Meme of fives

[radegund]

The chaotic state of our house is getting me down. I am suffering from severe Chaos Paralysis. We are progressing, but slowly, slowly, and I feel like curling up in a small ball until it's all sorted. I'm TIRED of serving dinner on the large desk that is shoved up against the piled-high kitchen table, and eating it sitting on a low sofa from which I can just stretch my chin to the table-top, and having to edge everywhere all the time, and having to move smaller furniture around the kitchen every time I want to change task, and only being able to find the limited number of things I knew we'd need within days of the big clear-out and therefore put in accessible places, and not being at all sure where my tax return letter is, which I need before the end of the month, and argh and argh and argh.

So have a meme.

What I was doing...

5 minutes ago: Feverishly ogling knitting blogs. I am doing a lot of knitting at the moment. It's portable, controllable and very, very soothing.

5 hours ago: Writing a letter to the nice man who's going to tell us whether our house insurance is going to pay anything towards repairing the storm damage to our garden wall, which is now cracked in several places and leaning at a rakish angle out towards the public footpath.

5 days ago: Wednesday. My incomparable mother-in-law came around and finished the (then) current phase of digging in the back garden. I wasn't able to help her, because I'd pulled a muscle in my chest some time around Monday night (no idea what I did - probably just Oyster-hoisting at a bad angle) and could barely lift a cup of tea, let alone shovel earth. She also minded Oisín for most of the day, because she is ace. I did make her some rather good roast potatoes in partial recompense, and then hot-footed it to choir rehearsal, which was great. We're doing a concert of Italian music on 25 November, and it's going to ROCK.

5 weeks ago: Mid-September. Legend has it that in that fabled Golden Age it was possible to traverse our kitchen without stopping to move things out of the way, and yea, e'en ascend the stairs without sucking one's belly in and edging crabwise between massive articles of furniture or hooking one's knee up over things the better to perform complicated, physics-defying swivels. For lo, this was in the time e'er ever the Great Sanding came to blight our lives, and there was a semblance of sanity about our downstairs that we have left far, far behind. In those days, all I had to worry about was the extreme filth generated by the garden project. When I say that I wish there was the remotest possibility of mopping the kitchen floor any time soon, you may comprehend the gravity of our situation. Oh, it was also around now that the abovementioned storm damage occurred. Those high winds? Yes, those.

5 months ago: Mid-May. Oisín and I were in Reading, visiting ailbhe, Rob, Linnea and Ailbhe's Inner Emer. We were having a fabulous time, just pootling around doing fun things with the kids or talking, talking, talking. Two parents plus two toddlers is (mostly) a very pleasant ratio indeed. I recall that Oisín was feeding like a fiend - possibly because of the unfamiliarity - and I found it quite difficult to eat enough to keep me from gnawing on my (uncooked) hosts. Luckily, Ailbhe, as a pregnant breastfeeder, understood and arranged plenty of extra food.

5 years ago: October 2001. We'd seen this house on 28 September and fallen in somewhat surprised love with it. We put a bid in, which was rejected, then upped it, and finally got the call to say that yes, they were prepared to sell it to us. I can't remember what date we heard this news, but we got the keys on 26 November, so it must have been somewhere around now. October was dominated by running around clawing the necessary paperwork out of the solid granite facades of various banks, insurers, surveyors and other public benefactors. The unspeakable tedium of this, coupled with the air of direful, anxious necessity, made for an adrenalin-sodden, please-can-I-eat-my-own-leg-off-instead-of-enduring-this-for-one-more-second atmosphere that I would be quite happy never to meet again. But hey, it passed, and all was well, and here we are five years later, revisiting the unfeasible chaos of those early days just after moving in, only this time with a toddler - who plaintively asks, "wibbing woom go back to normill?" every few days. I know how he feels.

Comments

[socmot.livejournal.com]

Have I missed something? Are you moving house?

[radegund.livejournal.com]

Oops!

No, not in the least. We've been redecorating: had our living-room floors refinished two weeks ago, so absolutely everything that was in them had to be put elsewhere. We have a lot of stuff, and we swiftly ran out of elsewhere. Doing the walls soon (we hope), bookshelves this weekend, and then maybe we can restore a bit of order.

[ailbhe]

WHAT is going on?!

[radegund.livejournal.com]

Sorry - very unclear. We're doing major redecorations downstairs, including having the living room / study floors sanded and waxed, and because of various delays, we're still stuck at the OMG CHAOS phase of the works. But not for too much longer, we fervently hope.

[glitzfrau.livejournal.com]

I hope you're ogling Aileen. She gives good ogle.

Hang on in there, and I'll see you soon, sweetie!

[ainetl.livejournal.com]

are the floors all done now then and moving on to the bookshelves? sounds like it'll be beautiful when it's all done. and i hope the insurance worked out for the garden wall.

[londonn7.livejournal.com]

inneresting. will you be allowing revellers into aforementioned house on the 23rd this year? I am trying to hatch a plan that would allow me to stay for longer this time....

[radegund.livejournal.com]

We do seem to have appropriated the 23rd somewhat, don't we? That's definitely the plan, barring anything earth-shattering. Your presents presence will, as always, be most appreciated :-)