Fire-fighting

My jobs for this morning included cleaning out the veg racks, making vegetable curry and tomato soup, mounting new cork boards in the kitchen, sorting some laundry, stripping and remaking the bed, … actually, the list is endless. It didn't include washing all of the cat toys and the basket they live in, nor this blog post, but I so need a quick rant to get things off my chest.

It doesn't help that I was woken too early. At about 05.20 (the shipping forecast was just starting) I was awoken by Greebo yodelling at me and a strong smell of cat wee. I switched on the light to see his tail leaving the bedroom and went out to the toilet to find him sulking (lying with his back turned and taking the maximum amount of space) on the landing. I returned with loo roll in hand, just in case, to discover that he had sprayed my make-up case and peed in the cat toy box. I've no idea what this protest was about. It could be that I was ignoring him, which was because I was fast asleep. I cleaned up as best I could and left the yuk until I was feeling more human. The little beast sashayed back in some time later and woke me again (still too early!) by jumping onto me and purring loudly, butting the hand outside the duvet for head rubs. So cute, (apart from 6 kilos of cat landing on my ribs!) butter wouldn't melt.

The reason I need to clean out the veg racks (and their cupboard) is that a couple of onions I had in there suddenly collapsed into smelly pulp. The rest are okay, but having been in proximity to rotten ones, it's best they're used, hence the need for some cooking.

Several weeks ago, the sticky pad for the hook holding the kitchen notice board suddenly gave up and the board crashed down, breaking the dustpan and brush which were neatly standing beneath it. So in the meantime, I have had to buy a new dustpan and brush (which I find I like very much, but which I have also had to wash already. Greebo decided it needed scent marking, so he sprayed it and the utility room skirting and wall where I'd placed it). I also found that the pine frame of the kitchen corkboard had broken and there were a few holes in the cork too, so I needed a new one. And something to mount it on the side of the cupboard. And therefore also to clean the side of the cupboard so the mounts will stick well. And a trip to the dump to ditch the old board.

I know life is a problem-solving exercise, but it's not surprising I can't make any headway on my To Do list when new tasks which need some sort of urgent resolution suddenly appear, spawning a number of dependencies and sub-tasks. Fire-fighting (in the time management sense) is a good analogy, except that there's generally a team of fire-fighters. I can't delegate, there's only me.

The single-handedness is getting to me as I can only get so far with multi-tasking. I'm grateful for the technology which allows my coffee to percolate while the washing machine spins and I'm doing the washing up, having left the cat bowls to soak temporarily, but I can't change the light bulb at the same time as I'm putting a battery in the kitchen clock or mount cork boards while hanging out washing (not that I can hang out washing, it keeps raining. A tumble drier and new dishwasher would be nice, but no money for them!).

I went out to empty the kitchen compost, to find last night's wind (the tail end of Hurricane Helene, for which the met office removed the severe weather warning, since the gusts were only 40-ish mph instead of the forecast 60) has led to a massive tear in the canopy of the swing seat, and some of the attachments for the canopy frame have sheared and broken.

The compost trug is now full, so that will need to go into the compost bin, which itself is nearly full, and bin #3 will need to be dug out into bags to make more room for compost making. (So much gardening to do!)

I'd be much more relaxed about this, but I've got a guest this weekend, a fellow dancer doing the JWAAD music course. We have dance in common but don't otherwise know each other, so I've warned her that this place is chaotically messy with added cats. I've just been into the guest room to find coats and hangers all over the floor, where the clothes rail that they were on has fallen over. And the reason for that is because the plastic thingy which attached the rail to the stand at one end has split. Yet more things to do.

I've just saved and previewed this post, only to find that some of the text which I'd edited appeared in a different font. I couldn't immediately see the change of style in the editor, and ended up editing the HTML to fix it. Add 'finding out what's up with the insertion of a different span style when I've moved text' to the ever-growing list! Not such a quick blog post after all!

I suppose I'd better get on with it. Thanks for listening. Comments welcome below!