Horrors!

So, in the spirit of duck-in-a-rowness, I cleaned out the fridge (my mother is not exactly the pinnacle of organisation at the best of times, and now that she's away I seized the opportunity), the drawer by my bed and my shoe collection.

To tell the truth, I'm not too sure how much of it was my newfound desire to put my life in order, and how much was a result of my spending most of the day reading papers that I didn't understand. Eventually I went home, printed a few of the worse ones out and settled down on my bed with a pen and a highlighter and tried to get through them. After about an hour, I got to a stage where the scientists had put together a bunch of pictures with an instruction to 'hold your finger 10cm from the page and focus on it and then look at the page without changing the focus of your eyes' or something. They followed by assuring me that not everyone can do it. After about 10 minutes of squinting I felt (once again) like I was stuck in an episode of Punkd, except that a) I really dislike Ashton Kutcher and b) I'm not famous. Unless I really am living the Truman Show, but that makes very little sense because if that was true they wouldn't have made the movie.

So I started going through some of the piles of junk in my room and getting rid of stuff. It was pretty interesting. I've always known myself to be a bit of a hoarder, but I had no idea how bad the situation was. For example the bottom of my bedside drawer was covered with old batteries. There were about 3 handfuls of them. I'm sure that I had them in my walkman way back in the day, and when they ran out I saved them to use in an alarm clock or a torch os something that doesn't need as much power as a walkman or discman. For a horrifying moment I realised how bad the situation would have been if I hadn't switched to an Ipod. I'd be wading through batteries, which would be spilling out into other parts of the house... You'll be glad to know that I put them all in for recycling!

After that I tackled my shoes, which actually began in a perfectly innocent attempt to find a certain pair of shoes, and ended up with me throwing out a huge pile of old ones. I realised to my horror that I have a shoe collection to rival a lot of people who I ridicule regularly, which makes the whole situation a lot worse considering that I probably wear about... 6 or 7 pairs regularly. I actually found my huge silver platform shoes (don't judge me) from when I was about 14. There were others, equally old that have acutally come back into fashion because I kept them for so long! On the plus side, I found my old hiking boots, which I thought I'd lost.

So now that that is done, I have no excuse (except cleaning out the other cupboards, but I don't have the energy right now) but to get back to the nasty complicated papers.