A week at Chez Szondy

One thing I always loathe is when people complain about how humdrum and routine their lives are; how it's the same thing day in, day out without any variation except that which is induced by the passing of the seasons. And the odd war, flood, famine, plague, revolution, earthquake fire, shipwreck, recession, or inevitable zombie apocalypse. Or entropy working its way inexorably toward the heat death of the Universe. Otherwise, pretty samey.

I could do with a bit of routine. It would make for a nice change. What I wouldn't give sometimes to sit down at my desk in full confidence that when I stood up again I'd have 1500 words completed and a nice G &T to look forward to with supper to follow. What I actually have any confidence in is that if I sit down at my desk, I will be interrupted inside of five minutes by someone or something coming along and interrupt me. It may be something as prosaic as my daughter wanting to know what I'm doing or the appearance of a pair of cold, wet noses demanding attention. It might be the phone ringing to announce some emergency that requires my immediate attention, a chore that can't be put off any longer, or the power cutting out for some inexplicable reason. Mind you, with my life, it's equally likely to be a bear showing up in my front garden or a rain of toads in the living room. I am astonished at how I can leave a week open with nothing else to do except outline a novel, only to discover that the full Sunday to Sunday period has vanished down the plug hole without my even opening the bloody file.

Take last week, for example. Regular readers will have noticed that postings were a bit light. That's because instead of my usual frantic typing on the computer when I get a moment or two, things had got so chaotic that by Wednesday the only way I'd get a post up would have been to thumb it in on my cell phone while keeping one eye on the road while I barreled through the valley for the umpteenth time that day.

Monday vanished in a welter of errands that cropped up out of nowhere, an emergency trip to the post office to deal with a bundle of letters that hadn't been franked, and a frantic call from an old client who'd mislaid something I'd written over two years ago, but she was sure that I not only kept a copy of that sort of thing, but also stowed it someplace close at hand under an obvious file name so I could just fish it out and pop along in an email in the next half hour if that isn't too much a bother because we really, really need it yesterday.

It didn't help that I'd just started on a resolution not to work at all after 9:00 PM to avoid my routine of finishing "just one more thing" until it's 3:00 AM.

Tuesday, I took my wife to the dentist, which normally isn't a problem. In fact, it's a blessing in disguise because it gives me a three hour respite when I can hide in the waiting room with a cup of coffee and my notebook scribbling away. That is, if the receptionist doesn't notice that someone has cancelled their appointment, so I can get that cleaning done that I've been putting off for two months. So, instead of working on notes, I stagger out in the afternoon with a gums feeling like they've been lightly massaged by a pack of rabid French weasels using substandard cricket bats and clutching in my hand a bottle of prescription mouthwash that tastes of cherries–assuming that cherries were designed by a psychopath.

Wednesday was our wedding anniversary and the wife had a surprise arranged that was extremely welcome, but resulted in my losing another day's work that I tried to make up for on Thursday, but couldn't because the rain stopped and I had to take the rare opportunity to mow the lawn before the monsoons returned and finish the annual spring cleaning. That's the annual spring cleaning from 2008, so you can imagine what was involved.

Friday, our friends, who own Chez Szondy, came up from California to collect some things they'd stored in our garage. It's one of those occasions that I imagine will involve a bit of welcome catching up on things, then letting them get to it while I go get some work done with breaks to refresh my guests at intervals with coffee and pizza. It never does, however, and I spent the entire day in the garage and getting bugger all else done. I didn't mind a bit, but I was still scoring zero out of five on shortening the check list.

Perhaps I could catch up on Saturday. Sorry, Saturday is Family Day and it was compounded by the wife feeling under the weather, so it was her, me, the daughter, and two dogs all piled on the bed watching television all day. Even with a netbook, there is no way to do more than check the RSS feeds with a crush like that. I'd have had terminal cramp except that I'd completely forgotten about a birthday party that we'd been invited to and so, the wife still being poorly, the daughter and I ended up tearing twenty miles into Redmond to arrive almost three hours late. Good fun, though. The girl of honour had only turned two, so my daughter was by far the oldest and had the rare privilege of spending more time talking to the grown ups instead of the kids. Meanwhile, I chatted with people whom I hadn't seen in five years–some of whom I didn't recognise until I added the appropriate number of years and pounds to. Not that I was exactly Dorian Gray myself.

Aha! Sunday!

Nope. I had the week's shopping that I should have done earlier. Now that I was catching up on that and with my daughter in tow, I had to throw in a detour to a petting zoo, a book shop visit, and the purchase of a sea monkey aquarium.

Total score: Seven/nil, advantage distractions.

I suppose I should admit that other writers have had to deal with the world as well as the typewriter and that I'm merely grumbling, but I think I can say with some authority that whatever travails Shakespeare may have encountered, I doubt if he ever came face to face with setting up a sea monkey aquarium.

I looked it up. He hadn't.