Before and after

I know I said on Thursday that “I’ll let you know tomorrow”, but I was too busy yesterday – and not with Stupid Fucking Spider Solitaire.

Last Saturday morning I celebrated waking up at 9:30am by taking this photo.

The photo itself wasn’t the celebration. It was simply the before shot. For months and months this is what my “office” looked like. A complete mess. It was annoying to see, but, more to the point, it was also an excuse. How could I possibly write in the midst of this clutter. I’d been swearing for months that I was going to tackle it. My theory was simple: tidy space = tidy mind = creativity. (Okay, don’t ask me what the hell a tidy mind has to do with creativity. I said it was a theory. I didn’t say it was a good one.)

My celebration of waking up at 9:30am was going to be tackling this task. It didn’t work out as planned. Instead, I took the photo, then sat down on the sofa with my tablet to have a quick check of email and Facebook. Oh, and maybe just one game of SFSS. Ha, bloody ha.

Yesterday morning when I got up (11:30am), I decided I was not going to switch the tablet on until after I’d got some shit done.

Started gently with watering the plants. (How long had it been? Well, at least they weren’t dead.)

Then I moved on to hoovering. Unfortunately I have a crap hoover. It’s quite expensive, purchased when Mike was still alive, because it was guaranteed to create the least dust possible. (Mike was asthmatic.) And I’ll give it that. It really doesn’t spew much, if any, dust, but it also doesn’t suck up things like cat hair. So, after running it over the area rugs, I then have to walk them. If you’re not familiar with this process, it involves donning footwear with a decent tread and scraping the sole of your shoe down the rug. The result is surprisingly large piles of cat hair and other crap the hoover hasn’t touched.

A break for lunch and then it was time. Five hours of filing, tossing and furniture polish later and voila!

C’est magnifique!

As you can see, it was dark outside by the time I’d finished. Time for dinner, not sitting down to write a post.

Short pause while I pat myself on the back.

Oh, and not a single game of SFSS all day.

Let’s hope there’s something in the tidy space theory.