Not, oddly, one of those days where you wonder about whether your continued existence on the planet will ever produce anything tangible and worthwhile, or whether you are instead doomed to spend the entirety of the rest of your life looking at cat pictures on the internet*.
No, today was one of those super productive days.
I’m wondering if I need to write myself a to-do list for every day when I’m not working because the effect was astonishing.
On my list was the following:
– Clean some house
– Practice Guitar
– Practice Piano
– Order power supply connector
– Bottle cider
– Garden
– ?Print sepsis card
And apart from the sepsis card all of it got done and some other bits and bobs. Also I listened to lots of music, which is a bonus.
I actually managed to spend a good hour practicing music, which is astonishing to me. I have absolutely no commitment to these things, have never been a big one for practicing (or studying) so for me to hit a point where I was actually keeping playing because I damn well wanted to get the piece of music to sound at least roughly right was pretty pleasing.
Also I had a sudden understanding of how awful it must have been for my piano teacher (or paino teacher, which seems a strangely apt typo) to have listened to my terrible, terrible, timing when I was younger and practicing more frequently. I had my little iPhone metronome and me chanting One-AND-Two-AND-Three-AND-Four-AND in a desperate attempt to maintain any semblance of notes being in the right place at the right time. Even then I’d frequently blow straight through a rest or end up playing a semiquaver the length of a quaver. It was all a bit hideous.
Oh lord, then, after a few rounds where the notes were at least landing in roughly the right order with the right timing with my right hand I thought I’d dare to try and play both hands together. Oh the hilarity. Normally when I’m sight-reading I torment the piano with both hands, but when I’m really trying to learn a piece I’ll often do some one-handed stuff, and then the other hand, then tie the two together. Today the tying together bit was fairly disasterous but still, it was recognisably music. Or at least some vague relation of music. And I did enjoy it :)
Anyhow, next up was testing out the new Dyson and y’know what, it sucks. In the good way. In a way that makes the old Dyson look like our Hoover Junior in comparison. So I ran around hoovering and dusting like a good little housewife, mainly because my mum’s coming at the weekend. And thus the house must be extra clean.
Then, cleaning having been achieved I set everything for bottling the cider to be sterilised. Bottles in the oven, self-priming siphon in sterilising fluid. Sat down and had lunch. Having steeled myself for the potential disaster of the cider being hideous, I opened the demijohn and took a sniff. ‘Well, it smells like cider’, I thought, so I siphoned off a teeny bit into a cup and took a sip. And lo, I have created cider. I’m not going to say it’s awesome cider. I’m not going to claim it’s the best cider in the world. But it’s adequate, drinkable cider. It’s a touch dry, and not going to win any awards, but hey, I made cider. Wild yeast cider.
Yes, I am quite proud of myself.
It took a bit longer than intended because I failed to sterilise sufficient bottles, but I used the spare time while I was cooking the second batch of bottles to order a few bits and bobs (including the glue to hold the face onto Kathryn’s pocket watch which I’ve singularly failed to replace the glass on, a power supply for the evil SuperPad, and some other dohickey that’s been on my ‘buy this at some point’ list), and also spent some time e-mailing people about the electric minor project.
Bottles all labelled up and sealed and I set to on the next job on the list, the garden.
Having injured my wrist moving gravel and earth last time, and thus had to take a couple of weeks off, I was a bit gentle with myself, just the three wheel-barrow-loads of gravel. What was quite distressing about this was that the distance I managed to cover with the gravel was much less far than I imagined / hoped. I have a sneaking suspicion I’m going to wish that I’d bought four bags of gravel, not two.
The pleasing thing though, apart from just the pleasure of being out and about in the garden, is that occasionally you get flashes of what we’re trying to achieve.
There’s still loads and loads to do, but at least at this point I’m starting to feel like there’s progress on this front.
* Which for various personal/health reasons was how I spent most of yesterday. Well, not cat-pictures per-se, but they might as well have been.
