be a scrabbling of frantic realisation that I have yet to start our dinner off, which means an even later meal than normal, and I just seem to be disorganised all the time. I want to sit down with her, and talk to her, perhaps while knitting, while she eats; I feel very strongly that it’s important that mealtimes are convivial, relaxed and communal. Don’t get me wrong: I am always in the room with her, and I do talk to her (and she to me, increasingly), but I am not able to give her my full attention because I’m normally surveying the three hundred things which still need doing, or which I’ve overlooked earlier in favour of a short stint online.
Our evening meal has slipped backwards so that we rarely sit down before eight o’clock, which, for me, means a very short evening afterwards, and a going to bed which feels hasty and anti-climax-like because I feel cheated of a Proper Evening, one in which Things Were Achieved. Also, increasingly, we’ve been sitting there, watching some load of rubbish on the Beeb’s iPlayer rather than eating at the table, and that normally means that we don’t clear up the kitchen after eating, and a daisy-cutter effect is thus encountered first thing in the morning, which doesn’t exactly set one up for the day, shall we say.
So, my plan is that today, when the small girl sleeps, rather than either sleeping myself (which, tempting though it is, doesn’t actually help my mood, really, and is so short as to be almost worse than not sleeping, sometimes), I will devise a cunning and rapid dinner for adult consumption, and I will have a tidy-up around the house as well as thinking of something creative to do with the small girl when she gets up (it’s very wet here today, so our default of going for a walk in the fields is probably not on the cards). Once that’s done, I will sit and cast on something knitting-wise; perhaps having started a project, it will seem easier to pick it up and get on with it in the evenings.
I am also declaring a fatwa on both Facebook (which in lots of ways I abhor) and shitty televisual programmes; after all, we got rid of our TV for just this reason, and both felt much happier in its absence. It’s so easy to waste your sodding life away while sitting there, watching some bloater cooking something you’re not remotely interested in, for someone you’ve never heard of, in a restaurant the prices of which you find morally offensive, or to read the profile of some friend-of-a-friend you’ve either never met or can’t actually recall either way while pondering their intense love of poodle crochet classes and upscale wheelbarrow decorating. In short, why am I doing this? This is not what life should be about. It’s not a lesson I want to teach the small girl, and it’s certainly not helping me or Quercus. It’s procrastination on a scale I’ve not encountered since my PhD days, when whole days passed with only a sense of increased desperation to show for them, and when I came to realise that if I don’t do things, I only feel worse for it. And if I’m not happy, our whole house suffers for it: the cooking gets crapper (with attendant guilt), the washing mounts up, the bedtimes get later, and poor Quercus gets that slightly hunted look which speaks of ‘she cannae take nae more, Cap’n – she’s goin’ee blow!’.
So, today, I will rip that sodding plaster off instead of picking nervously at the edges, and by god, I will take control of things, and get the fuck on with them. No pissing about online (and no, blogging, which has a tangible and cathartic result, does not count), and no sitting there feeling sorry for myself, and no despairing over The State Of This Fucking Place. Just progress, and creativity, and thus Ordnung.
And you? What are your frustrations in life at the moment, and how are you going about overcoming them (or procrastinating your way around them)?
This morning finds Devon drizzling and grey; predictable, of course, given that we are hoping to go off adventuring tomorrow. Having had three weeks or so of hard work, something involving a pootle, tea and a scone and a walk somewhere other than the fields or woods on our doorstep is called for. Deluge notwithstanding.
Anyway, recent activities have included the acquisition of a reclaimed pine table for our kitchen, which genuinely feels like a kitchen now, and which has really changed the way we’re living in our tiny house to an extent I hadn’t anticipated. It’s so nice to have space for the small girl to toddle about the place without having to think about table saws and screwdrivers as potential weapons in tiny hands. We’ve even got space for a rug where she can sit and explore some of her recent haul from her grandma; she is loving the extra space, and we are breathing out, collectively.
While he is out, I am reuniting with
Right. Knitting calls, as does the sewing machine, and, to my shame, an online episode of something terrible. Oh, but just before I go, let me gloat about this year’s foray into seasonal crafty whatsits: coloured eggs. I’ve never done these before, but have often seen them on blogs and thought how lovely they looked, so this was the year. Ye gods, 

Those of you using feed readers may have picked up a post I disappeared a while back, one in which I explained the oddities of the caravan which lives in our garden at the moment. Well, to those of you who didn’t, the brief overview goes thusly: Lovely David, fixer-up of Citroëns and general all-round good chap, helped enormously on our extension self-build, and in the process he found us a caravan to use as a temporary kitchen, bathroom and general living space while chaos enveloped our house. The caravan belonged to a friend of his, J(o?)ules; we did him a favour in giving it a temporary home while he moved house, and he did us a favour in providing us with something which we’d otherwise have had to buy and then resell when the building work was done.