Nov. 1st? Cleaning house.
Nov. 1st, 2007 11:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7I think I hurt myself cleaning.
No really--my knee is sore as hell. I'm wearing kneebraces today. Black kneebraces with black stockings under a skirt that should be mid-calf length but for some reason is riding up over my fat gut and exposing the knee braces. I am sure that it looks incomprehensibly sexy. Orthopedic gear is always highly attractive.
Since I have to have this PR Committee meeting at my house, I finally have to get my house *actually* into order. This is good, as having already cleaned my house means it'll be easier to re-clean it for when my folks come to visit. Of late I've been a bit overwhelmed and haven't managed to keep up with routine things--I've been very frustrated by things like the fact that I'll do 2 dishwasher loads and then hand-wash dishes for an hour, and do this several times in several weeks, and then Z will do one dishwasher load, leave the sink half-full of dishes, and consider it even.
I know a lot of this is perception and if you asked him he'd complain that he's doing way more.
But I realized that my automatically getting up early and sort of invisibly spending 2 hours on laundry every week is kind of shooting myself in the foot. I then have this nebulous feeling that I'm doing more than my share, but if I am, it's invisible.
So I didn't do laundry over the weekend (I was too busy anyway). Z volunteered to clean the kitchen, because I freaked out about how much we had to do. He was done at work early yesterday, so he walked down the street to a take-out joint and bought dinner. I swung by and picked him up. We ate dinner and then got to work. Well, he took a short nap, actually. But I didn't protest, and started on the laundry and living room. I cleared out part of the living room, got the slip cover back on the love seat (we put it on, weren't sure we liked it, and then Chita threw up on it, so it's ours now! That was an easy decision-- but while it's washable, you can't put it in the dryer, so I had it hanging on the line upstairs for over a week...). Did a couple loads of laundry, and then Z was awake, did all the dishes (ALL the dishes in the sink, and did not leave any piles of dirty dishes "cleverly hidden" on the counter next to the sink), scrubbed down the countertop, cleaned out the dish drainer area, refilled all the canisters and jars etc, and even scrubbed the stove top. I did not look and see if he'd actually emptied the strainer baskets in the sink drains--he's never done that before in the 5 years we've been together, but I am sure one of these days he will and then I will reward him richly. So I forgot to check that, but it's because the rest of the room was so beautiful.
But then there's the dinette, and the table in there. Eek. That table winds up with so much crap dumped on it. Bad.
I did have a brainwave: we're struggling with the fact that, as both of us are trained as bartenders, we really like to have a full collection of liquor so we can have any drink we want whenever. We just keep a huge stock of different liquors, though we don't drink *much*. (I won't lie; I have an alcoholic beverage probably three nights a week, and on some of those nights I sometimes have a second beverage. I am totally an alcoholic, except that, well, I don't actually bother drinking to intoxication anymore because being vaguely dizzy isn't worth the headache the next morning, and sometimes I go a couple weeks without bothering to have a drink... Old Woman, I am.) The problem with having this wonderful fully-stocked bar is that... bottles take up room. You can't really pile them on each other. And while we've had a little cart out on the sunporch since we took down the bookshelf in the living room that had been holding the booze... the cart won't fit in the kitchen, and leaving the liquor out on the sunporch is not really a great idea for winter. Largely because it means that the stuff we actually drink winds up sitting on the kitchen table for months because we don't put it away. Like now!
Anyway.
I had a brainwave. Put up shelves in the dinette. They don't take up a ton of room if I put them up on the wall above the low sideboard. So all the liquor can go there. And it will also mean I don't have to decorate that wall. Ha! Perfect.
The only downer is that I have to peel the wallpaper and paint that wall before I can put shelves up, unless I want to put them up and then take them down again, and in so doing, lose the toggle bolts. I mean, I might. It'd be good to know the shelves work there before messing up the new wall...
The upside of the way the cleaning went last night is that I got the living room almost totally cleaned, got all the laundry done, and also even got Z to help me with the laundry, which he doesn't usually, all while he was doing the kitchen. I even cleaned some in the bedroom, which is still not put away but is getting silted in with construction debris still. So I'm now a confirmed fan of doing housework together and not at the last minute.
Anyway. Long, not terribly interesting, but there it is.
In other news?
It's November 1st. I haven't signed up at the NaNoWriMo forums yet. I haven't signed up at all.
Why haven't I signed up?
I don't know.
Except I do know this: I have written four novels now for NaNoWriMo. I have not yet finished any of them. I am making reasonable progress on one of them now. Slow progress, but good progress.
Should I set that aside for a month?
To generate a fifth complete yet unusable novel?
I may do this, I just at this point am not seeing any reason at all to do so. I enjoy NaNo, I enjoy the simple math of it. I love that I can win it so easily. But as I've now proven, to the tune of a million words in a single year, I can write words like nobody's business. More words doesn't mean it's a novel.
It's taken me four years now to pare down the 400,000-word monstrosity I began in November '03.
I don't think I need to start another one.
But I might do it anyway. Because I'm stupid.
No really--my knee is sore as hell. I'm wearing kneebraces today. Black kneebraces with black stockings under a skirt that should be mid-calf length but for some reason is riding up over my fat gut and exposing the knee braces. I am sure that it looks incomprehensibly sexy. Orthopedic gear is always highly attractive.
Since I have to have this PR Committee meeting at my house, I finally have to get my house *actually* into order. This is good, as having already cleaned my house means it'll be easier to re-clean it for when my folks come to visit. Of late I've been a bit overwhelmed and haven't managed to keep up with routine things--I've been very frustrated by things like the fact that I'll do 2 dishwasher loads and then hand-wash dishes for an hour, and do this several times in several weeks, and then Z will do one dishwasher load, leave the sink half-full of dishes, and consider it even.
I know a lot of this is perception and if you asked him he'd complain that he's doing way more.
But I realized that my automatically getting up early and sort of invisibly spending 2 hours on laundry every week is kind of shooting myself in the foot. I then have this nebulous feeling that I'm doing more than my share, but if I am, it's invisible.
So I didn't do laundry over the weekend (I was too busy anyway). Z volunteered to clean the kitchen, because I freaked out about how much we had to do. He was done at work early yesterday, so he walked down the street to a take-out joint and bought dinner. I swung by and picked him up. We ate dinner and then got to work. Well, he took a short nap, actually. But I didn't protest, and started on the laundry and living room. I cleared out part of the living room, got the slip cover back on the love seat (we put it on, weren't sure we liked it, and then Chita threw up on it, so it's ours now! That was an easy decision-- but while it's washable, you can't put it in the dryer, so I had it hanging on the line upstairs for over a week...). Did a couple loads of laundry, and then Z was awake, did all the dishes (ALL the dishes in the sink, and did not leave any piles of dirty dishes "cleverly hidden" on the counter next to the sink), scrubbed down the countertop, cleaned out the dish drainer area, refilled all the canisters and jars etc, and even scrubbed the stove top. I did not look and see if he'd actually emptied the strainer baskets in the sink drains--he's never done that before in the 5 years we've been together, but I am sure one of these days he will and then I will reward him richly. So I forgot to check that, but it's because the rest of the room was so beautiful.
But then there's the dinette, and the table in there. Eek. That table winds up with so much crap dumped on it. Bad.
I did have a brainwave: we're struggling with the fact that, as both of us are trained as bartenders, we really like to have a full collection of liquor so we can have any drink we want whenever. We just keep a huge stock of different liquors, though we don't drink *much*. (I won't lie; I have an alcoholic beverage probably three nights a week, and on some of those nights I sometimes have a second beverage. I am totally an alcoholic, except that, well, I don't actually bother drinking to intoxication anymore because being vaguely dizzy isn't worth the headache the next morning, and sometimes I go a couple weeks without bothering to have a drink... Old Woman, I am.) The problem with having this wonderful fully-stocked bar is that... bottles take up room. You can't really pile them on each other. And while we've had a little cart out on the sunporch since we took down the bookshelf in the living room that had been holding the booze... the cart won't fit in the kitchen, and leaving the liquor out on the sunporch is not really a great idea for winter. Largely because it means that the stuff we actually drink winds up sitting on the kitchen table for months because we don't put it away. Like now!
Anyway.
I had a brainwave. Put up shelves in the dinette. They don't take up a ton of room if I put them up on the wall above the low sideboard. So all the liquor can go there. And it will also mean I don't have to decorate that wall. Ha! Perfect.
The only downer is that I have to peel the wallpaper and paint that wall before I can put shelves up, unless I want to put them up and then take them down again, and in so doing, lose the toggle bolts. I mean, I might. It'd be good to know the shelves work there before messing up the new wall...
The upside of the way the cleaning went last night is that I got the living room almost totally cleaned, got all the laundry done, and also even got Z to help me with the laundry, which he doesn't usually, all while he was doing the kitchen. I even cleaned some in the bedroom, which is still not put away but is getting silted in with construction debris still. So I'm now a confirmed fan of doing housework together and not at the last minute.
Anyway. Long, not terribly interesting, but there it is.
In other news?
It's November 1st. I haven't signed up at the NaNoWriMo forums yet. I haven't signed up at all.
Why haven't I signed up?
I don't know.
Except I do know this: I have written four novels now for NaNoWriMo. I have not yet finished any of them. I am making reasonable progress on one of them now. Slow progress, but good progress.
Should I set that aside for a month?
To generate a fifth complete yet unusable novel?
I may do this, I just at this point am not seeing any reason at all to do so. I enjoy NaNo, I enjoy the simple math of it. I love that I can win it so easily. But as I've now proven, to the tune of a million words in a single year, I can write words like nobody's business. More words doesn't mean it's a novel.
It's taken me four years now to pare down the 400,000-word monstrosity I began in November '03.
I don't think I need to start another one.
But I might do it anyway. Because I'm stupid.
