Contradictory condition

It's 2.45 pm and I have just washed and changed out of my pyjamas.  I haven't been lounging around in them though I can't help thinking the FlyLady would disapprove most strongly.  I got up this morning determined to get the kitchen under control.  I haven't been feeling well the past couple of days, and have allowed things to slip, but the sad truth is that if it doesn't need doing in order to make a cup of tea or cook on the hob (ie if we still have clean cups and pans and plates etc) then no one else in the family will think to do it.

So... I started with the washing up and managed to turn the water to ice for Tom, who was showering in the bathroom.  It's the only disadvantage I have found so far for our wonderful new heating system - if someone uses water elsewhere in the house, you have a hard time maintaining a stream of hot water.  You soon hear about it if you do this!

I left that for a while and sorted things in the dining room - there are still sundry things from Christmas, including a selection of silly hats my mother passed on to me, which need to go in a box and be put in the loft.  I put them in a box.

I mused that I am a person full of contradictions.  I am tidy and untidy, organized and disorganized, clean and dirty.  My drawers are neatly organised, and I know what their contents is and where it is, but on the surface there is chaos.  I am obsessively clean when it comes to preparing food, washing my hands at the beginning but also if I have to touch a door handle, drawer handle or any other possible contaminated surface.  I make sure that I never prepare meat and vegetables on the same board, I hotwash anything which has been used for raw meat and especially am careful with anything which has touch poultry. Meanwhile, dust accumulates on the windowsills and my windows are gradually frosting over with coal dust and grime and I barely notice it.

I will tidy up beads and cotton reels into jars of similar colours, and sort stones and shells into categories known only to me, but I will happily go blind to piles of washing or bags of stuff waiting to go to the charity shop unless I start having to climb them in order to get to the fridge.  It's so much less interesting. 

I emptied the dishwasher and refilled the dishwasher, washed up pots and pans, put the gammon from last night in the big fridge.  I scraped out fat and dark brown material from the pan that it had cooked in and wondered whether the rehabilitation of fat as no longer the source of all ills extended to the gubbins which is left at the bottom of a pan when the joint has been cooked?  I remembered my grandparents scraping it into a bowl and frequently eating bread and dripping for a snack, and wondered whether it would be considered healthy or unhealthy to do that now.  I'm not much of a carnivore (another contradiction - I can take or leave most meat but I sometimes do crave a steak or lamb chop) and I've never much liked gravy, but the gubbins in the pan was attractive.  I scraped it out and into the bin, feeling guilty (about the waste) and virtuous (about not having eaten it) at the same time.

I managed to make it more or less respectable, changed the tablecloth, and then sat down to write my blog about intellectual property in Second Life, and before I knew it, 2pm had arrived, and I was still in my pyjamas.  As the postman has delivered the second parcel for my next door neighbour, I knew it was likely she'd drop in to pick them up, and so decided it was time to make myself respectable for an external audience, which I have now done.

I must now tidy up the living room in case she accepts my invitation to have a cup of tea, and comes in!