Oh what a lovely day...

I had the loveliest birthday yesterday.

Thank you to everyone who sent birthday wishes. Messages came in all day via Facebook which is particularly lovely when cards don’t arrive overseas in time for the right day.

I’m always the first to wake in this house (first to bed too.) And this is the sight that greeted me at the crack of dawn when I crept out of our bedroom:

There was a pile of presents on the table that I presumed I wasn’t allowed to open… Oh the self control… eventually, when everyone was up I got to open the gifts. This was one of them:

(Is it wrong to be so excited by a label maker?)

After much research, Daughter made a wheat free chocolate cake that was delicious but was spectacular this morning after a night in the fridge. I know because I had some for breakfast.

We had dinner at Face in Sukhumvit Soi 38 (I've never been before but it's a gorgeous complex of traditional Thai houses) and then went to see Red at the cinema.

I love my Dymo

My kinda fun

I'm tidying up.

It's something I can control.

And, if I utilise all the essential stationery bits and pieces I've bought over the years, like the Dymo label maker, I can even have fun while I'm doing it!

Oh dear.

Should I get out more?

(I was very upset that the Dymo didn't have an apostrophe: just a slash (/) and a full stop.)

I really must get out more.

Tidy me

Blergh. I’ve spent all day tidying my office. I promised myself I’d get going on it before I start my next 10,000 words which I must be tomorrow. It was disgusting. There were several toppling piles of paper and they were all crucial too; I couldn’t just tip them into a bin bag. I’d got papers from school, travel documents for Singapore next weekend, vital notes about novel one and novel two.

In fact, I had to tidy up before I start writing again, because somewhere there was a graph of which character was what age in what year and I’m starting to get confused. Now I know exactly where it is.

I spent the whole time listening to BBC’s World Book Club podcasts. I’ve listened to David Guterson, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Annie Proulx, David Lodge, Chinua Achebe, John Irving and Khaled Hosseini. Not wasted time at all and my desk and area are looking lovely and tidy.

I haven’t quite finished tidying … I’ve got some piles of books to find a home for (there isn’t a home – every shelf is already full of double stacked books) and some magazines to make decisions about (they’re destined for the recycling bin but I hate throwing magazines away – what if I need the information again?) I’ve also got a gargantuan box of papers to go through but they’re really old so I can ignore them for a bit longer.

Still, I got a bit over excited and prematurely got my Dymo label maker out. I’m sure I’ll be much more organised from now on…