Lucy and Jack have gone again.
It has been splendid to have them milling about under my feet for a few days, although it has been a very short visit. They have only been here since late on Thursday night, and really it was barely enough time to make it worth washing their sheets, although I have, obviously. You would not wish to live with a guilty awareness of unwashed bedlinen lurking odiferously in a quiet corner of the house.
Not that they are odiferous, or at any rate, not that I noticed.
They were tired this morning, Jack and Lucy, not their sheets, obviously. Their friend Emily came over yesterday, and they had an evening of drinking too much and laughing uproariously over a game of Monopoly, which left poor Lucy not in the best of health and well-being this morning.
I missed out on all of that roister-doistering because of going to work. Indeed, I barely saw anything of them all day yesterday. Jack was working and so disappeared anyway, and I had some sewing to do in the attic.
The sewing was a pair of Jack’s trousers, which needed hemming, and Lucy’s curtains again, which had turned out to be the wrong length, and had to be let down. Fortunately there was a large hem. I do not know how I managed to mess that up in the original curtain-construction stages. I thought I had allowed lots and lots of extra length, but obviously not, I must have been thinking about something else. This is not surprising. I am usually thinking about something else and not concentrating properly.
That was the thing that went wrong when I was at school.
I have decided to focus my concentrated energies by making a To Do list. I do this sometimes anyway, but it was recommended by a motivational book I read recently, which reminded me that it might be useful. I have got a very lot of things needing my attention, and today I thought that I would write them all down and thus inspire myself into a prolonged outburst of decisive action.
It was a list of the things that I really need to get done before Mark gets home, and there were so many Items upon it that they occupied two columns. I will have to continue being energetic even whilst I sleep if I want to get them all done, and they did not even include all the usual things that have to be done every day, like emptying the dogs and hanging washing up.
Even so, I thought that having a list was Inspirational, and I have resolved to cross off as many things as I possibly can before my entirely arbitrary deadline of this time next week. In the end I have become quite excited by the challenge, and have already tried to cram some more things into my evening than I would usually bother about. Order More Printer Ink was on the list, well, I have done it in between writing these very words, and so when I get home there will already be an Item to be crossed off.
I will have had a small success, which will encourage me to doing some of the more tiresomely lengthy Items like Finishing The Advent Calendars.
I have not put Go To Work on the list, but quite a few of the listed Items will not be possible until I have earned some more money, so I thought probably I could just take that as understood.
It is not as if I am likely to forget about it.
I had a very late night last night, which has not helped today go very smoothly. I took a last job from the nightclub to go miles away, and by the time I crawled into bed it was six o’clock. For some infuriating reason, however, when I woke up at ten this morning for one of those calls of nature that are one of the more tiresome features of getting older, I couldn’t go back to sleep. In the end I was obliged to abandon the idea and join the children downstairs. Jack’s dad had very kindly turned up to shift the dresser in his van, which was a relief, because I would not have had time to go to Manchester this week, certainly not with a To Do list like mine, and already I have got fed up of squishing myself around it and trying not to step on the dogs.
In the end they had all departed, dresser safely shoved into the back of the van, and according to their latest update they have managed to shunt it around the doorway in Lucy’s house and stand it in the front room, so it has been a Happily Dressered Ever After.
After they had gone I dashed around making a start on my To Do List.
It is going to be keeping me very busy for some time.
You may not have heard the last of this.
