Reminder for myself

So many things I want to do, yet it seems that without a push, I end up doing nothing. It would be tempting to wait until the new year, but three months is a long time to be doing nothing, wouldn't you say? Instead, I think I'll revert to the pagan calendar that I assume roughly 5/16 of my distant ancestors followed*. Samhain it shall be, which gives me a month to figure out how I'm going to do this, including looking for more students, maybe a part-time position somewhere. Until then I won't be idle, trying to set up a regular schedule for myself, as well as getting back into a sewing mood and delving into other craft projects, such as embroidery and paper crafts. I'm also going to start dancing again on my own, though I'll invite anyone who wants to come and give it a try. Apart from that, I've already got a few regular activities, but it's an hour here, a couple of hours there, nothing that feels like routine.

( Activities )

* A pair of great-grandparents from near Liverpool on my father's side and a Scottish great-great-grandmother on my mother's side. The rest of my lineage is 7/16 French-Canadian (originally from the Poitou region of France, but there might be a dash of First Nations somewhere in there -- 13 generations is a long time), 1/8 German and 1/8 Austrian (from my grandfather, born and raised in Vienna). I find it fascinating to tally these things and to wonder about these people, at the story of that Scottish great-great-grandmother, improbably on the French-Canadian side of my family tree. My great-great-grandfather was a boat pilot and on a trip to Edinburgh, he fell in love with the 15(or17?)-year-old Catherine MacFarlane. He asked her to wait for him, and two years later he brought her home to Canada. What must it have been like, for her?

Go me, go!

Bilbo thought that "It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door" but to me, it's a dangerous business doing the laundry and ironing. Not because having freshly laundered and ironed clothes is bad in any way, but because those being the two household chores I dislike the least -- dare I say it, I actually enjoy them to a certain extent -- it's all too easy to get those two things done and proceed to rest on my laurels, completely ignoring the less pleasant but no less pressing chores, such as cleaning the bathrooms and especially vacuuming. So at the end of the day, when I think to myself, "I still haven't vacuumed? But I did the laundry, ironed G's shirts for the week, did the dishes and got groceries!" I can bask in a not-altogether-unmerited feeling of accomplishment.

What appeals to me about laundry is, I think, that there's no getting your hands dirty. You put the clothes in and they come out smelling fresh and clean. Actually, the only thing about it is that you kind of have to stick around, or at least be around when it's done. Since I'm at home, now, it's not a problem at all and I don't have to set aside a good chunk of a Sunday, as I used to do. After that, there's nothing nicer than clothes flapping in the breeze, though I've been rather unlucky these past couple of weeks, weather-wise. On the odd sunny day, I've usually been out doing something else and when the sun broke through an hour ago, I rushed to get the laundry going; wouldn't you know it, by the time it was nearing the end of the cycle, the sky was covered in leaden clouds once again. It still is, so the laundry's hanging on the drying rack in my sewing room.

A few things I forgot to put in my list yesterday:

- Contact moving company to get rid of boxes
- Contact Air Canada about our downgrade on the Ottawa - Vancouver flight, ask for compensation
- Sort papers and receipts, shred all that can be shredded (I'm down to only one box of unsorted papers, which is a small miracle for me!)
- Install printer
- Find French teaching material (will most likely have to order online, pickings seem to be slim for French stuff in Tokyo)
- Start my reading log again, maybe post it here along with a movie/tv log?
- Go back through all my entries and tag them appropriately
- Organise the buffet
- Unwrap and hang up our pictures
- Select some of my travel photos to print out and hang on the walls
- Put something in the downstairs bathroom to make it look like someone lives here; at the moment, there's a towel and a bar of soap, nothing else on the counter, nothing at all on the walls

And to put in the "thing I'd like to do more often" list:

- Bake
- Plant herbs (I'm pretty sure the packets of seeds are here somewhere), have to buy some soil first