My house is small and untidy

It being Thursday, I arrived home from work at 5.30pm. As HWSNBN has buggered off to foreign parts, the house is my own; I have the evening to use as I will. Unfortunately, some of that time will have to be spent tidying up.

HWSNBN does not approve of the level of untidiness to which I readily descend. This means that, when it all gets too much he will either be angry at me until I tidy up (do not like this option), tidy up himself (like this option a lot) or join me in ignoring the mess (meh). When he left to go away he had recently tidied the living room and washed the dishes, but the rest of the house was a pigsty.

On Monday, I tidied the spare bedroom and did plenty of washing, but the living room is rapidly turning into a dumping ground. This is not helped by the addition of the habitual contents of our cars' boots, plus two pads and a bag full of eskrima sticks from Kiaido Ryu, plus my climbing gear, plus a few rucksacks and some random crap. The contents of my boot can be returned to their rightful home now, as my car has been returned from the garage*, but HWSNSN's boot contents cannot be replaced until he returns next Friday, and the martial arts stuff will not be returned until the next session, which is on Tuesday. Everything else just lives in the corner of the living room, as we ran out of space upstairs.

Having painted an incomplete picture of what's going on in my living room, I almost feel inspired to throw things out to free up some space in the spare bedroom. Even that is not an easy task; although the spare bedroom is not really a small bedroom (I grew up in a large Victorian house - from my perspective it's tiny. My parents' bathrooms are bigger), it has the job of being HWSNBN's office, the place where the clothes are dried, the place where the clothes are kept, the place for the upstairs bed settee, the place to do the ironing, the room through which one accesses the heating controls, and a place to store HWSNBN's books and computer bits. Our bedroom is much smaller, as all it has to take is a double bed, two chests of drawers, a shelf, some chili plants and a bin. It would be big enough (assuming one person is happy not being able to get out of his side of the bed) if it wasn't for the bin. Perhaps that's what I need to get rid of - it's all becoming clear! Bin the bin and enjoy a whole new era of spaciousness.

So, having procrastinated for a while (to be fair, I have also been awaiting a Skype call from HWSNBN, but he appears to have given up on me), I suppose I had better tidy up a bit. There is plenty of washing I can be getting on with, plus washing up, plus efficient piling of random crap... I don't even want to think about what else there is to do.**



*They washed it - it was really shiny until it was rained on with dirty rain. What's with that, anyway? I thought rain was supposed to be clean. I have learned from experience that it picks up all sorts of nasty stuff on its travels, but it seems somehow wrong that things should get dirty just from being rained on. This is why I do not wash my car.

**Such as write up a research proposal, removing the drunk bits. Must be accomplished as a) the funding body is not psychic; and b) even if they were, they would not award me any marks for effort this way. Marks for effort are important.