Oh, dear. I started in watching Fox's 1944 The Lodger last night, and although I found it very well done and intriguing, suddenly twenty minutes into it I got up and turned it off.
It's not the fault of the movie. I look forward to seeing the rest of it sometime. I guess that I'm just not in the mood to sit passively and watch telly when I should be up and about, doing things, getting caught up. If I'm to stay in this house for even a short period of time, I can not have boxes full of stuff sitting on the floor in the front room. I can not have things just all a-jingling. I can not have dust bunnies and rubble in the corners.
Plus, my scrapbook keeps calling to me. I never would have thought that this would be an activity for me, but there you are, I have scrapbooking supplies neatly arranged (for me) on the dining room table. I could not find a scrapbook that I liked in the stores, so when an unused ledger of my mother's turned up, I started manually blackening the pages with India ink and mounting my photos there, writing captions in white ink and adding scarp elements cut from documents, magazines, cards. It's going to be pretty arty when I get done.
I find it more comforting to be in a well-lit room working on something like that, than to be sitting in a darkened room watching old movies. When I go to bed at night, I feel as if I've accomplished something. The cats are starting to settle down and take advantage of the new arrangement. We all sit in the living room, and I put some music on (until Melanie arrives, Herb Alpert is getting a lot of play) and I work on emptying the boxes, loading the bookshelves, repacking linens into drawers, or I sit and work on the scrapbook.
The living/dining room, the kitchen and the front room are all pretty good now. But the study needs more cleaning, more furniture and more thought, and the front hall is merely storage space at the moment. I haven't even begun to clean up my mother's bedroom. I don't like going in there.
Oddly enough, the pickers took next to nothing out of her bathroom, so it's like an oasis in there at the edge of a wasteland.
Tonight maybe I'll try again, maybe not. Tomorrow I go looking at houses.
-- Freder
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