Just saw my parents off at Heathrow for their return to Australia and now am very sad. In spite of my grumbling, it’s been lovely having them to stay for three months & I’m really going to miss them. Contemplating a trip to Aus this year now…

But enough moping. I did achieve something today: the start of the traditional New Year spring clean. There’s still tons to do but it feels great to have made a start!

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Still exhausted, and with the heavy snowfall and the arrival of Djelibeybi’s sister to stay for the weekend, most of the day got wasted in frantic house-cleaning, then photographing the snow. I never did quite wake up and though I tried very hard in the afternoon to progress the layout stuff for the quintet, nothing really got done, so in the end I gave up and made a chicken and leek pie instead. I fell asleep in front of the telly in the evening, which is a measure of how exhausted I was – I NEVER do that. I absolutely loathe it. Heigh ho.

And, in the interests of Christmas culinary experimentation, we made our first-ever batch of ebelskivers. Just plain ones, with the vanilla sugar we brought back from Copenhagen several Christmases ago sprinkled over them. They turned out fabulously – I was worried about turning them over, to start with (you need to turn them with 2 skewers which looked harder than it turned out to be) and whether they’d be cooked in the middle. But both worries turned out to be without cause. They went down very well – and very fast, so it now looks like we’ll have a go at making a version with dill in the batter and a smoked salmon and cream cheese filling (out of our ebelskiver cookbook) for Boxing Day breakfast.

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Still no better, but it had to be done so we hired a car and steeled ourselves and toddled off to Ikea. Mission? To buy a tablecloth, vase and a couple of picture frames. We came home with a tablecloth (not the one we intended – they’d sold out of that one), a vase, 18 glasses, a pitcher, a recycling bin, a wall clock for the kitchen, some red boxes to organise messy crap, and a railing to put up in the pantry. Um. Well, that’s Ikea for you. Oh, and 2 bottles of lingonberry cordial and another 2 of elderflower cordial.

So it wasn’t entirely the plan, but I have to say that the results have been awesome. Finally the flat is starting to look lived in rather than camped in! The clock, red boxes and railing have almost transformed the kitchen/pantry area. Neater, more stylish, more loved-looking. And we got the hall clear too so at last I can vacuum properly! And the plastic recycling is neatly encased in its new box and so isn’t flopping about in front of the bookcase. Exciting!

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And so I’m back on the Eurostar today. With a couple of quiet hours, it seemed a good chance to take stock of what needs to be done in the next couple of days to get this site online, so I’ve started pulling out chunks of code that will become PHP includes, stole the code for the contact form from Minim Media and have built a new page for social media links. So I think that, barring the video page which may be scrapped, pretty much all the content is in place now – huzzah!

Looking ahead, tomorrow I think I need to focus on getting the PHP bits and pieces working – the includes, forms, highlighting menu items, etc. I think that’s the biggest thing. Plus, to go with that, I need to determine how I’m going to identify the various pages as belonging to a particular section. I guess I could just include a variable in each page – it would be nice and clear, but I’ve also been considering whether it might not be easier just to divide up the content into folders and identify the section by folder name from the URL. The problem with this may be one of longevity. There was an article on URL-naming that was referenced from our course materials for the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices course I took earlier this year which I think I may need to re-read – its premise was that addresses of pages should relate directly to what they are about and not reference filetypes, technical approaches or current-but-possibly-unsustainable filing systems. The idea is to end up with a URL that can be used for that content forever – if the page’s focus changes, then it needs a new URL which reflects that. I like the idea of this, that the address for something is permanent because there is no need for it to change – it means that other sites can link with confidence, and archives can be maintained without the need for ever renewing links. So I’ll be re-reading that, I think, and I’ll see what is feasible to implement right now.

And now, back hooooooommme! And then tonight, the concert. Eeek!

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HUGE leaps forward today. Djeli assembled both the CD and DVD mini-bookcases and the full-size Billy bookcase and I populated them with the relevant media, emptying about 5 boxes in the process – YAY! Unfortunately it seems we’re such media junkies that we actually have overflow from all three media types’ bookcases into the not-so-useful bookcase in the loungeroom. And all this in only 5 years… Must… exercise… self-control. He started trying to assemble the bed too, but discovered that one of the sides has been drilled wrong, which is VERY annoying because it means we need to hire a car again tomorrow night to take the offending part back down to Ikea and wait in the returns queue for hours But it will mean that I can hopefully do the remaining errands there while he waits without having to face the horror of buses.

And we ordered the futons to go into the unassembled bedframe so the parents will have something to sleep on.

And we clarified that the poster I’d been thinking of buying (a great one of Battersea power station from Habitat) wouldn’t really go with the new red bookcases, so we saved ourselves £25 on that and will probably get a photo blown up instead.

And I baked. I like to have something to nibble on while I travel and I’m not that fond of commercial treats in general – since going on the deprivation diet a couple of years back I find I can taste the preservatives used in so many commercial biscuits and cakes, which kind of ruins it. BUT I found a fabulous recipe for homemade Oreo cookies and made it up this evening – just the cookies though, because I’ve never been a fan of cream-filled biscuits (although I did fill one pair for Djelibeybi with the leftover Mexican vanilla buttercream from the cake I made for work last week), and WOW. Really brilliant. And SO easy.

Oh, and we washed my teddy bear so he’s ready for my parents’ visit next week and they won’t look at him and go “ewwwww!”

Enough capital letters for one night. Signing off to file biscuits in their tin

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A good friend gave me a talking-to on Friday about how I’m always trying to do too much. And he’s right. I woke up absolutely hating everything today. The house is too neutral, I was disappointed with the work the landlord had done in the bathroom – he seems to do everything on the cheap and often without consideration for how it looks or functions, so in changing the shower setup so we can shower without crouching, he removed the good quality, perfectly functional and convenient mixer tap and replaced it with two cheap taps, so we no longer have the convenience of staggering, half-asleep into the bathroom & just lifting the mixer tap, knowing it’s on the right temperature – we’re back to faffing around with trying to get the temperature right before we can step in. And they’re the sort of taps where the colour panels on top start unwinding themselves the instant you start to use them. And the plumber put them on the wrong way round so hot says cold and vice versa. Small things, but enough to set off an attack of the glums.

So I spent a fair chunk of the morning thinking about how I can make the house brighter and better and feel more like home than rental accommodation. And I think I’ve at least settled on a palette of red, orange and teal. It’s kind of hard to make stuff go with the oatmealy walls because they’re neutral but not truly neutral – in the kitchen, for example, depending on the time of day and available light, like right now (overcast, indoor lighting on) one wall looks pale yellow, the other looks almost apricot. But it’s the same colour. So I think strong colours are really the only way to tackle it. Anything else will be wishy washy.

On the plus side, this fit of frustration made me get up and do some tidying and cleaning and to write some lists of all the things we need to buy or get done before my parents arrive in about 3 weeks’ time. I put on the CD of Tripod vs the Dragon which we bought at the show in Edinburgh (awesome!) and sorted a bunch of stuff out.

Djelibeybi had to go to Andover in the evening so I caught the train with him as far as Shepherd’s Bush, bought some stuff for dinner and wandered round the shops & finally caved on the beautiful little red & orange Le Creuset Poterie ramekins I’ve been eyeing off for at least 2 years. They were a little more expensive than I’d seen them elsewhere, but I was so desperate for colour that I just thought ‘sod it’ and took them to the counter… Where I discovered they were 20% off!

And then I decided to take the evening off too – house to myself, Wiener schnitzel for my tea, I made apple and raspberry crumble in the ramekins and watched a whole DVD of Season 1 of Chuck. Happiness!

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Indeed, have gone! Our landlord’s coming tomorrow with plumber to do some repairs/improvements, and everything was such a mess that I really felt I needed to clear some stuff up, so I’ve done 2 loads of laundry, put away the clean sheets that were drifting about for ages, cleaned out the fridge, put out the rubbish, put on the dishwasher, tidied the remnant laundry which was flowing out of the basket and all over the floor and generally neatened things up. I even managed to clear out and get rid of another box. I know (like yesterday’s) that this isn’t hugely creative in a concrete sense, but for me being tidy is often a first step to getting my brain in the right place to actually do some work. So yay!

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Well, it may not be hugely creative but one thing’s for sure: getting one’s financial records up to date sure helps clear the brain to make way for more exciting stuff. Plus there’s the pleasure of ticking things off the to-do list and feeling super-organised!

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I’d actually forgotten about this poor little blog. There’s just been so much going on over the past month – work, the piece for London New Wind Festival (stress and heartbreak over that one – more on that later, I suspect), my healing ankle (good news on that one, at least!), a week off frantically working on the piece, then frantically trying to get the house in order & achieve other chores before zooming off to Edinburgh to sample the Festival for a few brief days and go to a meeting in Dundee. And of course, while in Scotland I accidentally relaxed, and within 4 hours had the flu. Which I still have, a week and a half later.

So now I am at home, bored, frustrated and wanting to get things done but lacking the actual physical strength to do it. Every nap is plagued with hideous nightmares (this afternoon I was being chased at vast speed by an aggressive eagle, last night I woke whimpering at 3am thinking my legs were wound around with hundreds of red and black centipedes) which usually indicates that my creative brain is running and ready to go… except that I don’t have the strength to actually do very much.

So it’s been a tad on the frustrating side, really. And we’re nearing the end of August now. The piece is due in final form, with parts, on 1 September; on 21 September my parents arrive for 3 months and we all go to Paris for a week, which I’m quite looking forward to – when my brain lets go of the panic of all the pages and pages of things that need to be done before then – everything ranging from doing some handwashing (working out the best way to do handwashing in our new flat) to getting the landlord to take away the horrible lumpy bed in what will be the parents’ room to harassing Djelibeybi to organise a passport for Number One Son who is supposed to be coming to live with us next year. Not to mention getting back to my harmony studies, the Satie/Dada article, the web book, reworking my website and actually doing something about the many, many incomplete projects that are lying about the place…

Now I’m going to stop thinking about it and maybe go and do a little gentle baking, if the germ will let me stay standing for that long.

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It filled a whole A4 page. Without really trying. Which is rather scary, I think. Conclusion: I’m expecting too much of myself, and because I’m too tired to be rational, I’m blaming others for not apparently putting in as much effort as I’d like them too (even though they have their own stuff going on). I think this has been useful. Unfortunately there’s very little I can ditch off the list right now, but at least now I have a better handle on why I’m falling apart so I can hopefully be a bit kinder to myself and a bit more forgiving of others. Or at least that’s the plan. Oh look – a plan. That’s another thing for the list. *sigh*

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