An hour of amnesia. Amnesia and blindness.

I spent an hour this evening looking around the house thinking “it doesn’t look too shabby”.  Feeling good about the state of the house I went upstairs and indulged in my most time-wasting of tasks: going through my box of “photos-to-go-in-albums”.  The box is packed with photos spanning the last decade.  They are completely disorganised with duplicates, blurred shots and wrong sized prints.  Every year I get the box down pledging to clear it out and get the photos in albums.  For a month the spare room gets covered in photos and then, exhausted and bored by the chaos the photos go back in the box for another year.

Over the past few days I’ve been feeling pumped.  There is nothing like your husband coming back after four months away to get you off your butt and doing things.  I’ve been to the dump, taken two boot loads of stuff to the charity shop, hung pictures on the wall and reorganised the kitchen cupboards once again. 

With guests over today and tomorrow the living room has been dusted, the floors hovered and so, having put Alby to bed my eyes surveyed the house and concluded that going upstairs to flick through photos for an hour would be a completely sensible use of time.

And then I remembered that I hadn’t fed Percy.  Going into the kitchen I realised that I hadn’t taken the washing out of the machine, nor put the next load in.  I hadn’t done the washing up from dinner.  I hadn’t cleared up anything from dinner.  On the way to the tumble drier I knocked over the bag of bottles waiting to be put out in the recycling bin.  I also noted the fingerprints smeared across the mirror in the hall.  Noting all of these I thought I'd sit down and write a to do list, which seemed to trigger in my head a whole list of other tasks already on my mental to do list – making chicken burgers for Alby’s lunch tomorrow, making cookies for my coffee afternoon tomorrow, defrosting liver cake for Percy’s puppy class tomorrow, cleaning Percy’s crate and putting away the pile of wet wipes on the living room floor following Alby’s decision to empty the packet earlier on (I didn’t mind, it kept him busy whilst I was cooking the dinner I have now to clear up).

For two hours this evening I was suffering from both amnesia, blindness and the delusion that I was on top of everything.  Two glorious hours.  Foolish foolish me.

Thank goodness I snapped out of it now before I have guests in the house.  I’m already feeling quite insecure about the return of Mark’s beady eye which seems to see dust from 100 miles away – dropping my guard seven days before his return is just silly.  And so, without further adieu I’m off to cook, wash, clean and cuddle a bulldog.  Don’t go feeling sorry for me – I don’t mind errands and it has saved me from the frustration of the photo box for, possibly, a whole other year.  Plus, cuddling a bulldog is at the end of my list and you can’t feel sorry for somebody with a bulldog to cuddle.