Sunday, January 10, 2016

An Unintentionally Productive Day

Well, it's 4.30 on a Sunday and this is the first prevarication of the day, so that in itself is a marvel.
I woke stupidly early for a weekend (at 5.55: what woke me at that time?).
There was no point in trying to go back to sleep, so I worked on my conference paper for an hour and it is now completely different to the one I was working on yesterday. I have such a huge volume of information that condensing it into a 20 minute paper, even though I thought I am usually quite good at focusing, seems impossible.

The Sunday papers arrived and I depressed myself by reading about the wonders of technology.
Yes! Yes! We'll be able to digitally archive tons of film and photographs of animals that we will make extinct by our use of the wonders of technology.
No! No! I don't care about Mars trips, Hadron Colliders, sooper dooper computer games or virtual reality glasses that make people look like twats. What about addressing global poverty and stopping wars, and looking after the beautiful planet that we are destroying ever more quickly? What the feck has got into the human race?

Furious, I stomped upstairs and removed 100 layers of wallpaper from the bedroom wall, and a lot of rotten plaster too. After more than two hours my energy was flagging, but there were four stubborn bits of paper that just wouldn't move. The bottom layer of paper looked as though it was rather beautiful: 1920s, possibly; then there was a tweedy grey layer (1930s austerity?), then some ferociously stubborn gloss paint, then ghastly wood chip and finally a layer of emulsion.
There is now a bin bag in the garden bursting with flaps of torn wallpaper and crumbs of plaster, and my back aches, but I bet my bingo wings are now fully under control.
It's too cold to check, though.

After a quick rush down the road to replace Offsprog One's Christmas present candle that I broke when I was shoving furniture around up there, I burned my dinner but still ate it, and then did a bit more work on the conference paper.
The prevarication and the writing of this boring and pointless post are because I've got some emails to write that I should have written on Friday, but I didn't.
They are not difficult emails but a little voice inside my head is saying 'It's Sunday, and you've done enough for what is supposed to be a day of rest'.
Shut up, little voice. If I write those letters it will be one less thing to do tomorrow, when I go back to work.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If you need any help re-papering (call a professional)