This will come as a shocking revelation, I know, and I apologise for that, but openness is important, so, here goes: I’ve had a lot of trouble blogging lately. Technically, it’s not trouble with blogging as such—after all, in recent weeks I’ve posted several things on my personal Facebook that are, essentially, blog posts. In fact, my two most recent blogs posts (“Puzzle pieces”, and the one before that, “A mini-adventure”) began that way. Plenty of others over the past couple months were at least sparked by something I posted on Facebook.
This has come about, not for the first time, because of a sort of generalised ennui and malaise, which is also nothing new. I can’t point to a specific reason, though at one point I thought I might’ve caught the plague (I didn’t), but it affects me in precisely the way it has before: If I don’t write and publish a post in the daytime, it’s usually unlikely to happen that day.
This mainly means that there are a lot of things that I may talk about on Facebook, but not here, but it really means that there are a lot of things that I may talk about at all. I have some more Facebook-birthed posts I may get around to re-doing for the blog (as always, maybe…), but there are relevant things to talk about in the meantime, starting with updates on what I’m doing, or not doing, as the case may be.
This past weekend was the four-day Easter holiday weekend in New Zealand, and that included two of three and a half days a year when most shops must close: Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The shopping ban is why I went on my mini-adventure, but it otherwise doesn’t usually affect me much.
Still, I planned around the bans, and didn’t plan on going anywhere that weekend. Because I didn’t have any special plans, I thought it would be a great time to work on stuff in the house, especially clearing out/organising my office, something I’ve nicknamed “The Project From Hell”. As so often happens, things didn’t quite work out that way.
I was extremely tired already when the weekend began, but when I looked out my front window, I saw that the weeds were again sending up their seed stalks: The lawns needed to by mowed again. That became my main project for Sunday, and I did nothing on The Project From Hell that day.
To be clear, I have made progress on the project, just not nearly as much as I would’ve liked: It “should” have been finished by now. I found out, first, that a lot of the stuff in my office actually belongs in it, and wasn’t just stuff I dumped there as I thought when I mentioned the project in a post at the start of this month. The fact that the stuff actually mostly belongs in my office means that I have to find somewhere to put it (after reaffirming that I still actually want/need it), and that made it into a bigger project than I expected.
I went through and reorganised boxes, repacking what I really wanted to keep, recycling some stuff, putting aside some stuff to be shredded, and throwing away the tiny amount that couldn’t be recycled or shredded. This is a subject in itself, too, but the thing that’s relevant to this post is that the work’s very slow, time consuming, and unbelievably boring.
Once I finally finish all that sorting/evaluation/pretending it doesn’t exist and doing other things, the actual reorganising of my office wardrobe will begin. To do that, I’ve long planned on putting a wardrobe organising system in the wardrobe (and the wardrobe of my guest bedroom), like I’ve done in the two houses Nigel and I shared before I moved to this one. It’s basically like the shelves I put in the kitchen, except with wire shelves instead of solid ones (for air flow), and it has a rod for hanging clothes. I bought two sets of shelving using reward points (and some cash), choosing a different system than I put in the kitchen because I had some spare shelves from the set I put in the master wardrobe in our house before the last one.
That’s a straightforward and fairly easy project for me, however, that doesn’t mean it’s simple.
The builder put in one single shelf in each of the two wardrobes, and they’re screwed to some wood attached to the walls on three sides. The hanging rods are all heavy metal pipes in brackets. To get a shelf out, I first have to remove the screws, all of which have been painted over. Then, I have to figure out how the wood shelf supports are attached to the walls, and then I need to remove them. This will almost certainly damage the walls, which I’m certain weren’t painted before the wood and shelves were installed.
Once I get the old shelves and their support out, I’ll need to patch the walls, prime those repairs, and then paint. I have everything I need to do all that—though finding the patching compound did delay this awhile, because, once again, I’d put it “somewhere safe, where I can find it”. However, the paint I have may not precisely match the white of the existing paint, so I’ll paint the entire inside of the wardrobes, which will (or, should…) make any imprecise colour match pretty much unnoticeable.
THEN I can install the new shelving systems. Sigh.
So: Take the tediousness of going through everything, the extra work I’ll have to do to prepare the wardrobe before I can install the new shelving, mix in that generalised ennui and malaise, and season generously with IDGAF, and the result is that not much has happened with The Project From Hell, and it’s also basically why nothing much us happening with this blog, either (I kinda don't want to even go in my office). Even so, some progress has definitely been made on the project, and I have posted some things here on the blog.
This weekend is another holiday weekend: The Anzac Day public holiday is on Monday, and up until 1pm is the half-day trading ban. Again, that doesn't really affect me, not the least because I don’t have anything planned for that trading ban public holiday, either. Maybe I can squeeze in some attention for things I want to work on. For a change.
There are other bits and pieces I could’ve mentioned, of course, including some more Facebook-born stuff, and maybe I’ll get to that. For now, though, that’s me catching up on the little there is that’s been going on.
2 comments:
You and I see Facebook very differently. I NEVER start something on Facebook, unless it's an announcement - the niece won two awards at the San Diego Music Awards! - mostly out of general disdain for FB. But also, I can't retrieve specific stuff on Facebook, even stuff I have posted.
Related, when I look at my Facebook, I get different folks, based on whether I use my laptop or my phone.
I do look at it differently. I honestly think part of the reason I use it as much as I do is because of convenience: There's an App for it on all my devices, whereas it's incredibly difficult to write new blog posts on my devices (which, I suppose, is a topic for a post…). I use Instagram, too, but that's a mostly visual medium, which neither Facebook nor this blog are, so it has a point of difference.
The way it usually works for me is that I'll start writing something to post on Facebook, realise it should/could be a blog post, too, so I copy the text and past it in Apple's Notes App, because that's on all my devices and also my desktop Mac and the content is on all of them, too. I've tried composing a post directly in Blogger using a bowser on my iPad, but that's really difficult.
Most of those Facebook-born blog posts fall into that category, but every once in a while I want to blog about something I shared on Facebook sometime in the past, or maybe I just want to double-check timing or something. In those cases, I search my profile for anything I posted with certain words, but that's something that seems to be possible only on the desktop, using a browser (I've tried that using a browser on, say, my iPad, so don't know if that would work).
So, I use Facebook primarily as an easy-to-use, readily accessible tool—I always have one or both devices near me. But there's still a lot more to it that I haven't talked about here—still plenty left for an actual blog post, one that would be written on my Mac, not a device.
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