Ooh, ouch, one day to do everything

Woke up this morning, my shoulder really hurts. Deep inside, the way it does; almost enough for me to break out the Tens machine, for the first time this year. Absolutely enough for me to pack the Tens machine, in case it gets worse in strange beds. (Maybe it'll get better. Who knows?)

Anyway: hurty shoulder, but today is the day I don't have to work. Yay!

Because today is the day when I have to clean All The House. Boo!

Because tomorrow is the day when I have to get up at OMG o'clock and go to the railway station and catch trains to Cambridge, in order to be driven to Staffordshire. This may not make a great deal of sense topologically, but internally it does; you only need to factor in the fact that I don't actually know where Staffs is, but I can find my way to Cambridge. As long as there's a train.

And then after a long weekend it's back to Cambridge, and then down to Heathrow to collect Karen, and then on to Glastonbury, and then back to London, and then up to Cambridge, and then home for four days. And then Paris.

Oy. You see why I moan and whine such a lot? I have to clean my house. With a hurty shoulder.

(Oh: just to make the point all the more clear, this is where we'll be staying in Staffs.)

One item makes a list

Bathroom: tick!

Now I drink more coffee, and go back to reading a biography of the Knox brothers (by the daughter of the eldest, who contrives not to mention her own name throughout; and the only times she uses the first person it is in the plural and does not refer to the family. We are the English and their allies in the wars, and sometimes the Christian church, the entirety of believers. It's kind of charming: a sort of generic partisanship that rigorously excludes the particular). I have sixty pages to go, and refuse to leave the dog-end of the book until I come back.

Not doing that again

No, no, not the housecleaning thing. (Two loads of laundry: tick! One load of shopping: tick!) But I tried to make everything better, and I just made everything worse. To wit: I have lost the manual for my camera, which had taken advantage of dead batteries to reset itself, and in trying to re-reset it how I want - well. In the midst of order we are in total meltdown. And in looking for the manual, I found a Lit & Phil book I had completely forgotten about; and peering even further beneath the sofa, I spotted a couple of other books which, y'know, might also be titles I was looking for - and so I tried to move the sofa. Ahem. Collapse of stout party hip-high mountain of books previously leaning against the other arm thereof. It has taken twenty minutes to get them restacked to the point where I could move the sofa back to where it was. Whatever is underneath it? Will just have to stay there a little longer.

Now vacuum; then lunch.

Book(s) launch

Put this in your diary, people: Wednesday 28th September, 7.00pm, Lit & Phil, Newcastle on Tyne. Chaz Brenchley launches two (2!) new books: House of Doors, a ghost story in novel form, and Rotten Row, a science fiction novella.

Please to be there, if you can. I may have to interview myself.

Onward

Eek. It's almost 2.15, and I have way too much still to do, and an early dinner date tonight.

Vacuuming: tick! Next: sweeping. Sweeping everything, with or without cats in it.

I have a breathing

No, I do. I have a breathing, and it is all my own. It's just ... not a very good breathing, as breathings go. It is thin and loud and unprofitable: a sort of adolescent breathing, if you like.

Myself, I do not like. Accordingly, as I have observed that I am running low on painkillers, I am going to go out and buy some more, and take advantage of the opportunity to breathe air that is not purely cat-druff and dust. Which I am allergic to. (The dust, blessedly, not the cat-druff. Dog-druff also, but I do not keep a dog.)

In other news, one of these days I might learn to sweep the stairs before I hang the damp laundry over the banister rail. Might do.