It turns out, right, that living in squalor is really not where I want to be.

But all our housekeeping mechanisms broke down in the onslaught of 2009 (the construction of the south wing) and the early part of 2010 (my vitamin B12 deficiency), and they're only just beginning to come back.

I still feel at sea. So I'm going to take a leaf out of ailbhe's ( Read more... )

I think that in some past life niallm and I must have been burrowing creatures. We seem to have an inexorable1 need to arrange our possessions in teetering heaps all around us, with little winding pathways between them leading to the places where we want to go.

1Well. We're trying to exor it this year - wish us luck!

I'm not a squeamish person. Compost delights me. I'll cheerfully clear out a blocked drain. As an emo teenager I once lay in bed and watched as ants devoured a dead woodlouse on my bedroom carpet. More recently, I developed the conviction that childbirth and early parenthood had cauterised whatever vestiges of perturbability remained to me (though ( Read more... )

...I love it when you talk kitchens ( Read more... )

Happy St Radegund's Day, one and all!

Up to what is your (perhaps less than ideally) faithful correspondent?

( Click here to find out... )

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 ( Read more... )

Too many holidays.

So far this year:

First weekend in March: Choir trip to Galway. Two nights. First night just me and Oisín; niallm came down the following day. Pretty packed schedule, featuring a three-hour rehearsal on the Saturday morning, which I spent following Oisín around the church. Choir folk mostly unchilded, poor understanding that minding ( Read more... )

I was ringing drain-clearing companies yesterday to talk about an ongoing problem we have, when I stumbled into the following little cesspit ( Read more... )

Well, I appear to have made it to the end of January without dying, which was the principal aim. Other aims, such as to finish the project I was working on in good time, tidy my desk, file my e-mail, take some time to myself before surrendering unto the wide blue toddler: these were not so rigorously executed. But that's OK. I'm there, that's it, ( Read more... )

Why I love niallm, reason no. 400,003:

[our kitchen, end of dinner; Niall's clearing up, I'm seeing if the Oyster would like a Petit Filou*]Radzer: Would you like this, sweetheart ( Read more... )