A miscellany

The thing I didn’t raise with the doctor.

I had an ECG test done a few months ago and the results came back indicating I was dead.

OK, not quite dead, but the heart rate recorded by the machine was not strong enough to give a proper review of the state of my heart.

Annoyingly, I had to go back to my GP and have the test done again.

The GP’s practice is near my work, and the individual appointment rooms face out to the walkway where people pass from nearby offices to the nearby shopping centre. The glass has some kind of occluding film on it up to about 2 meters high, so passersby can’t look straight in at patients. But there is a gap above that of just plain glass so you can look out into the world.

Which I did, when I was sitting on the examination table, naked from waist up, wires strapped to stickers all over me, as the machine registered my heart beat.

What I found myself looking at was the tall apartment building across from the surgery. A very tall building with many balconies, and all of those those balconies provide a fine view through that narrow gap of clear glass down into the doctor’s surgery.

While I was sat there (“stay completely still!”) with the machine beeping and drawing a graph of my heart beats, I stared hard at the apartment building, to see if anyone was there with binoculars staring down at me.

No one was. But it’s the potential that someone Could Have Been.

Did I ask the doctor to please close the blinds that could have screened the whole window?

Of course not.

Cleaning Slowly

“I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man, I keep his house.” (ZsaZsa Gabor)

I’m not a marvellous housekeeper.

I see the house needs cleaning and tidying but most of the time I don’t take any action to do something about it. Unless someone’s coming to visit, and then we have to clean. Then we clean with attention and vigour. We even clean in places our guests will never see, giving our guests the benefit of a clean house that we don’t give ourselves.

I’m trying this year to do more little spells of “maintenance cleaning”: doing five or ten minutes of cleaning a few times a week instead of saving it for one big time sapping effort on the weekend. These mini-cleans happen mostly when I’m working from home. I clean the bathroom more often now, especially now the days are longer and (sort of) brighter and as when I’m working from home I’m in there more often than I am on other days, I can see more clearly the places that need cleaning.

In the past weeks I’ve been cleaning out drawers and shelves in the kitchen cupboards, one at a time. This week it was the turn of the shelf where we keep the cleaning products.

First step, throw out all the empty plastic bottles we were keeping for… what exactly?

We have a lot of cleaning products. I’m sure some of them are necessary but not the duplicates. Why do we need two bottles of bleach in the kitchen?

We found a packet of descaler so we descaled the kettle. The kettle is now so clean!

We found a bottle of washing machine cleaner, so we put that through the washing machine.

While the cleaner might have done its bit for removing limescale and residue inside the machine, I discovered that it doesn’t do anything for the rubber seal around the door, which was full of – how to describe this horror – some kind of brown slimy residue that has built up over who knows how long? If like me you never clean the washing machine, I suggest you go and have a look at the door and be prepared to be disgusted.

We also found a product called “colour catcher” that stops your whole wash going pink if a stray red sock goes in. I guess you could also use it with new clothes where you don’t know if the colour is going to run. We didn’t buy this product. It was left behind by a flatmate who moved out something like 20 years ago.

Also in the cupboard, a slab of henna. I can’t remember the last time I coloured my hair. I can’t picture that I will need henna again anytime soon. That henna is at least 10 years old and it goes into the bin.

This shelf now has a lot more space on it.

By practising on things that don’t matter (household cleaning products) I may eventually be able to declutter items that are more personal.

Also, I’m letting you know, even after 20 years, the colour catcher still worked when we put it in with a mixed load of laundry that included something new and brightly coloured. The colour catcher sheet came out grey, everything else was fine.

WIPs

An update on those works in progress I couldn’t find.

I found them!

They were hidden away on the old laptop, sitting in an un-downloaded zip file.

The old laptop took 15 minutes to wake up and then another 10 minutes to realise we had a new internet connection, and another five minutes to process the new password and connect to the new internet. It took another 10 minutes of searching to find the files (click…. (wait)…. click…. (wait)…), and once I found them, another 10 minutes to download them. By the time I opened a web browser, logged into email and sent the files on, we were up to an hour.

Top tip: when saving WIPs it is helpful to save them with month and year you were working on them, not just month. You never know when you’re going to leave them untouched for a long period of time.

Absorbed

Me, on the Tube, on my way home from work, making notes of a conversation between two characters who don’t even have a work in progress to live in yet. My head is down and I’m focussed on capturing this conversation. I don’t know who these characters are but it’s important that I get this conversation down on paper because who knows where this might lead? I look up and see lots of people are getting off the train.

Where are we? What station is this?

Oh crap, this is my station, and I nearly missed it, caught up in two characters who don’t even have names yet.

Although I think one of them may be Leo.

Things you learn by reading

I’m currently reading a book called Hokkaido Highway Blues by Will Ferguson. It’s about a man hitchhiking through Japan. I’m keen to go to Japan on holiday one day (one day!) so this is like a little precursor holiday. I’ve learned some things about Japan and Japanese culture (the prevalence of squid as a foodstuff is alarming), but I’ve also learned about Japanese castles (made of wood! with metal roofs! very few remain because most were struck by lightning and burned down!) and the phenomenon of ‘bull sumo’.

Yes, bull sumo is exactly what it sounds. Two bulls in a ring lock horns and push. The first one to give up loses. Unlike Spanish bullfighting though, the bulls live to push another day.

I’m not saying I would be keen to see bull sumo when I am in Japan but I feel enriched from learning about it.

And I’m only halfway through the book.