Well, it’s the final day of my advent project, officially, although I think that was really yesterday. I was feeling so burnt out this morning that I decided to take a bit of a break today and instead of panicking and exhausting myself over the two big pieces I haven’t finished yet, decided to focus on getting the house in order a bit in preparation for the coming term so that I can go back to work tomorrow like a little beaver without having to worry about wading through messes. I also did some listening, which I actually enjoyed today – Faure piano Nocturnes and John Adams’ Gnarly Buttons which I enjoyed more than at the London Sinfonietta performance I went to a little while back. So! Today I have…

• struck the Christmas decorations and put them all back in their boxes (and realised I’d totally forgotten about my gorgeous fat robin, who would have made a big difference to the festive feel somewhere) because it’s 12th night and to leave them up would mean bad luck for the whole year
• set up Roomba in the bedroom so I can start cleaning that without needing to clean it, if you get my drift, rather than him sitting in the doorway to the study gathering dust and getting in the way because there’s nowhere convenient up here to plug him in
• done gargantuan quantities of washing up
• changed the sheets and doona cover
• put up the remaining shelves in the large bookshelf (which hadn’t been done because I was waiting on a second round of those nubby things that go in the holes to support the shelves to arrive)
• set up reminders in rememberthemilk so that I don’t let my finances get so crazily out of date as before
• taught Djelibeybi the pomodoro technique (which he then didn’t use)
• started tidying the study – which is now a worse mess than ever before. Of course.
• uploaded a bunch of recent photos to Flickr
• and made my lunch for tomorrow (all bar cutting up an avocado, which as we all know, should be done at the last possible minute)

If you’re reading this, then I guess you’ve been following at least part of the past month. I do hope it hasn’t been too dull! Happy New Year to you all – see you in the new term!