The Here and Now

I am a very disorganised person.  I am also untidy, but I suspect that comes in part from being disorganised.  I have never developed a place for most of the things in my life.  I mean, I have a cutlery drawer, and an underwear drawer (although my undergarments often sit in the clean washing basket until worn again), but most of my possessions stay where they land, which is not ideal and really needs to change.

Take my crochet hook for example.  I have hundreds of the things, but only one that I use almost every day.  It is a satisfyingly red aluminium 4.5mm hook, and it is the exact right size for Stylecraft Special DK yarn, which I also use almost every day.

You will notice that it has a cork skewered onto the end.  This is because I lose the damn thing almost as often as I use it.  Now that it can't easily fall down the side of the sofa, or roll underneath it, or be picked up unnoticed in a large piece of crochet work, I lose it (and therefore swear) far less frequently.  Of course, it is the only 4.5mm hook I can find, despite having bought three complete sets over recent years, because I only caught on to the cork trick after at least two other hooks vanished into the ether, never to be found again.  Or at least, not until I rake some of my unfinished projects out from my home's various nooks and crannies.

My mother says that I have a grasshopper mind.  Which might go some way towards explaining how I can spend hour upon hour making a blanket, then find a photo of it on my camera a year or so later and wonder what it is!  After a few seconds staring at it vague bells started to ring at the back of my mind.  I sort of recall making it as a blankie for a toddler, when I fancied a shorter project than the 2 kingsize granny stripe blankets I had made in succession.  I also decide to do a colour repeat, to see whether I liked it.  The jury is still out on that.

I've seen worse, but it doesn't wow me.  The point is, though, that I've put it away somewhere and completely forgotten its existence.  It's not so bad that it deserves never to see the light of day again, and it's a waste of time, money and effort if it is never to be used.  This "losing" of things is not deliberate, it's my disorganisation again.  I need to come up with a strategy.  Actually, I need to declutter, because if I didn't have so much stuff, then so much of what I do own would not be out of sight behind newer stuff!  I dare not show you my bedroom.  In fact, I'd not dare show you any room in my house.  I'm not so bad that I'd set any records for filth on "How Clean is Your House", but House Beautiful it is not!

And disorganisation has other, less frivolous consequences.  If I am to be un(der)employed, then I have to cut back on my outgoings.  That has to start with not wasting food. I'm normally not too bad in this area, being a great leftovers consumer and food recycler. (Last night's lefotver soup becomes today's shepherd's pie with the addition of a tin of lentils and some frozen veggie mince).  But I shocked myself earlier in the week when I opened my fridge's veg drawer and found almost the entire contents beyond use.  Including a whole bag of spring greens, not even opened.  This has to stop.  Apart from the financial consideration, it's just plain wrong.

To my shame, I can see carrots (black spotted and slimy), white cabbage (black spotted and dehydrated beyond use) a whole red pepper (wrinkled and with great slimy patches), the two heads of spring cabbage gone yellow (look, the one on the right's starting to flower, bless it) and part of a celeriac root which is pretty much fossilised.  There are a couple of apples lurking in there, too, out of sight.  Ack.  Awful waste.  All headed for the compost heap, which is my only consolation - at least it's not all going to landfill.

After that depressing image, here are a few other, more cheerful aspects of my life at the moment.

I love my garden.  Not to work in, but to look at from the kitchen window as I wash up, and to sit out in with some wine and music and Husband (not necessarily in that order of importance) when the weather is kind.  At the moment it's looking very overgrown, because Husband (who is in exclusive charge of grasscutting) has a note excusing him from heavy work due to a recent hernia repair.  The grass is becoming very, very long.

Here my senior cat demonstrates how far up her side the grass currently reaches.  You can tell from her half-Siamese frosty glare that the current state of her domain is not appreciated.  She is doing her best to help us with this situation by chewing off, eating, and then throwing up on the dining-room carpet as much grass as she can manage, but she's only one cat, dedicated though she may be.

Not all of the garden is looking so neglected.  We also have riots of wallflowers in two old half-barrels.  They perfume the garden with scents of my childhood and delight me whenever I go out there.

And the lilac bush is in flower, proving that I was wrong and Husband was right when he pruned it back so hard last year that I predicted he'd killed the tree.  I only photographed the top part of it, official reason being that it looks wonderful against the current old-jeans colour of the sky.  Real reason is the lower half is obscured by an unlovely rotary clothelines that I can't reach over the long grass to dismantle.

To finish on, here's a photo of my one and only white camelia that's not been rendered brown and crispy-edged by the wind:

Please ignore the two flies inconsiderately bonking on the leaf to the left.  It is spring, after all.