Organising

My New Year's Resolution this year was to stop procrastinating so much at work, and so far it's not been going very well as I have been spending most mornings asleep and sometimes the afternoons too. It was becoming pretty obvious (to me, at least) that I wasn't doing enough work because the house was almost permanently messy and I didn't have the energy to deal with it because I was sleeping so much (oh, the irony!).

So this weekend, as the family was away, I decided to have a day of cleaning. Addi was working (again!), Dani was working (finally!) and Katherine was in London with her family, so as I basically had no friends left it seemed the perfect time to get the house back in order. The kids had all been sleeping in the same room as the heating was broken and I swear to god, everytime I went in there, even if I'd tidied it hours before, it was messy, so I decided this meant they had too many toys and went a bit mad. I chucked two whole binbags of crap out and put another binbag in the basement full of Ernest's old baby toys. I feel so much better now and the house is still tidy three days later. Bliss. Definitely worth working on a weekend. Also means that I will still get paid for the whole week despite missing Monday to gallivant around in Geordie-land.

I also decided that this week I would stop sleeping all the bloody time and would get up when I was paid to get up (8.15am), and so far I have managed it! It's 9.30 now on the second day of trying it and I feel more awake than I have for ages, and the house is already tidied.

I think my back up career should definitely be as an organiser. People do that you know, get paid for organising people's crap. That is my idea of heaven.

Hm, just got distracted by looking at pictures of tattoos. I saw a site once where most of the tattoos were truly horrendous - like that lady with the huge twilight tattoo on her back. That kind of calibre of awful. This site, if you're interested, is slightly better. I don't think I'll ever get a tattoo because I'm too much of a wimp - not pain wise, although I am pretty wimpy, but just in terms of thinking "oh god what if I hate it later!". Hard to commit. My friend Addi is getting one for every country she's lived in; she's lived in Romania and the USA so far, though she hasn't got one from the USA yet, I guess 'cause she's not done living there (or possibly because she only came up with this idea since moving to France!). I like that idea, but I think possibly I'll only do it if I end up living in a third country.

Ahahahaha check this one out. Good lord. The caption was 'Not only have I stuck with Harry until the very end, he's stuck with me'. What does that even mean?

This weekend my friend Martha is coming to visit me. She currently lives in Valencia, in Spain, which is pretty cool, but it is way hard to get to Paris from there. She's flying with Vueling and she went to print off her boarding pass last night and discovered they had changed the time of the flight from 7am to like, 6.30pm! They hadn't let her know or anything. How stupid is that? So she gets a day less here which is lame, although I'm working anyway so it doesn't matter too much. While she is here, we plan to go to the Louvre and also to an exhibition at the Bibliotheque Nationale. I enjoy it when people come to visit me because it makes me do more stuff than I would normally; last weekend's expedition to Belleville was unusual. Usually my weekends consist of going out till really late, then sleeping really late the next day, then not really doing anything else. That is, of course, the problem with living somewhere - so much cool stuff to do, but you always have the option of doing it another day, so it just gets put off. My other problem is that I am disastrously uncultured. The last time I went to the Louvre, I basically spent the entire time sniggering at all the silly statues and paintings in there. This time I am buying a guide book.