Tag Archives: lists

How Did It Go?

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The tall thing is Julia’s teak candlestick with electric candle inserted. The tall snowman with the badly fitting hat is Julia’s yew snowman. I don’t always know the woods but I recognise teak and the yew started off as a piece of tree with the distinctive bark left on. The three small ones, with non-PC tobacco products are extras that she bought at the fund-raising stall.

This is the second post of the day. It would probably help you to read the first one before starting here, though you will probably guess roughly what I’m talking about as I go through it.

By the time I had taken Julia wood turning and got home, via queues and a Radio 4 interview on the government’s view on Peter Mandelson I had already done the checking of comments an emails, but it seemed like a fair thing to do to check them again, as this was a new start. Nothing much had happened. There was a note from the Numisma6ic Society about the meeting next week, but I’m giving it a miss as it’s still not the right time of year for travel. Does that make me sound old? That, of course, reminded me that I have a talk to prepare. There was also a note from the Peterborough Military History Group – one of my articles has been mentioned in, and linked to, another local military history website.

Two views of a pencil pot she turned for me. I forget the wood. Note the sides are actually flush but the perspective is not easy to control when using a phone. It’s impressive for a morning’s work, parfticulalrly when you consider she only started just before Christmas.

I wrote the prose section for a new Haibun, which was an extra that wasn’t on the list.

So – wasted a bit of time checking emails/blog and wandered a little looking for a decent Mandelson link.

But delivered Julia to wood turning in plenty of time, did my outline for the medallion script. It surprised me how much of it I’d actually done in my head, and is looking quite good, even though it’s just an outline. I don’t think I need to do too much extra to knock it into shape.

It’s now 9.58 so things are going well. I have now written an extra blog post and  have time to write an article and do my list for this after noon, which will be starting with “finish article I started this morning . . .”

Photos are some of Julia’s wood turning, and some she bought for Christmas decorations.

Skittles and ball. Somebody made the ball for her but she made the skittles.  If you are thinking the same thing as me, you are right. However, it appears, as Julia says, that there is no law about what shape skittles should be, or that they should all be the same.

When he visits in May I’m sure the grandson will love them.

The Day Continues . . .

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The previous post covered a few things I had in mind this morning when I sat down. This one will cover the sitting down bit. I woke at 7.28, a little late than normal but not bad seeing as I hadn’t set an alarm.

I was downstairs and ready to work by 8.00 and started – read emails, respond and file as necessary, answer WP Comments, organise my Inbox (including deleting over a hundred mails that were just hanging around), answer feedback requests from Amazon and eBay (which I had allowed to back up). Eat breakfast (prepared by Julia), do the washing up, start on reorganising my files on Open Office. The enthusiasm for that lasted about 20 minutes, Strat on the list of my published poems.

At one time I was very good about printing copies and used to keep a file of them as a way of keeping my confidence up. It’s hard to become too downhearted if you have hard copies of successful submissions. I got a bit lazy after that and all I have now is the list of submissions.

Numbers are building up and, as Lavinia remarked a few days ago, I will soon have enough for  book. Of course, I need enough good ones, but it is encouraging to see them mount up towards book length.

My Orange Parker Pen

Julia has not been well for a few days and I have been doing my pathetic best to make her feel better, but in the absence of medical qualifications,  pharmacy and, most importantly, a cooperative patient, I haven’t made much headway. She is a nightmare as a patient as she never believes she is ill or should rest.

Finally, after giving it some thought (as I have also been a bit seedy for a few days, I suggested COVID tests).

Both of us have had runny noses, sore throats and tiredness and Julia has had headaches and now has a temperature too. All COVID symptoms, but all cold symptoms too. And I spend my life constantly feeling sleepy.

However, the tests revealed all and  it seems we have COVID again. We didn’t have particularly bad symptoms in 2021 when we had it, and they don’t seem too bad  at the moment. We also have plenty of food. Guidance for work is that we should avoid contact with people for five days so we are off until Monday. It’s inconvenient for work but there’s not a lot we can do about it. Julia definitely can’t associate with her group while she is infectious and it really isn’t a good idea for me to go to the shop while I’m infectious as a number of our customers are elderly or immunosuppressed, or both.

Definitely a day of two halves. It started so well and ended on a rather depressing note.

Orange Parker Pen

 

Downsizing, Decluttering and Döstädning

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All productive days need a list somewhere near the beginning. If not, you risk wandering off the point, lose motivation and, as I often do, become confused by the number of tasks. Once you are confused by the profusion of tasks it is hard to settle down and achieve anything.

Some things need to be done every day – replies to comments, checking emails, maybe looking at eBay (which is of varying importance, depending on what I am bidding on). Others don’t need doing, as they are just time-wasting habits of no importance.

It is now some time later . . .

I looked up soup recipes using tinned soup, which was something I had meant to do. Then I made the lunch, using one of the recipes. Well, part of one of the recipes. We are out of smoked paprika and the lentils would have taken too long to cook.  Then I had to take Julia to an appointment so, while I was out I nipped to the jewellery shop as I haven’t been for a while.

It’s now 4pm and the day is slightly slipping by, despite my mention of lists.  I am now going to spend another hour on tasks from the list and see how it turns out. I suspect it will be better than some of my recent days.

In the last post I said “research some articles, write some bits for the Numismatic Society Facebook page and knock some submissions into shape.”

I’ve done a bit of research and polished a poem. So far, apart from the soup, they are the only actual list-type things I’ve done. I’ve also found a specialist book dealer who may buy some of my books. I need to downsize and if I can make  few shillings at the same time it will be good.

I’m going to start calling it döstädning, which is Swedish for Death Cleaning. Actually, I might just call it Swedish Death Cleaning, there are a lot of umlauts in there now I come to look at it again.

Ah! I’ve just come up with a new title . . .

Danger of Tedium . . .

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Sorry, another day and another late night slump in front of TV. Julia woke me to tell me she was going to bed and I fell asleep again. I awoke with a head full of peculiar dreams (I’d obviously being listening to TV as I slept) and found the remote on the floor, where it had obviously dropped when I drifted off.

You didn’t miss much, as it was a truly boring day. The man with the “13 gold guineas” didn’t turn up, but we had always suspected that might be the case. A dealer did turn up with a load of junk, which is always interesting as some of it was quite interesting – one man’s trash being another man’s treasure as they always say. Silver has gone up so he wanted to cash in his lower grade coins and he also had various bits he’d bought in auction which are not his normal type of stock. The other two enjoyed themselves with that and I ended up with the task of writing up empty display cases for eBay. They are easy enough, but not very interesting.

Today (Sunday) has mostly consisted of bacon croissants, ginger biscuits and going through old emails. I lost my list of submissions when the computer failed, and I need to get it back together for future use. If I want to reprint anything (I’m still ambivalent about putting a book together) I will need all the details of first publication. A trawl through the emails has netted me 22 haiku (which was a surprise, as I thought it was only about a dozen) and 20 tanka. I have not been writing tanka very long, but am obviously better at them than I am at haiku.  I know there are a few tanka missing from that total and I think I know where to track them down, so suspect that the amended figure might see tanka outstripping haiku.

And suddenly, from telling you that I had a boring day on Saturday, I start telling you I spent Sunday making lists. Sorry about that – let’s hope Part 2 is more interesting.

 

Day 58

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The header picture is the roasted vegetables from a couple of nights ago when we had the cauliflower cheese. The roots have cumin sprinkled on them and the cauliflower has smoked paprika on it. The effect was mainly cosmetic in the case of the cauli, as i didn’t notice any change in flavour. However, it did look more interesting when it came out of the oven and after over 30 years of making as little effort as possible, I was happy just to cook something that looked a bit more interesting. Thirty years and I’ve graduated to smoked paprika. Who knows what dizzy heights I might achieve in another 30 years?

Apart from that it doesn’t feel as if the last week has brought much in the way of progress.

I’m getting back into the swing of things with writing, but even that is feeling like more of the same, rather than moving forward.

It looks like I am going to have to go back to writing lists of things to do. I know that some people disagree with them but I have always found them useful. However, I do tend to sloth, drifting and procrastination and I need something to combat that.

As long as I start with (1) Make a list of things to do and (2) Drift off to make cup of tea and check eBay I will at least get two things a day done from my list.

This is my resolution for the coming week. In the meantime I am going to go and make a cup of tea. We have shortbread biscuits and they aren’t going to eat themselves . . .

Day 54

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I’ve been looking at lists of 10, 30 and 50 Greatest Poets and Greatest Poems to give myself some perspective on yesterday’s surprise about people not recognising the name Adlestrop. Robert Frost ranks highly in most lists. Edward Thomas, his friend, does not. Frost after surviving the trip back to America in 1915, which was not a foregone conclusion in that year, as the Lusitania shows, developed a poetic career and eventually died at the age of 88. Thomas enlisted in 1915, prompted by Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken, and was killed in 1917. It seems to me that poetic reputations are often developed by such quirks of history, rather than by the quality of the poetry. Death, and its timing has a lot to do with reputations. Thomas died too soon, Byron died at about the right time, at which point he became a legend rather than a mere poet. I could name several poets who died too late, but that would be mean-spirited.

What I can tell you about some of the lists is that I haven’t heard of many of the poets on one of the lists, which, as far as I can tell, was chosen on political rather than poetic grounds. Such is life when you start making lists. Any list you make is bound to be biased, though you only notice when it is biased in a way you don’t like.

The average list is composed of classic white men with a few Indians, Japanese and female poets thrown in jut to show how well read the lister is. I’m always left with a feeling that these lists reveal just how little I really know about poetry and how any list I write on this subject should not be titled “100 Best Poets” but “100 best Poets in the Opinion of a man of limited reading and ingrained prejudices”. This would be more accurate.

It’s the same with many articles in the news, in the UK they should all be qualified with the words “written by a young and overconfident Oxbridge graduate”.

And that is the opinion of the blogger Quercus Community (a miserable old git who is not fond of modern life and young people).

A List, and a Letter I Will Never Send

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Next time I write a to-do list towards the end of the evening I am going to include Number Eight – fall asleep and sleep past midnight in my chair, Number Nine, wake up feeling like rigor-mortis has set in and Number Ten – make sandwiches in the early hours of the morning.

If I’d done that I would at least have achieved three of my objectives.

As it was, I didn’t even reach Number One – write sarcastic letter to TESCO. We had a delivery at just after 8.00.  It gives us time to relax and cook before bringing the shopping in from the door. There were no brown cobs with this delivery, and  a few other bits and pieces of omission or change that I found a little annoying, but that’s the price (plus £4.50 for packing and delivery) that you pay for not jostling with the germ-ridden denizens of our local supermarkets.

The prize for the most bizarre substitution ever, and the reason for my planned outburst of sarcasm.

It was going to be along the lines of –

FAO CEO TESCO

If you opened your sandwich box in the Executive dining room, looking forward to a lovely cheese cob, only to find a mere heap of cheese and pickle, because your grocery supplier couldn’t be bothered to supply any bread rolls, and had failed to find a suitable substitute, I bet you’d be disappointed, and wonder how people can stay in business if they can’t even supply bread rolls.

If you then reached for your delicious finale – an easy peel citrus (as they call small oranges these days) and bit into a lemon, I imagine you would become quite annoyed.

I am, I confess, more than quite annoyed that you substituted lemons for my order of easy peel citrus. I was tempted to pack one for my wife’s lunch to see what happened, but am, frankly, too frightened.

Remembering last week’s non-delivery debacle, I think I will be going back to ASDA. They are useless, but not quite as useless as you.

I am, yours etc…

Of course, I won’t send it. I never do…

 

Ten Steps to a Better Life

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I’ve decided to make some changes to my life. That way, slowly but surely, it will improve.

One, do some housework every day. I belong to the Quentin Crisp school of housework (“There is no need to do any housework at all. After the first four years the dirt doesn’t get any worse.”) but if we are going to retire to a bungalow I need to sort things out. I just did some shredding. I’m now up to 2008. No need to overdo it.

Two, exercise every day. Even a little bit. Including my hands. Make it into a habit. I’m going to find my weights and residence bands and start leaving them around too. As long as I remember to rearrange them every day Julia will never know I’m not actually using them.

Three, make a good nutritional decision every day. Today’s decision is not to eat biscuits. My willpower on this matter is boosted by the fact that we finished the biscuits on Monday. Tomorrow’s decision to avoid fizzy drinks should be quite easy too.

Four – stop pressing those internet buttons which promise to show you something amazing some American found buried in his back garden. It takes a long time and the only amazing thing is that I fall for it every time.

Five. Go out and walk every day. To the car and back should be about right.

Six – write a retirement plan – that way it won’t creep up and surprise me.

Seven –  start using shopping lists. It will make online ordering less of an adventure but will be better for us nutritionally.

Eight – plan my writing for the year. I have  a few things I want to do but unless I write them down with dates and everything, they won’t get done. This, Julia reminds me is a SMART Plan –  Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. I’ve done it before and it’s worked, I really should do it again. That should also help me stop pressing those alluring internet buttons – it’s nose to the grindstone for 2021.

Nine – employ psychology in my struggle with weight loss. Repeating the mantra “Stop eating or you’re going to die, you fat bastard” will be a start. I don’t see any point paying Noom to do that when I can do it myself.

Ten – stop promising Ten Point Lists when you can’t actually think of ten things.

 

The List (2)

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I meant to post this yesterday, but I forgot to add that to the list, so it didn’t get done.

14. Warm up yesterday’s soup and eat with the remains of the sourdough bread from Lidl

15. Ruminate on the question of why a budget supermarket has the best bakery

16. Freecell

17. Look at list of jobs.

18. Look again. Are you sure it doesn’t mention Freecell?

19. Look again. Nineteen points in and only two of them are actually on the list.

20. Magazine article. It’s nearly done. An hour later it was still nearly done. Ditto for thirty minutes after that.

21. Let the article mature and go back to it tomorrow.

22. Alarm rings. Is it that time already? Time to pick Julia up.

23. Lose the plot and watch TV.

My performance was patchy in some areas but I think I really nailed Number 23. I’m going to try another list next week and see if I have similar success.

The Bits in Between

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I’ve often wondered what happens to people in between the bits they write about in their blogs.

I’m assuming, like me, that people only write about the best, most interesting and positive bits of their lives. So today I’m going to write about all the bits in between – the bits that make me appear lazy, small-minded and xenophobic. This might be news to those of you who already see me as lazy, small-minded and xenophobic, but there are, I promise, further depths to explore.

This morning, for instance, whilst eating a piece of toast and marmalade Julia had made me I pondered the question of whether or not she does it on purpose. She knows I’m trying to cut down on carbs and sugar, and that I’m life-threateningly obese. I’m not sure whether she’s merely absent-minded or whether the toast and marmalade is part of a cunning long-term plan to kill me.

That’s why I watch a lot of crime dramas, it’s research for foolproof ways to murder your spouse. I’m not sure why Julia watches them, but I have my suspicions.

There is an alternative, but that involves getting up earlier and making my own breakfast.

While I was eating the potentially fatal dose of calories I watched TV and muttered about European politics. Just before the EU referendum I was broadly in favour of Europe, but since the vote, with all the posturing of the negotiators, I’ve moved to a position where I’m not.

This mirrors the experience of two of my uncles who had trouble getting out of Europe in the summer of 1940.

Anyway, enough of my growing anti-European bigotry.

After dropping Julia off at work I shouted abuse at a couple of drivers and went back to sleep. I woke up and went back to sleep again. And again. Finally, feeling sluggish, and having wasted an entire morning, I got up.

The launderette was deserted. I’ve stopped going early in the morning as it always seems to be crammed with people trying to avoid the rush. The machine was faulty again and I disobeyed the instruction taped to it by changing programmes mid-wash. This seemed to work and it started washing again.

When I went to the supermarket it all went well until it came time to pay. I had my cards out ready to claim my points and pay when the till operator was asked to help with a problem at the till next door. I don’t know about you, but if it had been me I’d have completed my own sale before doing something else.

I smiled through it, despite being late for picking Julia up from work, even when the machine messed up my contactless payment three times. I find that smiling and being pleasant is character forming, and is good practice for dealing with customers in the shop.

This evening, armed with a list of jobs I’d written in the launderette, I made a start on turning my life round with efficiency.

I’ve done one of them, which was to load eight items onto eBay. I prepared them yesterday at work but put them on tonight as Sunday night is supposedly the night where people pay the most.

Sadly, that’s the only one of eleven items that I’ve done. The fault is obviously with the list, rather than me. If I’d listed Go to the chip shop, Watch crap TV and Potter about on the internet I’d have been able to tick four jobs off instead of just one.

Part of my pottering involved looking at the site 32 Inspirational Sunday Quotes, but by the time I’d reached Number 19 the forced jollity was inspiring me to kick a puppy. This was probably not what they were meaning to do.

With that thought, I will leave you.