Half-Arse Weekend

Hi folks. Long time me no blog. I suspect I can't blame anyone for that but me, so we will press right along.

As you may have guessed from the heading, I had a rather half-arsed weekend. I felt a tad anti-social at times (yes, me - hard to believe I know, but stay with me, the story gets much better later on. OK, don't take my word for that), so decided to get on with some domestic reorganisation. This domestic reorganisation has been needed for some time. This is a rough translation of:

1. I have piles of bills, although mostly paid, sitting around potentially breeding. As a rough calculation between water, power, gas, internet, phone, other phone, oh and the mortgage of course I seem to pay the GDP of Tuvalu each month*. you would think in these circumstances a decent organisational system would be an advantage. Mine involves putting it all in piles, and then about once every 9-12 months spending far too much of my hard-earned leisure time sorting through it. Clever, non?
2. I also have too many books. Before you roll your eyes and say "Oh, what a surprise", if it isn't too late, I actually inherited a lot of them about 10 years ago, so they have some sentimental value too. An uncle who shared my rather Poindexter-esque taste in books left all his to me - all 1500 of them. So now I have a couple of thousand books 3 deep on bookshelves, a number of which may fall loosely into the categorisation with words such as 'fantasy' and 'fiction' in the title. And I am not talking fantasy in the sense of fingers' DVD collection, but I may be talking fiction of the scientific variety. In my defence, I also have a lot of English literature including my fair share of your English poets, although that doesn't get a regular run in recent years, and I have a few Halldor Laxnesses for your Icelandophiles out there... OK, and I am crap at throwing out books. I refuse to feel bad about this.
3. I have a small house - ok, I just needed a third reason, but I blame it for not having enough storage. Selfish, selfish house..

On the weekend I set about filing the bills, moving some bookcases into the study and setting up my new TV in the lounge room. On Saturday, a filthily hot day, especially with a tin roof, I was dragging around bits of furniture, categorising bills, unpacking, sorting and restacking books, and hooking up lots of cables for tv-surround-sound-type-thingies. These fun-filled pastimes are always helped by having small dogs that alternately lie around sounding like they are about the expire, and every time you move something, decide that they simply must check it out, climb into it, or wrestle on it (the last being reserved for neatly stacked bill piles) - I swear they were nearly disowned about 4 times.

Why is it then after significant time spent doing all these things, that none of it is actually done? Why does my house look like a halfway house for domestic chores? Why is there crap everywhere? Could it be that I am incapable of seeing something through? Could it be that there are too many questions and not enough answers? Well? Speak up?

*Apologies to all you Tuvaluans stopping in at UO, I'm sure you make much, much more than that. Birdshit is white gold, I tells ya.