CAts (heh, do you see what I did there?)

My poor boys have been pierced and punctured and poisoned, chipped and vaxed and vaxed again. And have to go back for more in a fortnight. And the vet thinks I need to phone DEFRA to ask about an export certificate. And it has all cost me a horrible amount of money that of course I do not have, and now I need to go and hide for a while.

See, while I'm in the Silence Room, I actually can't phone DEFRA, now can I...?

[EtA: Barry, of course, was a good boy. He didn't want to go in his nasty box, but he did it eventually. Mac, on the other hand? Oh, lordie. I have never heard Mac hiss before. He was Very Cross Indeed. And thoroughly badly behaved.]

[EtA2: I left the nasty boxes out, on account of needing 'em again in a fortnight. Just went downstairs - and Barry is now inhabiting his. Apparently it's fine when he chooses to go in it. Sigh.]

Books in my pocket, like grains of sand

Actually, I think we've already established that I am so very not the sort of person who should be doing all this. Half the time I just want to go back to bed, curl up and shake. Or cry.

But of course we do not do that, except metaphorically on the internets. Little by little, we try to get stuff done. One grown-up thing a day: that much at least. In pursuit of which, I went into town to begin a conversation with my bank about overdrafts and such (ugh - that's not going to go well, I can feel it from here). And on the way home, I stopped off at the pharmacy to fill in some paperwork and pick up some prescriptions. There'll be a twenty-minute wait, they said. Fine, I said, I'll just linger. And then I thought, "Damn, I wish I'd brought a - oh. Wait..."

And I rummaged in my backpack, and lo: there was indeed my Kindle! Books galore!

So I did that lean-up-against-a-pillar-and-read-while-you're-waiting thing, and it was all terribly cool and nobody would have known that inside I am a ferment of acid and bile and copelessness. So yay Kindle. It still feels odd, books without weight or presence, and it's definitely non-cognate with a shelfful of actual spines, but even so, I think I'll learn to love it.

Oof

Multi-tasking is my thing, especially when one task is the TV; so I have just been watching Jonathan Meades hold forth about France - well, mostly listening, I guess - while I sorted through an old boxful of papers.

And I was doing really well - this to shred, this to recycle, this to keep for now - when I hit a stack of letters from thirty years ago, when I left Cornwall and moved up here. What does one do with letters from thirty years ago - some from people who are dead now, some from people I've lost touch with entirely, some from people who are distant, some from people who are still close? Are they "archive", if they don't directly bear on work? I dunno. I've kept them this long because I'm crap at throwing things out; now I want to keep them because there is an obscure comfort in knowing that they sit in the bottom of a box, that there is still a record of that stage of my life. But God knows I do not want to read them, and I don't see why anybody else should, now or later or ever. So...?