Man I hate tidying.

I was on call today but it was very quiet so I was able to get on with tidying the... (durn dun dun) back room. Now this room has been so untidy since I moved into this house with my two girls 3 years ago that it has been pretty much off limits. Used only to house the Gecko, the stereo and the dreaded homework table. So today in preparation for the firework party next Saturday I set about clearing it. This raised a number of important issues. Firstly, Why does everything come with 3 different data cables these days? I must have two dozen different types of USB cable and precious few of those are standards based! It seems to be the result of digital camera and external drive ownership.

Secondly, spiders, Why is my house the meeting place for Tegenaria gigantea? (Check out the wiki article, 7.5cm span? Pah I'm talking 12cm without them having to stretch out.) When I was a kid I was afraid of spiders but since then I have conquered that fear. I've held tarantulas and even rounded up rogue spiders in pet shops. My preferred method for dealing with a spider is to grab it and throw it outside. However these guys have a habit of waiting until I don't expect to see them and then between 11pm and 1am they calculate the point in my peripheral vision which has been selected by evolution for... "incoming pterodactyl, evacuate colon" then they accelerate to 50mph and do an orbit of the living room leaving me covered with wine after my girlish shriek. Anyway today I found spider central and boxed them all up and shipped them across the road to the neighbours.

The reason for this sudden spurt of energy and enthusiasm is the impending party, People are going to need somewhere to stand, and (ahem) I'd rather they didn't think I was some kind of human hoarding machine. I think I must have inherited the yet to be identified "house proud" gene from my mum. The agony is that I definitely also have the "lazy git" gene which prevents tidying in favour of absolutely any other pastime. I can't blame that one on inheritance, I think I constructed it for myself.

Another thing that makes tidying so difficult is my children's prolific artistic output. I don't understand, it's unfathomable to me because I estimate that during my entire school career I produced at most twenty separate pieces of art. However in the space of Charlotte's four year and Rebecca's two year school career they seem to have produced a volume of work that is best measured in kilograms! Is everything taught through the medium of artwork these days? I am doing my best to store their work but it isn't easy, especially when they bring home 3d pieces.

As I got on the blogging bandwagon I thought I ought to get on the podcast bandwagon. Let me explain... My iBook is so old and creaky that I long since stopped upgrading it on the basis that, often bugfixes bring extra code and when you have a 600MHz G3 every ounce of code hurts. This prevented me from upgrading iTunes for a very long time. Unfortunately one of my close friends played me the Adam and Joe podcast on his 360 the other day and I realised that I was missing out. So as well as tidying I listened to Adam and Joe who were very entertaining. The iBook seems to be fine with this and the service is, as you might expect, excellent. This is all inspite of the fact that the iBook is known among my inner sanctum as "Frankenstien's iBook" becuase I bought it for £100 with a motherboard fault which thanks to judicious use of a scope and soldering iron I managed to work around, thats not including the story about "the hard drive with spit in it". Not the sort of thing I do every day, but nonetheless it's amazing what you can do when you really need a computer!

That concludes todays outing. Oo except for the fact that there were hardly any fieworks this evening. This suggests that the end of the working week is a concept that carries enough emotional enrgy to overcome 401 years of history. Cool eh?