No new hip but at least the rug is down and the shark is coming

I was supposed to get a new hip last week. Got a phone call while I was on the way there that too many staff had come down with COVID and all non-emergency operations had to be cancelled. Le big sigh. I got off the train and sat on the platform* for a while, txting people to share my frustration and, I must admit, letting a few tears fall. But at least I was now able to have breakfast so, silver linings and all that. 

It was particularly frustrating because I had worked late the previous two days, trying to get enough stuff finished to make it possible for my bosses to be able to cover my minimum four-week absence,** stayed up late to try and get my apartment in some kind of order and then gotten up really early on the day of the operation to do the washing-up, pack and get on the road in plenty of time. So I was tired. But I turned that into silver lining number two: when I got home, I ate, unpacked one more box of stuff lying around, went to sing with my local choir at a funeral and then spent the afternoon sleeping. 

I had so much stuff to organise in my apartment because I was planning on giving up the studio I rented a while back as an office/extra space*** but unexpectedly, through a friend-of-a-friend type situation, I was able to sublet it to a student who was just moving to start studying here. So, the desired result but at kind of short notice which mean a very busy weekend drawing up a contract for the sublet, trying to find the main contract to attach to it and then finishing the painting that I started......who knows......at least a year ago as well as move all the crap that I had moved over there back to my own place. A lot of it was just stuff needing to be sorted that had been thrown into big shopping bags and moved over there out of the way. I did actually give myself the space to move one or two at a time over the course of a week**** and sorted them a little bit immediately. I had some nice spare canvas organiser-type boxes and was trying to at least get all the smaller bits and pieces into them. I do still have quite a lot of stuff to go through more carefully and deal with but at least some of it has gone and the rest is sorted into relatively tidy-looking boxes and baskets. It was nice to find some items and realised that in the meantime, I have actually come up with a proper storage solution/place for that category of stuff. So often it feels like I'm making no progress at all but small little decisions or realisiations do end up gathering pace and resulting in actual improvements. I need to not lose track of that in the future. And I did get rid of three big bags of recycling and rubbish.

Best of all, for me, is the fact that the situation with the studio spurred me on to make some changes to the layout of furniture in my apartment that I have been thinking about for a good while. I bought a rug****** for under my dining table and had unrolled it in the studio to flatten out and air. And then it got rolled up and stashed in the bathroom there because I started painting last year. I do still have moths but, regardless, I brought it over and put it down in the place where I had moved the table to. I lived with that for a week but something wasn't quite right and so I used some of my newly-free time at the weekend to try something else. And what do you know, sometimes just turning a rug so that it's sideways instead of lengthways is just what you need to do. Bonus, now the chairs also actually fit on the rug. In fact, I think this is how I originally intended it to be and had just forgotten.*******

Just a quick photo that I took to send to my sister and a friend to show what it looked like in the new set-up. I skillfully didn't include the row of boxes on either side of that open floor space that still need to be dealt with but even with that, loads of floor space. 

I also finally bit the bullet and ordered myself a Shark cordless upright hoover (ok, a vacuum cleaner, but where I'm from, we always call all vacuum cleaners hoovers). The cheap Aldi version I got a couple of years ago gave up the ghost last week but even though it wasn't great, it was definitely easier to use, which meant more frequent hoovering. I expect great things from myself with an even better tool in my hands. Which increases the chances of me doing yoga and stretching exercises more frequently. It's kind of disheartening to get down on the mat, turn your head to the side, and be distracted by dust bunnies gathering closer and closer. 

I am choosing to think of this past week as one step back but two steps forward.

* Which is to say, I sat on a bench on the platform. Maybe when I do eventually get a new hip, sitting on the platform might not seem quite so impossible. 

** I still feel a bit like I haven't caught up since I had COVID in March and was off for two weeks. Three weeks holidays June/July, some random sick days, then a week off sick in August with a bad cold, followed by two weeks of doing the bare minimum because I was still not quite rid of the cold, followed by a week's holiday in September (went to visit my sister in France for her 50th birthday and it was lovely) and a couple more sick days and time off for doctor and hospital pre-op appointments. So, yeah, not my most productive summer ever.

*** Except for one regular monthly job, my sidegig of translation work has all but dried up and I haven't had the energy to go looking for more. So I have been paying the extra rent but not actually cutting back on any other expenses to make up for it. Debt is building up again. 

**** Still didn't want to finish the painting and this was as good a way of procrastinating as any.*****

***** Asterisking and foot-noting are fun. :-)

****** I just looked it up. NOVEMBER 2020. How ridiculous is it that I bought something I wanted to use, loved when I got it, and then left it unused and unloved for almost two years!!!!!!!

******* TWO. YEARS!!!!!!!!!!!

Dust as far as the eye can see

Housekeeping has been a very sore spot for a long time now. I was delighted to find The Organised Mum Method and app and I have used it more consistently that just about any other plan I ever came up with. However, after a good burst of starting to get back to it earlier this year, my back was so sore that I did nothing for a couple of months. Looking back through my app history I can see that I actually started on 14 November 2020 and kept going up to 31 March 2021. Then I picked it up again from 24 April to 25 May. That is more than I thought I had done. And on some days I even finished everything on the list. So, the background clutter wasn't really getting touched, but the day-to-day was getting done and no new clutter being added. 

Bits and bobs from shelves/window sill etc. in the bedroom

 At any rate, in mid-June I contacted the concierge service offered by work and asked them to find me a cleaning lady to come and do a deep clean. Unfortunately, I kept expecting it to be "any day now" and it ended up taking them a couple of months. Since my back was still pretty bad and I was generally feeling overwhelmed and not able to anything, I've just been letting the dust gather and doing just enough to maintain some basic hygiene in the bathroom and kitchen at least. 

Finally, on Sunday, after having the date moved twice, someone came and spent about four and a half hours cleaning. She was supposed to be there for five but after three hours I was already feeling very uncomfortable having someone I didn't know in MY SPACE, so I chopped a few things off the planned list and she left after four and a half hours. She seemed to think by the time she left that we were great friends, whereas I had landed more on the side of hope-to-never-see-you-again. A kind of strange person, not the best cleaner, but she did manage to deal with an awful lot of dust and I am managing to calm down a bit two days later and just appreciate the fact that she dusted things that I haven't even looked at for months or years.

The space in front of the dresser was full with boxes and bags of stuff - literally up to the drawers and about as far out as that black stool. You can see the marks in the dust!

It also forced me to deal with some of that background clutter. Now, I didn't manage to actually declutter and sort everything, but I did move most of it over to my other apartment/office. I will try to finish painting that this weekend and then start tackling the piles of bags and boxes one at a time. After already renting it for more than a year, it's time I had more than just one lonely table and chair in there! While the cleaner was here on Sunday, I mostly tried tackling my writing desk, which has become yet another incarnation of the Table of Doom. 

Bits and bobs from sitting room

I did loads of sorting, gathered a big bag of paper to recyle, almost filled six plastic boxes, and it still looks very much like a Table of Doom. So the plan is to first finish painting the office, but also to spend any spare TOMM time working on clearing my writing desk. I'll be most likely reverting to my old scheme of 3 Little Things to get it done. I started with the boxes of stuff that were lying around on shelves or window sills or the tops of cupboards and am making some good progress so far.

When it is all done, I can move the writing desk, and a small set of shelves and drawers over to the office, which will give me loads of space in my sitting room. I'd like to move the table down towards the window but can't quite decide where to move the couch to in order to get that done. We'll see.

I painted! But this getting fit thing takes up a lot of time

Well, I'm halfway through week 5 of the optifast program. Weightloss is going well and I'm not particularly suffering from pangs of hunger at all. Just every now and again when I haven't planned properly or something strange happens, usually with public transport. Like yesterday when I switched to wait for my tram - I had just missed one but the next was due in 12 minutes. And then none actually turned up for more than 40 minutes. Very unusual for here but it meant that I was more than an hour later getting home than planned. But it is definitely good to have a small amount of delayed gratification when it comes to hunger. Reminds me that I don't have to stop at the closest takeaway or restaurant or shop to get something to eat just because I'm starting to feel hunger. My well-nourished first world self could probably survive just fine with nothing to eat for a few days and can certainly manage an hour or two if things don't go to plan. That doesn't mean I won't try to avoid those situations, but it's a good reminder to try and keep in my head.

Leaves are hard to paint

I still don't much care for the sports therapist we're working with. At the moment he is solely focused on us measuring our heart rate and learning to recognise when we're entering the exercise zone* - whereas I am delighted and proud every time I actually do any kind of movement. Because compared to six months ago, when I was just starting to go swimming/aquajogging again and after one not-very-successful attempt was instructed to not try to do more than five minutes at a time to start with, the fact that I have built up to nearly an hour makes me feel pretty good about myself. Also, I bought the cheapest fitness watch I could find (€20) and it's ridiculously bad at measuring my pulse and I am really resenting having to buy another one (€40) for something I am not the least bit interested in having to use.

At the moment, I am doing one session of rehab sport per week (45 mins) on Wednesday mornings before work. Then on Wednesday evenings there's the hour of sport that is part of the optifast program - so far that has been walking. On Thursday evenings after work I've been doing aquajogging, which I really do love so much. Because of COVID restrictions the classes are only half-an-hour long but I try to get there as early as possible so that I can swim up and down for five or ten minutes before we start and try and sneak in another five minutes when we're finished, too. Being the last out of the pool after aquajogging means that the changing rooms are less crowded by the time I get there. 

I've signed up to start an online yoga course offered by work starting at the end of September. The in person class was on Wednesdays, so no use to me. And when talking about different sports with the optifast group, I was reminded of tai chi, which I did years ago and really liked. I vaguely remember looking for a class when I moved here and finding nothing. When I googled again recently, there are in fact three different tai chi schools here. How did I miss that? Anyway, I was thinking perhaps it would be too much but then a couple of days later they listed a beginners course starting this week and taking place on Thursday but later, so that it would be easy to get to after aquajogging. And today I signed up. Hopefully the next three weeks, with that double commitment on Thursdays won't take too much out of me. After that aquajogging is over and when it starts up again in October, it will be indoor and I have signed up for the Friday sessions.

Anyone keeping count? I think that should give me a better spread because at the moment, by the time Friday comes around I am tired and have no interest in doing any sport, or honestly, moving at all. 

Current timetable

• Monday: nothing
  
• Tuesday: nothing
  
• Wednesday: rehab sport (morning), optifast (evening)
  
• Thursday: aquajogging (evening, after work), tai chi (evening, after aquajogging)
  
• Friday: local choir for one hour every two weeks
  
• Saturday: nothing (but I try to tell myself I'll do some time on the exercise bike - so far this has happened once)
  
• Sunday: nothing
  

Future timetable (from end September/mid-October)

• Monday: yoga (online, evenings)
  
• Tuesday: nothing (kind of wanting to start going back to uni choir, which would be 2.5 hours on Tuesday evenings)
  
• Wednesday: rehab sport (morning), optifast (evening)
  
• Thursday: tai chi (evening)
  
• Friday: aquajogging (evening, after work), local choir for one hour every two weeks (later evening)
  
• Saturday: nothing (but I try to tell myself I'll do some time on the exercise bike - so far this has happened once)
  
• Sunday: nothing

This was supposed to be a sunset reflected in water

So, yeah, that feels like a lot. Especially considering the fact that I haven't been able to persuade myself to do much of anything outside work for the past couple of years. So far, I'm holding up ok though. 

I even went to a watercolours workshop last Friday. It was so much fun and although I'm not very good, it was enough fun and interesting enough that I'll keep trying things out at home, I think.

It got waaay better once we layered trees and stuff on it. Let's ignore the tree whose shadow is twice as wide as the actual tree. LOL

I can see myself getting as obsessed with making tiny thin brushstrokes as a good friend of mine who paints is. The one you see on this picture was done by the teacher using the exact same paintbrush as me. 

Anyway, not quite prizewinning, but definitely good enough to hang on the fridge.

I have booked a cleaning lady to come and do a deep clean on my apartment, which hasn't been getting more than a lick and a promise for several months now. My back was just too sore and I couldn't find my way out of the hole I was in. By now, I've caught up on all the washing up, caught up on the washing, and have gotten a bit more decluttering done. The plan is for her to clean the entire place and that should leave me feeling more capable of getting back to trying to TOMM every week day. 

I don't think this level of activity is genuinely sustainable in the long-run, but I have promised myself that I will really put a lot of effort into losing weight and, more importantly, gaining health and fittness this year. We'll see how things pan out over the next few months.

 

 

 

*There are technical terms for the different zones and formulas for working out your own range for each of them but I'm too lazy now to go and look at my notebook.

New table

After living with a 60cmx90cm table that I bought second-hand for £6 (yes, pounds, that'll give you an idea of how old it is - I think it must have been late 1999) as my only table for the last two and a half years, I finally had some money that wasn't desperately needed elsewhere and spent some time driving myself mad looking at hundreds of tables to find one I liked. After a disappointing time at Ikea a few months after moving here, I had kind of put the whole thing on hold. Starting to search again in the last few months, there were a lot that I did like but unfortunately they mostly seemed to come with pricetags in the several thousands of euro range, which was just a bit more than I had available.  However, I finally did see something that was a little bit unusual and a good price and after taking a photo and thinking about it for a couple of weeks, I went for it. After waiting and waiting (and spending some time looking for a rug, but that's an even more difficult thing to choose than a table!) it was finally delivered on Friday. I paid the extra for delivery and assembly but got a deal on a combined cost for those two because I'd been having a nice chat with the woman who was serving me. And she had a lovely holiday in Ireland once.

It did actually come with those little felt things to put on the legs so I'm not too bothered anymore about not having found a rug on time. I think I will get one eventually though, as the colour of the table really doesn't go with the floor. Glad I didn't think of that though because I do like this table, even if it is nothing at all like I would have described if you had asked me what I was looking for. Given that I will probably not live in this apartment for the rest of my life, it's no harm to not have chosen a table just to match or complement the floor here.

Just a quick snap I took after it was assembled - have given up even pretending to mean to take good photos

It's not quite right in that position and I have since moved it around to face the other way. However, that means that it's pushed up against the dresser (which I still haven't gotten around to painting red). I'll have to do some furniture tetris soon but for now, it's fine. I hurt my back somehow a week or so ago and am not supposed to be doing any heavy lifting for at least one more week. I think I'll end up moving the couch back around to fit under the window (this was when I moved it from that position, and this is from when it was there before - still need to get rid of that chair but hoping my sister will take it), move the dresser to the wall opposite where it is now and the tallboy that's currently there down close to the couch on the other side (just about where the wooden chair is).

I currently have three chairs and one of them doesn't match the table at all either. The other two are black (I've just bought another one of the black one you can see on the right-hand side of the picture above) so while they don't really match, they don't really clash either. I'll have to have a think about that at a later date. For now, I have those three chairs and also have three stools, which is more than enough if I decide to invite people over. The table is 160cm long but can expand out to 210cm - so it's a teensy bit bigger than what I had decided was my maximum of 150cm but what can I say? I just really like it and am so happy to have a proper sized table again. 

Some photos of my (messy) place

I never really did ever post many photos of my new place after I moved. And now it has already been almost a year and I'm still not quite finished fixing things up. After the initial few months of unpacking, painting some of my old furniture, etc., I needed to be just living in my space. I got everything to the stage that there was just one pile of ten or twelve boxes to unpack, all stacked up on one side of my bedroom, in front of the cupboard that most of the stuff would go into. I want to paint and/or varnish that cupboard though and decided that if I just unpacked stuff into it, I'd never get around to it.

For the long weekend this week, I've basically decided to do nothing other than read, watch films and do nothing. Things have just been far too hectic for the last while and I've been getting overwhelmed so it was time to consciously spend time doing as close to nothing as possible and leaving all the other stuff behind. I did have a small burst of energy this morning however and so I spent a half an hour moving some furniture around. I've been thinking about doing this for a while and I wanted to see what it would look like.

'Scuse the mess in most of these photos - as this was a spontaneous rearranging of furniture the photos are honest to goodness candid ones. This level of mess may be very stressful for some of you to see but for me, it's such a big improvement on how I was in my old place (and getting better all the time, actually) that it feels pretty good. And excuse the quality of photos, some even blurrier than my usual.

This is the end of the living room beside the balcony with the couch (also guest bed) and my two armchairs. I really don't need two armchairs but one is the final one from the three-piece suite I took from my parents' house and although I hate the cover (I will get it recovered one day), I really love it to sit in. The other chair is one a friend gave to me when she was moving a few years ago and needed to downsize. I'd always admired it when I visited and couldn't bring myself to refuse it. Anyway, at some stage I thought it would be nice to have an armchair in my bedroom, to curl up in and read, and to free up a bit of space here.







Here are another two photos of the rest of this room. I deliberately took them in such a way that you can easily see where one bit ends and the next begins - it's a nicely sized but not huge room and although I could do with getting rid of some more stuff, I'm not quite there yet. One step at a time.

This is the far end of the room, where I have my dining area. The other big thing I gain from moving one of the armchairs is a feeling of slightly more space so that, whenever I find one I like and can afford, I can put in a proper table without making it feel too cramped. I think. The table that's currently there is 2'x3' (60x90cm), which is fine for just me but doesn't give a lot of space for ever entertaining (I might do, one day, you never know), or using it for anything other than eating.

The nice cabinet hasn't quite been finished either and stuff is a bit higgledy-piggledy in it. I plan to paint it red but got sick and tired of painting last year and put that on hold. Also started dithering between bright red or dark red. Opinions on that issue welcome. (It's actually a fairly flimsy, pretty damaged piece that I bought for 20 euro second hand so I'm not feeling any "painting would be such a mistake for this beautiful piece of furniture" issues at all.

And this is the middle part, which functions as my work space. You can see the table (the stuff on the table is mostly stuff I moved out of the way to be able to move the chair), and the edge of the will-someday-be-red cabinet. Next to that is my writing desk (with red floor protector for the chair to sit on), and beside that you can see the armchair. That should all give you an idea of the amount of space.

This is the corner of my bedroom that I decided to put the chair in. After my initial dreaming / getting carried away thoughts on doing this I did actually measure and realised that it would barely fit in that space.

However, since I was still toying with the idea several months later, I decided it was at least worth trying.

This is the still-unpacked side of the bedroom, on the other side of the bed. As happens, over the course of the last six months or so the neatly stacked moving boxes seem to have attracted a layer of stuff on top.






I know I'm going to be fairly busy for the next couple of weeks but I think once we get into May, with hopefully less rainy weather, I'm going to move these boxes out to the balcony and paint/varnish the cupboard before unpacking it all. There has been a bit of a change of plan though and it's one of those things that proves yet again how you sometimes have to live in a space for a while before making final decisions on things.

Did I ever post a photo of the lovely built-in cupboards here that I immediately designated as jar storage? Here's one (or three, actually) I took last year before I'd even unpacked all of my jars.
Over the winter, however, I realised that these cupboards back onto heating pipes of some kind next door. I put a thermometer in them for a while and they were regularly over 20C, which is just too hot for decent food storage. So, now I'm thinking the jars will go into the cupboard in the bedroom, and the material, yarn, and other crafting supplies, currently still in boxes, will go into these built-in cupboards in the hallway.


Even more reason to varnish or paint that cupboard really well - at the moment the wood is completely porous so if a jar ever leaked (it happens), I'd never get the stain or smell out of the wood. So, that's the plan for now. We'll see how it works out.

One final photo now, of the living room after moving the blue armchair into the bedroom. I'm not entirely happy yet and suspect I'll end up moving this chair around a bit until a find an angle that I like. Or maybe I'll give up on having the footstool there at all (although I do love to use it).




By the way, in case anyone is wondering, the couch could go lengthways along the wall rather than the window (I'd need to shift the desk an inch or so to the left to make space) but there is not enough room to have a chair opposite it without blocking the door out to the balcony. No "after" photos of the bedroom or the other end of the living room yet though. I want to wait, live with it a while and maybe even get photos of a neat and tidy space to show you. So that's it for now. Would love to hear what you think of it all.

Procrastinating and pictures

I have a master's thesis to proofread and it is almost hurting my head. It's rather philosophical in nature and that's never my best area. I tend to get bogged down in thinking, don't necessarily have the tools to be doing a lot of that kind of thinking, but I find it difficult to distance myself from the ideas and just concentrate on whether that comma should be there or not. So today (and yesterday), I have been dillydallying and there has been quite a lot of procrastination. For a while early this afternoon I thought I was making good progress but now it's after nine and I still have nearly 30 pages to get through. Aaagh.

On the other hand, as has happened before, procrastinating on this task has meant that I've actually picked up and done, or at least started, a few other tasks that I have been procrastinating on for a while. So I've hung a few pictures up, or at least stood them up near where I want to hang them, to see if they work in that spot. After all of my pictures came crashing down in a pile now long after I moved, resulting in many broken frames and smashed glass, I was faced with the spectre of having to spend loads of money replacing them all. And so I did what I am wont to do in situations like that, pushed them to one side and ignored the situation.

I ordered one frame online a few weeks ago and it felt so good to hang that picture up again that it has been in my mind to do a few others soon. So during the week, I hung the "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster that I was given for my 40th birthday (I'll be 42 soon!). I did put that into a frame more than a year ago but never did get around to hanging it. There's a small chip of glass out of one corner from the toppling incident in July but otherwise it's fine. So I went ahead and hung that in my hallway.

The frame on the picture I have of St. Patrick's Cathedral was completely destroyed and it's an unusual size (fairly old and imperial rather than metric measurements) that's hard to find something for here. Today, while clearing stuff from one pile, I found two empty frames that used to hold pictures that I have since gotten more suitable frames for. And it occurred to me that they weren't that much smaller than the St. Patrick's picture. So I checked it out, and ended up just cutting away the extra mounting board (less than two centimetres top and bottom and barely half a centimetre each side) and put it into one of those frames. I am so pleased with it, it actually looks better, I think, than the original frame. Just need to find the perfect spot to hang it now.

And then I hung my Derek Beggs' print. And I've search for and found the music I promised a friend I would give her soon. And found the health insurance form I needed to find. Not to mention that while doing that, I found a whole pile of health insurance and pension stuff that I never got around to filing before moving and that I was looking for recently.

So, I may be looking at a late night working after all that procrastination, but at least it was a pretty productive day.

Boundaries. Or, DON'T TOUCH MY STUFF!!!

I've been dithering for a couple of hours about whether to post this but I don't think the person concerned will ever read this and on the whole, even though I have already ranted to let off steam to both my brother and my sister about this, I think writing it down will, as always, also help me to deal with it and, hopefully, put it behind me.

So, short version: former work colleague/kind-of friend came to visit to help me with unpacking/to drive to Ikea maybe. It did not go well.

Much longer version with not a picture to brighten the place up, in which I will also reveal a bit more about what a fucked-up relationship I sometimes have with stuff and "my" space.

The woman in question is very nice really and we worked together, including having friendly chats (not every day or even every week but regularly enough), for just over seven years. Over the last year or two she has also been to my house a couple of times to attend Tupperware parties, and I've been to her house, also to attend a Tupperware party. Apart from that, and my leaving do when I finished up at the company last year, we didn't really have any contact outside work. So, for me that's a friendly colleague, for her, well, I think she thinks we're better friends than we are. Anyway, she did help one evening with painting my old place before I left there and we have always gotten on alright. But we're just not close in my opinion. So it was a bit surprising to get a text message from her not long after I moved asking if I thought I'd be finished unpacking in July or would I like her to come and help out for a day or two, as she'd have holidays. I quite frankly assumed she was angling for a cheap place to stay (judging by my standards again, I really shouldn't do that) and, since the offer of having a car to maybe go to Ikea to pick up anything I needed was also tempting, and just 'cos I'm fairly easygoing about having people to stay (I may not be in future!!!), I said sure, why not.

Last Friday I checked to see if she was still coming and was somewhat taken aback to hear that she was going to leave her place after breakfast on Sunday and stay until after lunch on Thursday. But okay, I really, really did think then that she was just looking for a cheap place to stay and would be out and about and enjoying the area, then maybe helping me a little bit on one or two days. Boy, was I wrong.

She arrived on Sunday afternoon and wanted to immediately get stuck into working. I was kind of expecting that we'd spend the afternoon catching up, having cups of tea/glasses of wine and just sort of chilling out. But no. So I explained to her that the thing I really wanted to get done was to finish painting the bookcases and get all the books onto them. That really is the task that I needed to get done in order to be able to make more progress with unpacking. And I explained that I was unpacking very slowly so that I could declutter a bit while doing so, as I hadn't had time to do much decluttering while packing to move. And I did say that I had to be the one to unpack, as I wanted to be able to know exactly where things were going and so on. Then I said that if we did manage to get finished with the books, maybe we could get the balcony set up nicely, including that trip to Ikea or somewhere similar to buy some furniture. And I thought that would be more than enough to fill a few days. Especially since I also explained to her that apart from the somewhat deliberate way I was going about unpacking, what with the mindfulness and decluttering and all, the other reason it was going slowly was because it has been warm and I keep needing to take breaks to cool down.

So after me explaining all that, I'm still not sure how we ended up moving all the boxes that were in the bedroom (several of which I had only moved in there that morning so that we'd have a bit more space to work in the sitting room) so that we could clean the big cupboard in there. She decided that made more sense because I'd mentioned to her that I used that for material, wool and hobby supplies in general and she felt that would be the quickest win. Only, I wasn't looking for a quick win. It may look like chaos here all the time but I've actually been fairly methodical. And most importantly to me, I have been really working on making sure that I don't repeat the mistakes I made in my last place and that I am dealing with everything properly, from a psychological point of view that is. So, I kind of let myself be railroaded on Sunday afternoon. We did get some useful stuff done, like carrying some stuff up to the attic, where I did push back on her suggestion that we rearrange everything to stack better (since I had done just that very thing the day before and was happy with the way it was). And it was good to get that cupboard cleaned when there were two of us there as it is quite heavy and unwieldy. I would have managed on my own but with two it was definitely easier.

But otherwise, I ended up doing exactly what I didn't want to do, namely, throwing stuff into the cupboard just to get it unpacked. And still ending up with boxes that weren't empty because in every single box there is a layer of books! She amalgamated some of them to being very heavy boxes of books that cannot be moved and by the end of the day we had nine completely empty boxes. Which means that I unpacked about fourteen or fifteen. When my preferred pace has been two or three a day. With two or three a day, I felt like I was really, consciously doing it and fully aware of what was going where, giving myself time to sort things the best way, giving myself time to live with things for a few days before committing fully to that place for that thing (lots of things ended up not being in the right place first time round and this way, I've been able to move things to more optimal situations easily) and, most of all, even though I hadn't realised just how important this step was, I have had time to mentally get to grips with each step and each box and each item in each box. There are plenty of boxes where I've been overwhelmed and just closed it up again and moved on to a different one. And that's okay. Sometimes I've opened up a box three or four times before actually being able to deal with it.

The part I hope I end up finding funny when I look back on this in years to come: I was not so gently hinting that it was time for a break by drawing her attention to the fact that I was sweating buckets. Her reply to my comment on how hot it was and look, this is what I mean when I say the heat really kills me was to say that surely I wasn't going through menopause yet, was I?!! When I said no, it's more because it's 27° and we're doing physcial work, she merely commented that she wasn't sweating so it should be ok. I pointed out that that's because she's not Irish. I guarantee that the majority of Irish people would be having the same reaction as me to moving and working at that temperature. Did you know that an official heatwave in Ireland means there has been five consecutive days of 25° or hotter?

Anyway, shortly after nine on Sunday evening, we called it quits but not before, while I was unpacking in the bedroom I could hear her moving stuff around in the sitting room. I wandered in once or twice and could she her trying to "sort" things. For example, she picked up some large bowls and said something like, "Oh, these belong in the kitchen", whereupon I explained to her that no, they were going to go into the dresser but were sitting on top of the writing desk because it is currently blocking access to the dresser. I firmly told her not to worry, everything that wasn't actually in a box was more or less in the position I wanted it to be, close to it's final storage place. But she still bugged me by continuing to pick up this, that or the other and say things like "You don't need this, it's old, I'll just throw it out". No, you will not throw it out, leave my stuff alone! I'm the one who gets to decide what to throw out WHEN I'M GOOD AND READY!!!!!  I found a couple of things that I knew needed to go into the cupboard where I've hung my coats and since that was one small cupboard and I knew it was a bit messy (I also shoved my bicycle basket, helmut and pump in there) I asked her to put these extra things in that cupboard and maybe tidy it up a bit. Thought I'd make her feel useful, less likely to poke around other stuff and get something done that did need doing. And in return I got a comment about how I have hoarding tendencies. Not untrue but the reason she made that comment? I had also shoved a bag of bags into that cupboard. This is one thing that I really did declutter when I moved, partly because I used so many bags moving and clearing out what I did manage to clear out and partly as a decision to get this one thing under control. So I reduced down to one reuseable shopping bag full of other reuseable shopping bags, Ikea bags, small plastic bags....you know that kind of thing. Most people have a drawer or a cupboard or something with a similar pile. I'm actually proud of the fact that I restricted it to one bag full and decided that was more than enough for anything I'd ever need. Her opinion? No-one should have more than three shopping bags. Since she made that comment though I decided, having been more or less silently hating the way the day had turned out and what I was doing, to enlighten her somewhat about my complicated relationship to stuff, partly arising from my past, partly tied up in my struggles with depression (which she was aware of), explain about some of the therapy I've done and the improvements I've made and so on. Thinking it would help. Ha!

We went out for dinner, things pleasant enough and then she asked me what I wanted her to  do on Monday while I was at work. I said "What you can do is relax and enjoy yourself, go into town, visit the castle ruins, sure I'll be home by three and we can work on the bookcases then". I told her I'd probably be leaving for work about seven or half-seven as I had a meeting I needed to prepare for. At quarter to seven on Monday morning I was awake but not yet up, having not slept terribly well and feeling generally very unsettled and unhappy after the way Sunday had turned out. And she knocks on the door, "Moonwaves, it's time to get up". Jesus, talk about making me want to roll over and just stay in bed. So fucking annoying. Off I went to work, where I vented a bit to the first person I saw (wasn't intended but I just couldn't hold back). And then a bit to my boss when I was explaining to her that I was going to work my hours on Thursday and Friday this week instead of Tuesday and Wednesday. Heard nothing from her all morning and headed home about half-two. I was just getting off the tram when I got a text from her saying that she had washed all the cupboards (the one small one which did still need doing as well as two others that I had already done, which just needed a quick dusting), fixed the holes in the bookcases (paint got into some of them, making them a tight fit for the yokes you rest the shelves on - but how stupid to do that before the final coat of paint went on?), cleared up the balcony and sorted all the papers together. But not to worry, she didn't throw anything out, just gathered everything neatly.

Let's just say that text had me dreading getting back home. The thing is, yes, things looked really messy but there was a system going. I had important stuff in one place, urgent stuff that it was important not to lose track of somewhere else, and non-urgent, non-important stuff somewhere else again. And now? I have two big piles of papers all put together. Neatly, admittedly. But what the fuck? They are, to a certain extent, private papers. Things like my salary slip, my health insurance stuff, correspondence from the social welfare office. I'm very open with people about just about everything in general but that is not an invitation to do something like that!

As the afternoon went on (so glad she went out for a walk with her dog as it meant I was able to ring my sister to give out) I kept seeing more and more things. Folks, she didn't not touch anything! I'm scared to look in my little box of sex toys as it wasn't quite fully under the bed.  If I look in that and everything has been neatly lined up I may end up having to check myself in to a mental clinic. And I am not joking about that. Something like this has happened once or twice before when I was sharing houses but not for a long time and never in MY OWN PLACE. All my own. This is not shared housing. MY HOME!!! Seriously, she seems unable to have anything crooked. One one shelf in my bedroom, on my unread books shelves, only half of it is taken up with books and I have used the front half of it as a bit of a dumping ground. Fine, it's it was a bit messy but I knew what was where, things were where I could get at them and even if a collection of stuff like multi-vitamins, perfume and small nails might not seem to fit together so what? It was all straightened out, the old cards that I am slowly moving out of my purse as I get new ones (as a result of my move) were stacked up together like books. The scissors was neatly lined up with the pinking shears.  My mooncup!!!, neatly lined up with the cotton wool. My nightdress, which I had thrown on the bed in the morning, was neatly draped over the end of the bed. The pile of books on the other shelf, which I have read but not yet added to my list of books read this year, was pushed back against the wall - no angles in this house! In went on and on. It seems like there was nothing she didn't get her hands on and I feel so violated. In the bathroom, she'd taken the washing powder and colour catchers out of the bag they were in and placed them neatly beside the full ones, with the bag folded neatly underneath them. Fuck all use to me when I just want to grab the bag and head down to the washing machine with it. Why did she think it was in a bloody bag? My toiletries bag, left open with the small boxes I use for travelling (soap and cloth holders, toothbrush holder): everything neat and straightened, lids on boxes. The lids are left off on purpose - trapping oxygen in there just leads to stale oxygen and smelly containers next time I want to travel. Hint for anyone who didn't already know it: never store empty containers with the lids on. It just went on and on. The one bookshelf I've already put stuff on is one I've planned out for cooking and gardening books on top and choir stuff on the bottom. And even though it wasn't full, I've deliberately not added any other stuff to it. It has its purpose and that's what I want it for. Now? It's chockablock with things that were placed near the cupboards/drawers I actually intended to use for them. But it's all neat and straightened.

My stress levels were really going through the roof and I was kind of starting to be a bit passive agressive, making comments on "oh, you did that, too". I know she meant well but she really, despite me again explaining that I need time to mentally deal with all of the unpacking and sorting, just did not get it. I flat out told her over our late lunch that I was not planning on unpacking any more boxes while she was here, that Sunday was just too much for me. I got on with painting the bookcase and asked her to do the shelves. All fine. Except then I went into the kitchen and noticed the bin had an ordinary plastic bag in it (rather than the bin bags I normally use). Since I'd emptied it just before she arrived, I wondered why she had emptied it again. And my stress was so high at this stage, so many of my triggers already triggered. I had noticed she had thrown out one thing: the empty toilet rolls bags, i.e. the plastic bag that the toilet rolls are sold in. Not at all a big deal to get rid of that, right? Well, no, not really. Except that I had brought the recycling bag down with me on the way to work to empty it (she wanted to do it on the way to dinner on Sunday night and I disagreed as I didn't want to carry the empty bag around with me, to which she replied she would have just thrown the bag out - it's a reusable bag that is still perfectly fine, why would I throw it out?) so I knew those plastic bags weren't in the recycling (I had only just put the empty bag back in place). As a matter of fact, I use those bags as bin liners for the bathroom bin as they happen to be the exact right size. Which is why I had another empty one just thrown into the cleaning basins in the bathroom. I was keeping it to use. I mentioned that to her, explained that I usually used them and asked her if she had thrown anything else out. She said no.

After I had noticed that she had indeed emptied the kitchen bin, however, I couldn't relax. It was another hour or so when I just couldn't stand it anymore and actively started trying to figure out what else she had thrown out. Next up was the washing-up liquid bottle (and again, something that should have been recycled). Now, it was getting near the end, I will admit but I would have gotten at least another week, probably closer to another month out of that bottle. I asked her and she said it was completely empty after she'd wiped down all of the cupboards. Okay, fine. Then I saw that she had moved one carton of eggs into the little holder in the fridge. Now, I'm not one for keeping my eggs in the fridge and since I buy my eggs from the market I always re-use the carton. At that stage I asked her again, what had she thrown out. Nothing, was the reply. People, I am somewhat embarrassed to say that I just couldn't take it anymore and I ended up going down to the big bin, dragging the bag out of it and opening it up to dig through it. I was nearly in tears I was so upset. She claimed to have only brought the bag down because she had seen the lettuce in the fridge (it was stored in a plastic bag), taken the outside leaves off and they smelled a bit because it was so hot. Reasonable enough. Except, if she wasn't having salad for lunch, why was she digging around in the fridge at the lettuce? Why did she feel the need to find the eggs in the cupboard and put them into the fridge? Whatever about being untidy, if I had left the eggs out on the counter I might have understood why she thought I just hadn't gotten around to/hadn't bothered putting them away. But they were put away in the cupboard.

So, digging through the rubbish was not one of my finest hours but you know what? Totally justified because of course, she had thrown other stuff out. Even if some of it stayed in the bin, at least I've now seen it and I can handle it, because I know it's gone. Even if I do prefer to shred envelopes that have my name and address on them. And I was able to fish out a guarantee for a little gizmo (no-one ever needs those guarantees really but you never know. I have a small drawer dedicated to things like that so again, keeps it in bouunds but allows me to be a bit anal about hanging on to maybe-but-probably-not-ever important stuff). And I also recovered the instruction manual for something that I only purchased a couple of weeks ago and haven't yet set up! There were some receipts in there as well although a quick glance was enough to reassure me none I needed to keep. The thing is though, she didn't know that. I can keep receipts for all sorts of stuff to claim on my taxes now that I'm a freelancer and it's my business to go through what receipts I have and decide, not hers. I think after she saw that, however, she started to actually accept that when I was talking about my issues with "stuff", I really do know what the hell I'm talking about.

After making a show of myself (although in my opinion a fairly justified show), I decided to, as it were, take the high road. I apologised for making a scene, explained again that these really are serious issues that I deal with and hugged to show there were no hard feelings. And I cooked a nice dinner and we ate and drank a bottle of wine she had bought earlier. And then watched some Father Ted, as I had been trying to explain my "Feck it, sure it's grand" poster to her and remembered Mrs. Doyle "feck" scene. I still felt invaded but in my head was thinking, when she's gone, I can pull everything out of the cupboard again and start over. I can pull all the stuff off those shelves and get back to where I was before. I suggested to her that the next day (today) we put the books onto the now finished shelves and then go and get balcony furniture and buy some soil while we're at it and then we could spend the afternoon potting plants and enjoying the balcony. Thought that would stop any further issues.

But this morning I just could not make myself get out of bed to face it all again. Woke up several times during the night and just don't feel relaxed or comfy or, well, basically I still just felt like my home had been invaded and violated. After txting a friend about the whole situation and then receiving a phone call from someone else who never fails to make me feel good, I bit the bullet (about half-ten at this stage) and headed into the bathroom. I was in the shower when I noticed the straw that finally broke my camel's back. Last Friday, I bought a two-pack of drain protectors, you know, the little round things you put in the plughole and they stop hair or anything else from going down the drain and clogging it up. That packet was in my bedroom as I hadn't yet gotten around to clearing out the hair that has accumulated since I moved here (I forgot to take the old one with me from the old place). Not anymore though, as yesterday, she obviously opened up that packet and took one out to put in the shower. I really did cry when I saw that. Again, it is such a stupid, silly thing but I feel like she robbed me of a piece of making my home my home. As if I've missed out on a small piece of ritual that would have been another satisfying click of another piece slotting into place in making this place a home. Now, whether I did it or she did it doesn't really matter in the greater scheme of things, really the important thing is that my hair won't be clogging up the drains. But, still. I felt and still feel robbed of that moment. And the sense of violation just washed over me so strongly it left me weak. And so, to end this long and for everyone else boring story: I got dressed, went out to see her where she was sitting on the balcony, told her I had a migraine, was likely to be in bed for two or three days with it and asked her to leave. Not quite the assertive way to do it but I just had to get her out of here.

Even since she has left, I have been prowling around, trying to see what else she's done. Noticed that when she cleared up the stuff on the balcony she threw out the box that I was keeping pots and things in. Okay, it was a fairly beaten up box but now I just have stacks of pots and the tools are shoved into a bucket and have been placed under the barbeque. What happens when I need to use the bucket? Or want to use the barbeque? At this stage, I'm even annoyed that she pulled all the dead bits off my aloe vera plants, something I've been meaning/threatening to do for at least four years. I'm slowly trying to undo what she did but hey, at least two of the bookshelves are finished and I can move forward with the things that I wanted to move forward with. It's going to take me a while to get over this and I've already asked a couple of friends to come and visit soon so that I can clear out her "bad" energy imprint. :-)

So there you have it. Yet more longwinded insight into the fucked-up mess that is my brain and my life. I only seem to be normal sometimes, never actually am.

Painting bookshelves

I'll be sick of this before I'm finished. I'm already getting a little bit bored but things are moving along so I just have to keep going now and it'll all be over soon. Books on shelves by Wednesday would be really fanstastic.  The paint I've used today is the one I bought in Dusseldorf to do the skirting boards. I didn't much like the feel of it there so I went and bought a different paint here, which I used for the tallboy. Expensive though so I decided to use the rest of what I had at least for the undercoats. It doesn't feel too bad on these though so whatever was on the skirting boards before must have made a difference.

At any rate, I can't do anymore today as I've finished that 375ml tin of paint now. But for my own records, here's what these bookshelves looked like before painting. Before cleaning, come to that and with the sun shining straight in so that you can't quite see the red of this dark colour. Have disliked these for so long, it is great to be finally doing something about it.

This one of two identical bookshelves is a bit beaten up at this stage so I'm going to have to remove the back and reattach it. I've cleaned it now and given the inside of the frame a quick first coat. Not a proper one but wanted to use up the paint that was on the brush and then just kept going.

 
This is the other one of the same type. The bottom half has had a second coat here, while the top half has only had one. In the meantime, I've done a second coat on the top half. And I've done two coats on all eight of the loose shelves as well as the three loose shelves from the smaller, lighter coloured shelves that you can see in the photo below.

The smallest shelves from that photo are now in the bedroom and the matching small corner shelf you can just about see is over the opposite side now. That photo feels like an awfully long time ago now. It was moving day. Before everything filled up!

I think I'm going to move the writing desk over to the opposite wall and try and centre the bookshelves a bit. So I'll have the smaller, lighter of the tall shelves in the middle (painted white) and the dark tall shelves (painted white) one on each side. And then the small square shelves (the ones with four shelves), one on each side of those again (not planning on painting those at the moment).


It might not be the prettiest set-up but at least it'd be somewhat more symmetrical.

Cleaning furniture

I've spent the day cleaning and moving around furniture. Now that I've been living here for a couple of weeks, I'm getting a better idea of whether I'm happy with the furniture in positions that were planned on paper. There are those things that just didn't really go well in the place I'd planned, there are those things that I had forgotten to plan a place for and then you live with it all for a while and change your mind about what should go where. Trying to make furniture from one place fit into the next is always difficult and it's made somewhat more challenging by the fact that most of what I have is second-hand anyway. Sometimes I do think it'd be much easier to have some kind of modular system from Ikea or somewhere, just to have everything matching no matter how you move it around. A lot of what I have is from Ikea but when you're buying second-hand, you end up with lots of individual pieces. That has its own charm but even though I did get rid of some furniture before moving, I still have probably more than is ideal for the space I have. Since I have so much stuff, though, I need plenty of cupboards and drawers to put it all in.

I've been painting my tallboy white and although I thought two coats would be enough, I'm leaning towards doing three on most of it. I have to do a second coat on the doors and do the drawer fronts as well and then I'll decide. Wasn't in the mood to start with that today though and so I started on cleaning some more stuff. I've never been the best at dusting although I did do it on occasion. What I never did, however, was really deep clean the insides of drawers and cupboards. Is this something that normal people do regularly? It's really kind of disgusting how filthy the runners of the drawers and things like that were. I may need to start remembering to do it all again every year or two. As I've been cleaning I've been putting those small pads onto the bottoms of the furniture as well. The floor here is really nice parquet and I want to look after it well if I can. I also glued together the various bits of my bedside locker (a three-drawer type) that have been irritating me for years because they kept coming apart.

And then it was a bit like a game of tetris for a while. Can't move that one until I've moved that one but in order to move that one I need to move this one over here. I put all of the painting and deocrating stuff that was just in plastic bags into a box. When I've finished getting things in order, that box will be labelled and put up into the attic, everything all in one place. I did bring a couple of things up to the attic today as well, mostly christmas decorations. Similarly though, I've been gathering them into boxes in an attempt to have everything in one place, so the effort will pay off in the end.

Tomorrow I'm going to try and clean the writing desk and the drawers that I keep all my stationary in. After that, it's the bookshelves. I'm wavering on these now. It is taking me so much longer to paint the tallboy than I thought it would that I'm just not sure how quickly I can get the bookshelves done as well. The main problem is a lack of space as I can't do one set and then move on to the others while they dry. I may end up unpacking things onto the shelves after all and then, when I have the space that is currently being occupied by boxes back, I can paint them. I need to examine the two dark ones anyway to see how much fixing they need. The backs need to be secured again but I'm actually now considering removing them completely and covering them with wallpaper before securing them properly. I do have wallpaper I could use and that would probably be faster anyway than painting. Then I'd just have to paint the frame and shelves.

For now, my hands are destroved with having been in and out of cleaning water all day and I suspect I will have several muscles aching for the next few days. I haven't unpacked anything more but it does feel like I made some progress so that's something.

Moving slowly but doing something every day

I have to keep reminding myself that I made the decision before I actually moved that I was going to take my time unpacking. Even if it took me months, I reasoned, this was my chance to do things properly and not repeat some of the mistakes I made moving into the last place eight years ago. My new place may be smaller but it is nicer in many ways and in the spirit of new beginnings, I felt the frustration living with boxes for a potentially long time would be worth it in the end.

At the moment, more or less two weeks in, I'm started to feel that frustration a bit and so I'm glad I said it so often to so many people. I know in the end, it'll be worth it. And except for perhaps one or two days, I really have been doing a little bit every day. The kitchen was first up and the bedroom isn't too bad either. The main living room is not usuable but I'm going to clear a couple of things this afternoon so that at least I will have set up the table. For now, I've been using a stool at the nice wide window sill in my bedroom, or eating from a plate on my knee while sitting on my bed or, a couple of times, on a stool on the balcony. I do still have to find one or two boxes of kitchen stuff. Despite my attempts to move the boxes straight into the kitchen as they were arriving, it's so small that I quickly ran out of space. And typically, it's one of the boxes that was packed close to the end that is, presumably, right at the bottom of the pile. Which means I'm missing my big knives and my salad spinner. Sigh. I haven't really cooked a lot (it's far too hot for that) yet so I can manage with just the few small knives but I'm really missing my salad spinner. Tea towels just don't work as well (at least not when I'm doing it).

Speaking of teatowels - I washed this great potato storage unit this morning. I used to keep potatoes in the top and onions in the middle and the bottom mostly stood empty. So now I'll keep potatoes in the bottom, onions in the middle and have put tea towels and dishcloths in the top. Apron and tea cosy are resting on top, still have to find a final place for them. I will evenutally, I think, put this up on a shelf so that I have the entire counter as a workspace.

One of the reasons it's taking so long is that I am determined to properly clean every piece of furniture before using it again. There is nothing that doens't need it and there was no point in doing it just before the stuff got loaded on a moving truck. So, last weekend I got the big set of drawers that used to sit in the living room done. They are now in my bedroom and serving as my main clothes storage, with everything folded vertically à la Marie Kondo. 


I had started doing this a while ago but had just the shelves in my old wardrobe to store stuff on and it wasn't ideal. Now, I've just about managed to get all of my vest tops, t-shirts and long-sleeve t-shirts into one drawer and I'm delighted. I even got rid of a couple of things, reasoning that using that big drawer as a limiting influence on my clothes would be a good thing. So, in future, I only get to buy new things if something old goes, because otherwise it won't fit. One other drawer has trousers (except work trousers, which will hang in the wardrobe), swimwear and nightclothes. And a third has jumpers, cardigans and fleeces. All sorted and my first bag of donations went off to the clothes bank yesterday.

During the past week then, I got my green shelves/cupboard done. That involved a bit more work, as the back had never really been attached properly (I bought it second-hand) since I got it. So I also spent some time hammering those tiny little nails into the back. For now, I've unpacked the books that used to be on the small bookshelves in the sitting room (mostly TBR stuff and then the WoT and Harry Potter books) and designated the lower cupboard as storage for blankets and sleeping bags. Towels are on the smaller shelf for now, as are table cloths and napkins. And shoes are going into the middle storage portion, which I used to keep records in and really couldn't handle the weight. Trying to figure out the best use of everything, as I'm changing the uses of several pieces of furniture. It's occupying a good bit of my thinking but it's another thing I think will be worth it in the end. And almost every day, I get a box or two sorted and unpacked. 

I've made a couple of new purchases for the kitchen. A kettle and toaster, courtesty of Aldi. And a nice new insert for my cutlery drawer. I'm kind of getting a kick out of having brought a bit of colour into my kitchen and it feels like I will take much better care of these things than I did of the last, which were all bought just because they were the cheapest I could find in a hurry. It's only now, smiling at my red kettle every morning, that I realise just how much I disliked the stainless steel one I had. 

And after contemplating throwing out the breadbin that had been languishing unused and hidden under a pile of stuff on top of the fridge in my old place, I'm glad I brought it with me. I've borrowed my sister's trick of finding space for it by simply putting it under the toaster. Fits perfectly and uses what would otherwise be dead space. Very nice to have somewhere to keep the bread again instead of it getting in the way all the time.

So, all in all, although I am getting a bit sick of looking at boxes, I'm happy with what I have gotten done and it's proving to me that I really am on the right track to be taking my time and doing things properly. And although I need to be very careful with money now, a few careful purchases are just putting the finishing touches on my pleasure at living here.

Sure who wouldn't smile at this lovely burst of colour every time they opened the drawer to get a spoon?

I have too much stuff

It feels like I may never be finished packing but the movers are coming tomorrow morning at eight so I have to be finished before then. I suspect I may be having another late night tonight. I'm nearly at a stage where I have one room (the bedroom) completely finished, which means I can start shifting boxes in there. That moves those boxes out of the way of the few cupboards in the sitting room that aren't quite finished yet. And then it's the bit I've been dreading, the large built in, stuffed to the gills, cupboards in the hallway. If I don't quite have the kitchen packed up it's not the end of the world as I'd be able to finish it in the morning while the movers start on everything else. Since I'm on the 4th floor and there's no lift, they'll be taking a while to get everything down. But the hall cupboards are right beside the front door so they absolutely must be emptied before they start.

I went through most of my jars at the weekend. Any of those which were just empty jars of bought foodstuffs (friends used to donate them to me, it all got a bit out of hand) have been deposited in the bottle bank. I've only kept the ones I actually bought - the glass is defintely tougher and, to be honest, most of what I want to do involves actually processing the jars in a water bath so they need to be proper canning jars. I do still have quite a lot of chutney and jams but since I didn't make any at all last year, and very little the year before, anything I do have is a few years old at this stage. Much as it pains me to do it, I'm trying to be at least a little bit ruthless and keep telling myself "new beginnings, new beginnings, new beginnings". So, I've decided to dump the contents of anything left and just bring the cleaned jars. That's work, of course, but a friend is coming over this evening to help so I think I'll set her to that task. People have been very good about offering to help but I find it very difficult to let people be at my stuff and so much has to be sorted first that it's hard to find things where I can just say "pack that, please". My poor sister was over for a few days visit, planned long before I ever knew I'd be moving so she didn't exactly have a relaxing holiday. I'm so glad she was here though, I'm not sure I'd have been able to do it without her and I'm very certain I'd be far closer to being a complete basket case if she hadn't kept me going the last few days. She left yesterday so now I just need to get finished. And when I'm in Ireland in two weeks I'll return the favour, as she'll be moving house then. No rest for the wicked...

Matching plates and bowls up

I few months after I moved here, I bought a set of second-hand dishes (you can see a picture on this old post). I still love these dishes but unfortunately a collapsing shelf when the cupboard door was open a few years ago means that I have almost none of the red plates or saucers left. I think I have one plate intact and four saucers (one which has a tiny chip out of it). The bigger sideplates have the pattern on them and I have plenty of them so I just use them and only occasionally think about how nice it would be if I had some of the red. I've toyed with the idea of going to one of those paint-your-own-ceramics places and seeing if I could re-create the colour but, well, that's one of those things you think about but almost never actually do.

On the spur of the moment last night, I called into a shop down the road from me. Not a pound shop, but not a million miles off either. They sell lots of cheapo stuff and then a few more expensive things. But if you need to grab a photoframe or a plastic box for under the bed, it's the place to go. I was thinking to myself as I headed out that maybe I should buy a small bowl in an effort to encourage myself to eat more salad. I'm not a huge fan of it in winter but a small side-salad with my dinner wouldn't be too hard to incorporate into my day. Perhaps if I had a nice bowl just for the purpose? I do have the soup bowls from my dinner service but they're not a great shape and a bit too big for what I was thinking of. The few small bowls they had along the lines of what I was thinking weren't really calling to me though and none was even close to matching any of the colours I have. I used to love having a mishmash of stuff but since I got this set I do make a bit of an effort to have matching things - not sure if that's something that happens as you get older anyway. I think perhaps wanting matched or non-matching stuff is one of those things that comes and goes in phases.

And then, just as I had decided to leave rather than spending money on something that wasn't really right, I passed the nice pottery section, where they have colourful hand-painted tagines and that kind of thing. Including, this week, a 2 for 3 special offer on the tapas dishes. I have to admit I normally walk right past this bit because gorgeous as the colours are, it's too tempting. But the big yellow signs caught my eye and then I spied some red stuff. Including some small bowls. And look: not a bad match at all, is it? It's not quite the same but close enough and, most importantly, it doesn't clash.

 
I grabbed the two small bowls that were there, added an olive dish type thing as my freebie and am happy out now. I wasn't really planning on spending money, don't have any to spare but this was totally worth it. I've been wandering in and out of the kitchen all day admiring them. More expensive than I might usually buy but for ten euro, not a reach-for-the-credit-card moment either. And although at first I hesitated because they might be too small, they're a bit deceptive so just the right size for a decent, but still small, portion of salad. And yes, I have tried it out already.

Colours are a bit strange in this photo but you can see the size of it beside the saucer, really not big at all. But big enough and I think it'll be a big help for February when I start paying closer attention to portion control.

Re-visiting old lists - January Cure Assignment 2

Back at the beginning of January I started the Apartment Therapy January Cure. I didn't get much further than this assignment I think but since I was reminded of it while searching for something else I decided it would be a good place to start doing something I've been thinking of doing for a while anyway - revisiting some of the lists I have posted over the years and seeing what, if anything, has changed. So here we go, my original list and updates/comments, if I have any, in red.

• Clear workroom half of bedroom (so that it can actually become, you know, my workroom)
• Paint
• Clear sleeping half of bedroom
• Clear pile beside blanket box - done (and no new pile has accumulated)
• Clear pile in front of cupboard unit - done (and no new pile)
• Clear telephone table - took me a minute to even figure out what this is. Not completely done but I have moved this table to the other end of the bedroom so at least it's gone from the sleeping half.
• Clear out locker 
• Glue locker drawers properly
• Sand down locker and paint?
• Clear shelves of cupboard unit
• Paint
• Patch duvet cover
• Check blanket box for potential bedclothes for dying - not really but I did pull out one or two things that I'm just going to get rid of
• Finish emptying box (which the Table of Doom contents got transferred into last week when I had guests coming)
• Find good way to store magazines
• Go through loose recipes, get rid of what I'm never going to use and file others properly
• Hang Van Gogh postcards - have hung three of these, need to figure out where I want to put the rest.
• Wash rug - not yet but I did fold it up and put it to one side, don't really need it until weather gets cold anyway.
• Clean couch
• Clear out crafting cupboard so that two bags on top of it can go in it
• Sand and paint crafting cupboard
• Sand and paint tallboy
• Sand and paint bookshelves
• Re-paper end wall
• Move bookshelves
• Strip old paper
• Hang new paper
• Clean all doorknobs and window handles - did windows in sitting room but that's all so far
• Set up wifi
• Hang keep calm poster I got for my birthday - got frame and put it into frame so just need to get nails up and actually hang it
• Paint hallway
• Clear built-in cupboards in hallway
• Put black backing paper in picture frames of Strasbourg pictures
• Finish stripping paper in bathroom
• Re-paper and paint bathroom
• Hang pictures in bathroom - despite not having done the rest I have hung one picture
• Get and hang new bathroom cabinet
• Clear top of fridge
• Put up shelves in kitchen
• Strip paper in kitchen
• Re-paper kitchen
• Clear filter on washing machine
• Deep clean cooker
• Pot up aloe vera plants

So, not a huge amount done but I'm really glad I "found" this list again as a number of these things are small and easy fixes so I'll try and fit them in soon.