Behind

1) The house is a disaster. I say this all the time, and sometimes this statement is truer than at other times, but really, it is a disaster. I don't clean. We have mice, although they are more or less confined to one kitchen cupboard where they snack on the poison mousetreat I have in there. They are truly the laziest rodents on the planet, because the kitchen is a veritable cornucopia and they choose to eat the poison. Stupid mice. Katie is a shedding machine and the dog hair is an impossible battle. The kids' bedrooms look like bombs went off in them. Everything is dusty. In our room the handwashing is beginning to block the windows. Toys, toys, toys all over the place, and the words, "Put this away," have no meaning. I live with chaos generators and I am just as bad as they are, but I complain about it because I'm the one who cleans the mess up (most often).

2) Ravelry is a lot of work! It's work I'd like to sit down and do mind you, but man! I've hardly started in on it and feel a bit overwhelmed by it all, but maybe that's because the idea of following someone else's idea of organization is daunting. I'm organized but my system is based on seemingly random relationships. Hmmm. See "chaos generators" above.

3) I have photos to upload, but attaching the camera to the laptop is a Herculean task. There is no good reason for not uploading the photos, except that I'm easily distracted and end up doing something else instead.

4) Backing up the laptop is another task that's not really that huge, but really needs to be done. I have DVD's, they have lots of storage space, I could back up all my files and run the CrapCleaner to get rid of the crazy temp files and run Spybot to get rid of the spyware and once I've backed up a lot of my files I can take them off the hard drive, because really, I don't need files from five years ago any more and I'm just keeping them for sentimental reason. Much like my chemistry course files, the tests and exams, the....oh, now I'll get all nostalgic and want to keep everything. Yeesh. Computer packrat.

5) I owe people letters. It sounds terribly old-fashioned but there is one family with whom we keep in touch via the written word on paper, and they wrote in the summer and I've not gotten back to them. The summer was heavy and difficult and I have excuses, but really, it would take an hour to write a letter and explain everything and I haven't done it and now it's nearly Christmas and then it'll be another letter.....damn.

On the bright side, I have one or two small Christmas gifts left to buy or make, so I'm nearly done with that. My list includes my kids' teachers and the family members I need to buy for and the friends too, and I am actually nearly finished. This is probably because I like to shop more than I like to do most anything else, and I like to shop for other people, and I will shop rather than clean the house (yeah. See #1 again). I have to wrap and send some gifts, but that's okay too, because I can get that done within the next week. I have to finish that crazy sweater for my brother, but that's doable now, just the sleeves to go and it does knit up quickly, it was just hard to pick it up after so long away. I finished the front of it last night and realized that I shouldn't put this off any more, so the weekend will hold at least one sleeve. There are four other things floating around in my head to make, but I'll try to just concentrate on this one thing for now.

There's painting to do, it's time to break out the twinkly lights, there are papers to sort and an office that I can't even get into now because of the stuff that has been piled up. I will need to work in that office soon, because I really think that I shouldn't use the dining room table any more as my office. Why? After all, a dining room is such a useless space...and I agree, except that we have nowhere else to eat in this house. It's the dining room, or stand around the island in the kitchen, and that won't work for the children because they are challenged by their lack of height.

So I'd better get at it then, which is something else I always say just before.....OH look! Something shiny!..........