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Have managed to do quite a bit on my to do list, and even thought the Biggie (finish the layout of a magazine) is not finished, it is inching towards completion. Seriously, I have no idea why I find it so hard to finish this number, usually it takes me a lot less.

I have, however, made a giant leap in identifying the owner of the flat next to mine, who is maybe the owner of the other flat, who is maybe the manager of the company holding the freehold. I called the letting agency who handles the rent. The guy at the letting agency emailed him, and asked me to contact him.

If I don't get any answer in a reasonable time frame, I think I'll have to ask the solicitor who dealt with buying the house to track down this guy. Because, honestly. Advice on this is welcome. I have already tried to get the owner of the ground floor flat to contact me, through the tenants. No luck.

I also managed to sort out the tottering pile of clothes that was growing in my bedroom. Thanks to Lavinia, my bedroom now is not only neat, it is actually getting more and more organized.

For the rest, I spent a pleasant day at home petting the cats and listening to the rain. On days like this it's really great to be able to stay indoors, all dry and warm, and enjoy the sharpness of autumn.

Evening brought the chilling news that Amazon has chosen to stop using Royal Mail for its deliveries. Despite me genuine sympathies for the striking workers of RM, I can understand Amazon's point. But I am still horrifies, for completely non-political reasons: if I have to rely on couriers to deliver my books, experience tells me that it will involve a lot of furious phone calls about cards left while was at home, or drivers who can't find my house, and many days spent waiting for a delivery while my blood pressure rises irresistibly, and long furious drives to locations that are conveniently located past the North Circular, leading to hours sitting in stationary traffic...

Which means that the local bookstores and Waterstones' will get a lot more of my business, and I will buy far less books. Probably not a bad thing, all considered, but...

Given that I am out of spoons, I managed:

half an hour of solid work plus a lot of idle module browsing (on my time, this logging time for billing is going to be hard for me),
a healthy meal,
laundering the comfy clothes that are supposed to be for exercise but that I wear around the house,
stretches,
a mission out in the mean streets to acquire an arch-lever folder for my car documents, the replacement glass for a cafetiere, and NOTHING ELSE (apart from a very very nice red moleskin), despite the temptations,
reconditioning of a few fountain pens I thought I had lost,
an experiment in litter medium mixing in case it's the litter that is the problem and not the fact that Zip is trying to make a point about her place in the world.

Still, I feel under par. I would have liked to be able to sort out the study and the bedroom, and I STILL have to dispose of the damn mattress. (Does anybody want a nice foam 160x200 Ikea mattress? Please?).

I also have one of those moments when things go chronically missing. Now that I have bought the replacement glass for my cafetiere, I can't find the handle or the base. Grrr. Neither can I find my favourite fountain pen, the Pelikan I have used not so long ago...

This is very much a case of my cleaning lady being sometimes more hindrance than help. I am very shy around her, and she is possibly just as shy around me; either that or she is not very bright, because her was of tidying up is putting things out of sight in any place, even when they have a perfectly obvious and natural place. For example, she stashes away the wooden spoon for cooking in various drawers, when there is a very obvious box with lots of other wooden spoons next to the stove. This means that I lose a lot of stuff, and that there are very neat but very heterogenic piles of Stuff all around the house.

At least I have now found the moleskin I had been taking my counselling notes on. It's something.

All this is not helped by the fact that my back hurts. I have been neglecting my stretches and getting fatter and not exercising, mostly on account of the fact that various bits of me ache. This is getting ridiculous. I am not sick or hurt, and I have enough actually, seriously sick or hurt friends to feel that I am a wuss about all this. Still, exercising is difficult and the fatter I get the more difficult it gets.

And this is Flock. I am not sure I want to switch to a whole new browser just for LJ, especially since I like me Firefox.

Anyway - I am writing this in my new study, that is, the dining room. The desk that was in my bedroom has been moved, as per my new counsellor's stern advice, into the dining room. The two chest of drawers are now in the bedroom, but as they very annoyingly didn't fit into the niche the desk was previously in, the bed had to go on the opposite wall, with much pushing and pulling and lifting and panting.

I am now tired and the bedroom, which was all nice and orderly before, is a right mess. The dining room too, with the exception of the computer desk which is a marvel of starkness and minimalist order. Won't last for long I predict.

Also, I have to find a different order of things in the bedroom because at the moment the bed is sort of at an angle.

I am not sure I am so taken with this counsellor, but I am too cold and uncomfortable right now to go to great length about it.

Also, my new GP was very nice and called me to tell me he referred me to a new psychiatrist. It will probably take six weeks or more to get back to me.

Fuckit, they take mental health seriously in this country, eh? And London is good - up North a guy attempted suicide twice while he waited for therapy.

(Don't get me started on private health care - I am broke because, guess what, no insurer will cover my depression, as it's a pre-exixting condition. Pre-existing to my coming to this country, that is. It is, believe it or not, a whole lot easier to get psychiatric help in Italy.)

This evening, feeling thoroughly miserable, I tried the Universal Panacea:

CUP OF TEA!

Believe it or not, it worked. Amazing. I felt so much better than I went on with the cataloguing of my books. They are currently stashed on the shelves in no particular order, but at least, gradually, I get to know where they are.

I've done the almost empty cabinet near the bed for Books To Be Read Real Soon Now (ah!), and two out of eight shelves of the niche in the living room, plus almost all the Lecco bookshop next to the window, for a total of 512 books.

The main problem is that I am using Delicious Library and I have found no way to import my Italian books. LibraryThing is not much better - there are several Italian databases but they don't seem to find any of my Italian books. This is very, very vexing.

I am uploading my new books to LibraryThing, just so I can have a backup, but I think I will also look into other cataloguing programs, one never knows.

I managed to fix the ceiling light in the dining room. I know, I know, it's no big deal, but hey, I grew up in a country where if you take down a light there are ONLY two damn wires sticking out, three at most with the earth, and my dining room had not one, not three, but TWO set of wires dangling down, and I couldn't make any sense of it.

My luck was that the last ceiling rose + pendant I bought not only had helpful diagrams, but the crucial information that the feed out set (might be missing). Yay!

Also, I decided to buy a circuit tester, because it was, well, a cool toy, and with a bit of googling around I was able to find out how to identify the switch cable and tell it apart from the feed.

Boys, am I proud of myself.

I keep being very, very tired. I'm not sleeping well today - the guys from Hippowaste are supposed to come to collect my Big Yellow Bag, but they were very insistent that I check that no cars are in the way, and therefore I staked out the parking spot directly in front of the Yellow Bag until I could occupy it, and this morning I left a notice on the windscreen telling them that the care was mine and I would move it out of the way. So I'm waiting for a bell and worrying and sleeping in fits.

I wanted to write about this documentary on Channel 4 that I saw by chance and rattled me pretty badly, "Raised by the hand of God", on "biblical parenting", but I simply don't have the strength.

Ahhh, Spring.

BTW, from one bit of news I found, it seems it's not a low-grade allergic reaction that knocks people down in Spring, but the manufacturing of a whole lot of erythrocytes and plasma.

No running today, of course. Maybe tomorrow. Pity because the weather is absolutely glorious.

The electrician sent me the bill for the parts today. The parts *only*. And there's the labour, and then the cost of the paint, and the labour for the painter, and the dormer window will have to be changed, and my head hurts even to think of what isolating the eaves might cost. Oh yes, and there is the money for the guys who will have to unload the boxes sent from Italy, and the hire for the skip, and the movers.

And this is the moment I chose to fall ill and stay home for two weeks.

My parents were reassuring, and say that they will loan me the money. But I am not sure I am going to have the money to go to Wiscon, because I don't feel like I can ask them for money for the house and then blow my own savings on plane tickets, and I so desperately wanted to go to Wiscon.

The new house is under the eaves. It's very prettily angled, and quite apart from the fact that I bumped my head on one of the abovementioned eaves this morning IS AS HOT AS HELL.

I mean, it's March. EARLY March. The sun beats down on the dormer window of what's supposed to be my bedroom, and the room boils.

Arrrgh.

I am trying to draw some plans of my new house - does anybody have any advice on useful mac software to do it with? I don't really need CAD - just the virtual equivalent of small-squared paper.

I have sent my solicitor the letter of representation, a signed copy of the agreement, and the down payment.

I now feel faint and scared and very achieving.

I have celebrated in true British style with a fry-up and a couple of cups of tea.

I will try to avoid thinking of how to pack all of my Stuff for the move. Really hard. And dwell instead on the sweet thought of a place! all! of my own! in London!

I am considering really seriously converting the bathtub into a shower. I miss a proper shower cubicle. I know it would devalue the house, but what the heck.

Got letter from solicitors with among other things exact amount of stamp duty. Feel a lot less guilty now. Thank you Gordon Brown.

I finished assembling the Ikea cabinets in the living room. Man, they were halfway done and I'm still sore and very tired. I wanted to do the kitchen console too, but I guess I'll do it some other day. The house feels more comfy every day.

I didn't write. Worse still, I didn't feel like writing. I am waiting for the will to write to come back, and also, I am trying for the right plot to come up.

Among the story I wrote at Clarion, the one that's been more successful, to my surprise, was the one I knocked together in a hurry and with a certain degree of cynicism. It's fantasy story, and I don't much care for fantasy.

The fact is, I know why it's so successful: it's because it's fun, and it moves along, and it's full of action and happenings and striking images of things moving. I had fun writing it, and it had all sorts of things I actually enjoy - Banks and Brookmyre wouldn't be among my favourite authors else. But, for some reason, I can't recapture that thrill when I write things i do care about. Then, my writing slows down and becomes sombre and grim and depressing.

Now I'm rewriting the first chapter of my novel. It's not totally mysterious why I'm not so excited about it - I'm basically bored with the story. Still, the first chapter is the one when things happen, when there's the big accident in the space station and so on. But it doesn't feel like movement and fun, it feels... like a chore. So, I'm waiting for the "PING" of inspiration to struck.

In other news, I phoned Riccardo, who's minding the house and the cat for me in Italy, and he said Zip became all excited at hearing my voice (he'd put me on the speaker). I also heard the characteristic noises of Zip being around, namely, Riccardo going "Aaargh! Ayyy! No! Stop that!"

Meanwhile my parents have ended up giving in and letting the small black cat (formerly a black ghost, now a small and rather round black cat) into the house. She is apparently very happy about the situation, and while not very demonstrative, she obviously cares about my folks. She woke up my mom the other day with a sort of howling, and knocking on the French window glass. My mom got up and saw that she had her mouth full of little birdie (hence the howl: she couldn't properly meow), and was showing it off. My mom got back on the sofa and the cat knocked again, so my mom had to stay up and look at her playing with the bird. The cat kept looking at her, checking that she was indeed appreciating what an awesome hunter she is.

And she is - this is her third bird in less than a month. My guess is that her previous owners didn't feed her, and she had to forage for a living. Which is not easy in an urban courtyard, hence her skeletal appereance. My folks fed her, but she seemed to be a bottomless pit. She had two litters on that diet.

Now that my parents feed her regularly and abundantly, having abandoned all scruples about ownership, she had the leisure to bring the birdies for them to see.

They have decided to call her "Cat".

Thames water: sorted
Council tax: sorted

British Gas: their automated service sucks. Still to be sorted.

Credit card: almost sorted
Debit card: waiting, and waiting, and waiting....

Update: opened last envelope... the courier telling me that I need to arrange a re-delivery of the debit card!!! Aaaargh.

Update 2: Phoned the courier. Sorted, as far as that goes.