Our house has, as residents, three humans and three cats, plus sundry guests. One of these residents is long haired, and the cats are, well, cats.

Vacuuming goes as follows:
- vacuum a couple square metres of carpet with the Vax.
- pop foot/pole off hose, use end of hose to remove my hair and cat fur that’s jamming up the vacuum foot
- use end of hose to do edges/skirting boards
- vacuum another couple square metres of carpet
- pop foot/pole off hose, marvel at size of current hairknotball acquisition
Lather, rinse repeat.

For bonus points, follow up Vax vacuum as above with a few circuits with the Dyson, and marvel further at the astonishing amounts that the Dyson can extract from the carpet even AFTER you swear that the Vax has thoroughly beaten all the dirt out. Hint: you’re wrong.

We’re making progress around the house. Operation 2012: Tidy The Things was generally successful, and Operation 2013: Keep It Up is ongoing. Honestly, ongoing maintenance is the problem T and I have always had. We’re really good at doing Things when they are big enough to be Things. We are not very good at ongoing habits. But… we’re getting there.

A friend who’s handy was kind enough to investigate why the light fixture in our bedroom had died – it turned out to be the dimmer switch. No problem, we didn’t really use it anyway. Now we can fold laundry at night!

I went through my wardrobe again and generated another sackful of clothing I don’t need/don’t wear any more. Then went shopping to replace the things I actually NEEDED – work pants, work-suitable tshirts, shoes. Three hundred bucks later, I had three pairs of pants, a skirt, four shirts, and three pairs of shoes. Great success.

On a related note – why are the racks in the plus size section of Farmers closer together than they are in the rest of the store? This seems somewhat counter intuitive.

I’ve danced a lot less in the last couple of months. No particular reason – enforced break at Christmas, no classes I really felt like taking, my favourite teachers are still overseas, trying to be more sensible with cash… all of the above.

I’ve realised in the last week or two that I really NEED that time. As much as I’m an introvert, I need the people time. I need the energy, I need the exercise, I need the motivation and exhilaration I get from the challenge of dancing. I’m still teaching at the bar on Thursdays, which is good for me, but I need more than one night out.

So I’ve joined another performance course. Intermediate level this time; performing in Congress in Wellington in June. For which I won free accommodation, which is a nice boost to the budget.

Two and a half years I’ve been dancing. Who’d've thought I’d come this far?

Our house has become quite musical lately. I’ve been making more of an effort with the piano, in between dance and my other commitments.

Then Tobermory, about six months? or a year? ago, discovered that a game called Rocksmith was due for release. It’s an Xbox/PS3/PC game; you plug in a real guitar (like, an actual electric guitar) to your console, tune it all up, and then the game teaches you to play guitar. It’s seriously FANTASTIC. Tobes played guitar, quite seriously, until he had a bad wrist injury a few years ago; and as with all these things, if you don’t practice you lose the skill.

So, Tobes got Rocksmith for his birthday, as it was released at roughly birthday-time. All three of us have been playing – Thaqui learned a little guitar in the past, as did I, and we’ve been variously cursing at it / each other as we slowly learn the basics.

Tobermory probably has the best approach – he’s actually practicing and repeating things, where Thaqui and I are happily bowling through the game without really refining our skills first. Hey ho!

Then Thaqui discovered a PC game called Synthesia, which teaches you to play piano. He also learned a little piano, so he went out and bought a fairly cheap 49-key USB keyboard for use with said game.

I’m really, really impressed. I’ve been playing piano since I was three, and started lessons when I was five; the game is very, very well designed. And if he does get bored with the constraints of the 49-key, there is most conveniently a full size piano sitting in the living room.

It’s nice living in a household that appreciates music. Not just listening to other people’s, but caring about creating it too.

The last couple of weekends have involved a lot of organising. Saturday last weekend, T and I moved ALL the living room furniture and vacuumed, steamcleaned the carpet, dusted, moved everything back… admittedly I still haven’t quite finished rummaging and organising the pile of junk that this created, but at least it’s all in one pile now.

Today, I evicted the entire contents of both pantries. No, the kitchen’s not enormous or anything, but there’s two cupboards which, together, serve the general purpose of “pantry”. Having spread the contents all over the kitchen table, they needed to be reorganised and stashed back in place.

I’m ashamed to say that I found things in the cabinets that I’d actually forgotten we owned. The culprits have been stashed in a cardboard box, listed on Freecycle, and will theoretically be collected tomorrow. I took a trip to purchase some plastic crates, as well – so things are collated in boxes with other things of a similar nature. In theory, I will be able to find things now.

I also went through the first aid box, which lives in said pantry. There was a remarkable amount of expired medication, which has been appropriately disposed of. Everything remaining has been tidied into a new plastic crate, one that has a handle and a lid for easy transportation e.g. to the bathroom. I’m not sure why we have six boxes of various bandaids, but there you go.

I’m still not very good at dealing with the odds and sods that result from tidying sessions like this. But I’m getting better, gradually. And it is nice living in a more organised home. I can find things!

Periodically I get the desire to organise things. Usually, this comes at the expense of other chores, mopping, vacuuming, etc.

I bought my husband the steam cleaner that he’s been begging for hopefully for the last, oh, year. He has been gleefully cleaning All The Things, including an EPIC clean of the kitchen floor today. And I finally decided I was sick and tired of the messy insides of the pantry, and have thus done some of the necessary organising.

For a start, most of the baking goods are now in mason jars. With chalkboard labels. In my defense, I liked these things anyway, and the current trends towards them just makes it easier for me to find the pretty things.

Cough. Anyway.

Second, the shelf we keep glasses on is really too tall. And we have too many mugs and glasses for the space. Lots of wasted vertical space. But people seem to think that those poxy wireframed ‘shelves’ are an acceptable solution.

Not in my house.

Instead, a plank plus four bed legs is now serving the function of an add-in shelf in the pantry now. Even if it did take me three trips to hardware stores to actually find four legs that MATCHED.

My inner organising fairy is pleased with the results.