Finding my normal again

Alien overloards infect the cucumber....

You know how some days you click on something in Facebook and it takes you to a blog and then you read a couple of posts and end up on a link from there and then read a couple of items which takes you somewhere else and...?  Sometimes my life feels like that.

I got up this morning thinking that today TODAY I would get back to my fly lady apprenticeship.  I tried the FlyLady method of cleaning and organizing the house a few years ago, and though I untimately let it slip, I still do certain things I learned to do then.  I still (erratically) keep a control journal and attempt to note any important correspondence or phone calls in it.  It was the most useful thing... although I have failed to add my addresses and phone numbers to the most recent one, because... well because I am lazy and can generally find those things when I need them in my phone.

It was cold in the house when I woke up.  Not freezing cold, I'd only turned the central heating down, not off, but it was cold enough that I didn't want to have my bath until the house was warmed.  You are supposed to dress properly to laced up shoes (although who wears those around the house nowadays except for FlyLady devotees, I don't know) and I hate putting on my day clothes if I haven't had my bath.  So I pulled on jogging trousers and a top over my pyjamas and tiptoed downstairs like a naughty child, for all the world as though the FlyLady could actually see me.

Strike two was not going straight to the kitchen to shine my sink.  It would have been pretty difficult to do, and not just because my sink is ceramic and not very shiny at the best of times.  The kitchen was devastation city with dirty crockery piled up by the dishwasher, which was full of clean crockery, and the sink itself had been piled with dirty saucepans and tins from the oven. 

We had a semi-disaster yesterday when I discovered the freezer hadn't been properly shut the night before and the alarm had been going off since the previous evening.  It is a very tiny and pathetic alarm, which my daughter assumed was a smoke alarm running out of juice ("I'd have wanted to know that too!" I said, when she used this as an excuse for not investigating or telling me so I could investigate).  As a consequence we had a merry variety of foods in various states of defrosting - and we took pot luck for dinner depending on preference.  I had a melange of defrosted seafood, and very nice it was too... but the children all cooked their own stuff and then played Jenga in the washing up bowl with the debris.

So I emptied the dishwasher and restacked it, washed up the pans and tins from last night, but left them drying on the draining board instead of drying them and putting them all away as prescribed.  Guiltily I sat at the computer and to assuage my housework guilt posted three blogs on my Caliandris Pendragon blog about Second Life.

It occurred to me that I could have been a celebrated blogger by now, given that there were only seven UK blogs to be found on Google (or more likely Yahoo) when I first started blogging in 1998, and people used to say to me "You're writing a what now?"  because they'd never heard of a blog, didn't have a computer except at work, and couldn't understand why anyone would.

But life intervened, I gave it up after six months, and although I have had a lot of different blogs since then, I haven't gone back to writing properly every day the way I did then, because I tend to dissipate my anger and passion in the comments stream on the Guardian or on Facebook or Twitter.  I no longer blog properly, recounting the great websites visited, because I am too busy being Mrs Angry of Market Rasen.

So.  I achieved that item on my to do list, did some tidying up, dealt with the tv licence people on the telephone and then, house warmed up, went to have my bath.

I took my lunch with me on the basis that I would be multi-tasking and therefore saving time but the days when I could read, eat lunch, have a bath and chat on the telephone all at the same time are long past.  I can say without fear of contradiction that it was counter-productive having lunch in the bath.  Doh!

I couldn't even juggle book and plate and so I meditated on the fact that I do so enjoy writing, and so I really ought to be more disciplined and write more.  Now that I have started, I can't help thinking that maybe I should return to a more disciplined approach and plan out what to write and draft it before I put pixels to page.  I'm used to the spontaneity of blogging... but maybe I would write better if I were less spontaneous and put more effort into it.  Or maybe I'd never get around to it at all.

A couple of weeks ago I found some letters I'd received from my brother when he was in Australia and later at University.  I don't recall ever having written to him, but it is clear that I did, and he writes of crying with laughter at my descriptions of various family events.  It's been a long time since I made anyone cry with my writing, but maybe I'd like to try that again.  Flylady can wait... posterity needs me!