Weekend

Sunday, 22 February 2004

Well, I said gentle updates, and here's one. If it's straight, undigested reportage you're after, you've come to the right place.

First of all, yay for Paradise, who has had a poem accepted by a literary e-zine. He rocks.

It's been a busy weekend. All Friday at work I was aching for the end of the day (although I knew I'd be bringing work home with me). The week had been long and tiring, and I was more than ready for it to be over.

When five o' clock finally arrived (I know: I shouldn't complain - very few people who are paid as well as I am have such good hours!), I grabbed something to eat, then went with my parents to hear my aunt give the keynote address at a children's literature conference. My grandmother's work was to be a particular focus, because this year contains the tenth anniversary of her death. It surprised me how placid I was able to be in remembering my grandmother. I truly can't believe it's been ten years, and I still miss her profoundly, but the sharpness of the pain has gone away, which can only be a good thing. My aunt's lecture was illuminating, and the discussion afterwards was very interesting.

Saturday was that rarest of beasts in the life of the Radzer: a day of Unformatted Time. Paradise and I slept late, then woke up for a bit, then slept a little more, and then he went and brought me my breakfast in bed (because he's like that) while I slept just a tiny bit more, and after eating I eventually got up and showered, emerging just as Melusina arrived back from town, shortly preceding Burning Flower and the Blue Voyager. A most indulgent brunch followed, at which I was unfortunately somewhat dazed from all that sleep and so contributed little to the conversation.

After lunch we looked at paint catalogues (we've just had our shower-room replastered) and then set off on a tester hunt. Your major DIY chain on a Saturday afternoon is never going to be the pleasantest of places, but it wasn't too bad, considering. We got everything we were looking for - oh, apart from "Fluffy Fairy-Winged Dawn Tinge", or whatever damfool name our sixth choice of paint rejoices in - and drove home.

Except that as we neared our house, Paradise said, "I'm driving on," and I acquiesced, and so we trundled along to the seafront at Ringsend. There we left our warm car and went for a brief and bracing trot down to the Martello tower and back. We drove home by a meandering route in the dusk, through UCD, chatting away, and arrived back all fired up on the home improvements front. It takes us that way sometimes.

So I created a new spreadsheet (my new Answer to Everything - don't slag me: I'm only learning) to keep track of our plans, and Paradise began tidying our bedroom. After a while I joined him, and we committed horrific purgative rituals upon our respective wardrobes. By the time we'd finished there were no fewer than four black plastic sacks full of clothes in the boot of the car. Ruthless, we were, and I already miss some of the items. But that's purely because I'm manky bad at letting things go - it's not that I ever wore them.

We made dinner then, and I ate with Melusina in front of Channel 4's excessively silly Regency House Party, making searingly incisive comments the while, such as "television is weird", "British people are mad" and so forth. Eventually I fell into bed, whereupon I perked up, as is my most irritating wont these days, and didn't get to sleep until well after 1.00.

This morning being Sunday, Mel and I rose with the lark and went off to sing. After the service we went for lunch to celebrate the conductor's birthday, and thereafter to Oxfam to drop off all those clothes before I could change my mind about any of them. (Gone - forever!) Purging being the order of the day, as soon as we got home I set off again for the Bring Centre with our recyclables. Then I sat foostering at my desk, not doing any of the four bits of work I'd set for myself. I managed to get through one, but a terrible laxness took hold of my brain at about six o' clock. I slowed to a crawl and was fit for nothing more challenging than reading e-mail (of which there is a lot: all my mailboxes are silting up and I don't have the time or energy to do very much about it).

Dinner and a couple of episodes of Father Ted on DVD revived me somewhat, and I was able, with a little less than an hour's psyching myself up, to do half an hour's work on the novel (not the NaNoWriMo one, the other one - the one that I'm going to finish a draft of this spring if it fucking kills me). This is a momentous event, friends, because it's the first time I've touched it since the beginning of November. Feels good.

And so I head bedwards, hoping to reach it before my head falls off. Sleep well.

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