Recovery

OMG- I am still recovering from the Mother of All Colds; I was in bed, hacking and snuffling, all last week. It started in my nose, then I had a horrific sore throat, then I got a chest cold, and finally it wound its way to my ears. I believe that I have that petri-dish of a preschool to thank for this plague. After years of good health, I'm sure it is just the first of many infestations that I will be forced to endure.

So quite naturally, I missed les Nuits Blanches again this year. The universe clearly does not want me to experience this event as every year, something comes up. Last year, we were in London visiting friends (highly prefereable to the plague). Obviously, having a baby in the house for the past two years, meant that any plan that involved staying awake all night was infinitely less desireable than a plan involving actual sleeping in my bed. Will 2009 be my lucky year? Somehow, I am doubting it.

I don't remember what the adage is, but in any case, I have been filling my non-hacking time by feeding my cold. I have cooked and baked up a storm this weekend. We had roast chicken, followed by chicken with white bean/chorizo/roast tomato salade, followed by homemade chicken noodle soup. Braised beef stew, almond cake with white chocolate mousse and stewed apricots, minestrone soup. My freezer is bulging at the seams. We finally had to order some Japanese food so I could get some more plastic containers to hold all the leftovers.

All that time laying in bed and waiting for the buzzer to go on the oven has given me plenty of time to write up my To Do list for the next week or so. I realized that my photo albums are about a year behind, so I am currently uploading a couple hundred(?!!!) photos to a website to have them printed and shipped this week. Unfortunately, I realized that I still have photos on my old laptop that haven't been printed out yet or transferred to discs. Ugh. See- this is the bad side of digital. Its nice to be able to take thousands of photos, but at some point you still have to organize them and, really, print out your favs otherwise you just lose them. I have learned from past experience that the best way to tackle the project is to just do a marathon session, printing up everything at once, spreading them out on on the dining room table, stocking up on albums and photo corners, and not clearing it up until every last photo has been pasted in or posted out to family.

So, the time for the photos to arrive, I have to tackle another big project. I mentioned to B that I wanted to buy some fabric to recover the pillows on our bed and suddenly it snowballed into this mega redecoration project. This week, he wants me to order: new living room/dining room curtains, wallpaper for the hall, fabric for living room cushions, bedroom curtains, upholstry fabric to re-do the headboard and chairs in the bedroom, and, of course, the pillows that started this all. And to be honest, I really should order fabric for curtains and cushions in the guest room but I feel like I don't have it in my to make any more decisions. I have a stack of paint swatches, a folder full of fabric swatches that the shop sent me, sheets of wallpaper- too many options for everything. Anyways, I will do a separate post on that as I really need to sort this out. To be honest, I need to go tomorrow, I think, in order to get my order in if I want it done by Christmas holidays. I definitely don't want this dragging into the new year if I can help it. Let's just call 2008 'The Year of the Great Overall' (to compensate for the total failure of our plan to sell our flat and move into a bigger place...) and be done with it all for another 5 years or so.