When I got up this morning, the little tabby was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, and turned and ran into the kitchen. As I walked into the kitchen, I heard the cat flap rattle, and the old black cat was sitting in his basket. I wondered why she had decided to rush out, and went and got the cat food from the utility room. As I was measuring out the food, she came out from under the kitchen table.
So, we must have had a furry visitor last night. Interesting that the old cat didn’t seem bothered. Maybe he’d finished his food and didn’t really care.
Monday morning again. It didn’t stay raining all day yesterday, it cleared up around lunchtime and was then just cold and windy till mid afternoonish, when the sun came out.
I worked most of the day, and did the hoovering and cleaned the bathrooms. Didn’t get round to the fish pond because by the time the weather was decent I was too deep into trying to get this work done. Yves emailed me and said could we talk an Skype and gave me his skype number. I’ve never used skype, I tried it when Lady Lucy was still alive, but it would only work on XP, which I didn’t have at that time. Yesterday I managed to download and install it, but couldn’t find the microphone. When I did and plugged it in I couldn’t get it to work. So, I might try and buy a headset today.
But I wasted quite a bit of time messing about with that when I should have been working.
I used to swear that I would never work at weekends – well, after my PhD, when I lived and breathed it seven days a week. But needs must. Everything has deadlines which must be met, and sometimes that’s the only way I have a hope in hell of squeezing them all in. And things like filing are forever being pushed back, because there just isn’t time to fit them in – which is bad, because sooner or later that will come back to haunt me when I can’t find something I need urgently. But what can you do? I can only do so much.
And why is it that the things which pop up which I should probably say: ‘Sorry, I don’t have time’, like this thing for Yves, are always more interesting and lucrative than the everyday things that have to be done whatever? If I ever feel I have to turn down opportunities like that, I might as well just give up altogether But there’s never going to be any way I can only do the interesting stuff and drop the clerking, because it is just too erratic and irregular, I can’t rely on it.
Life would be so much simpler if I just dropped this whole idea of making a living for myself and accepted that I’m dependent on Hubby and that’s the way it is, it’s too late to change anything now.
I try not to look back over my life and wonder where it went wrong. That way, madness lies. Why didn’t I manage to do what other women do, and restart my career? Lots of reasons, living in the States for one, which meant I had to give up my job completely without any possibility of going back to it. But then why didn’t I try to get back into IT when we got home? Because I wanted either to be a writer, or do a PhD. Or both. Probably it was the PhD that really put the tin hat on it all. But no point thinking that way.