Disorder

I want you to know that I am having a happy new diary-writing experience tonight.

I have cleaned my computer keyboard.

It has been upsetting me for ages, because it was filthy. Some of the keys had become a sort of sticky brownish colour, which Mark says is probably the colour of ancient hand cream. I use it a lot, and wipe it sometimes, but it would appear that wiping is not enough.

I took it out to Mark’s shed and scrubbed it with some exciting chemical stuff that is supposed to be for cleaning brake pads. This was not very nice in the little cuts on the ends of my fingers, but it worked brilliantly, and the keyboard is gleaming.

Obviously it does not work any better but it feels like it.  I keep catching sight of it as I write, and it is a small happy event every time.

I have also, whilst on the life-improvement campaign, changed the picture on my computer. It now shows a slideshow of all of our photographs,  slipping easily from one to the next every five seconds. This is wonderful and captivating, and I am enjoying it very much, except that it is so interesting I keep getting distracted from whatever I am doing and moving it out of the way so that I can look at the pictures behind it. At the back of this page I can just see glimpses of a holiday in Blackpool when Oliver was about nine, and I am longing to look…

I am back now. It may not be such a good idea. I am never going to get anything useful done at this rate.

I almost did not get anything useful done at all, because the day got off to a terribly frustrating start.

I had dragged an old bit of furniture down from the loft. It is a bit like drawers, except that instead of drawers it has got baskets. This is because it is Modern and On Trend, or at any rate it was about ten years ago. I wanted it down for storing our winter clothes, because our bedroom is not big enough to have capacity for thermal underwear as well as shorts. It has got to be one or the other, which leads to some dithering choices at around mid-April.

I sanded the coffee stains off the top of it and thought that I would help disguise its general weariness by staining it with some nice mahogany stain.

This ran out halfway through.

We bought it from the ironmonger’s shop in the village. He is taking advantage of the bat-flu crisis to open only a few days a week, and when I went to look, today turned out not to be one of them.

Nor did tomorrow or Monday.

I came home and looked on the mighty Internet to see if anybody else was selling it, but they weren’t. Everybody was closed except for B&Q, who did not have any.

This was terribly irritating. I am not at all good at waiting for things, I would have been the child who ate the marshmallow the second the door had closed behind the experimenter, and then had a look under the table to see if there were any more in the drawers underneath.

Mark offered to take me to Kendal to purchase some different, but almost the same, stain , but in the end I declined. It will have to wait until next week. I have put it back in the hallway anyway, even though it is peculiarly half red. It is a good thing we can’t have visitors at the moment.

I am sorry to say that we did not finish the bathroom either.

The grouting is done, and the painting is finished, but we ran out of get-up-and-go before we got to the floor, so we have left it until tomorrow. Taking a floor up and putting pipes underneath it is a jolly lot of hard work.

We thought that we would have a rest instead, but accidentally got distracted into taking my sewing cupboard apart. This has been a horrible jumble for ages, with upholstery fabrics stacked on top of calico and muslin and unfinished knitting.

It has been so difficult to bother hunting for anything in the sewing-tangle that I have just not wanted to start doing sewing. There were things that need mending mixed in with things that should be turned into dishcloths, mixed in with name tapes and curtain hooks and bits of things that might come in useful.

The reason for the disorder was that there was no shelf in it. It was just a handily large cupboard.

Mark went into the yard to create a shelf out of bits of an old cupboard that had once belonged to the chap next door. Making the shelf was difficult because the cupboard is a big round shape.

I dragged everything out of it and sorted it all out.

We have not finished that either. The shelf is made and ready to go in, and the fabrics are neatly folded ready to go in, but we have run out of get-up-and-go completely.

I expect we will have some more by morning.

Have a picture of the men in my life.