Neglect

I’ve been neglecting many things of late – for many reasons.

I’ve been so busy with work, with travel, with all the little things that get in the way of getting stuff done, that I’ve let a few things slip.

Last night I stayed up until 1am working my way through the 400 or so emails waiting for my attention. Fortunately about 300 of them were spam (my spam filter was broken after I made some changes to my email client – normally I wouldn’t have to deal with so many), but those other 100 had been depressing me for a while. I got them all done last night.

I’ve been neglecting my friends – I haven’t really made contact with anyone locally for a while now, haven’t gone out to dinner, had anyone over for a movie night, haven’t even called or emailed for a chat. Very disappointing.

At least I’m finally starting to make a bit of progress in getting my life back in order … Leanne and I spent the last three weekends (before this most recent one) cleaning up various parts of the house – we threw out a lot of old clothes, put aside some others to be put in the local St Vinnies bin, and identified yet more clothes that could be put into storage. This freed up a heap of space in the wardrobe – which gives us a bit more flexibility with moving other stuff out of the lounge. In total I think we threw out about 5 large garbage bags of clothes, and have another couple of bags of stuff still good enough to give away.

I also went through a heap of stuff on my bookshelves in the study – threw out a lot of old magazines I don’t need any more, and even threw out some of my old uni text books that are so obsolete now that even cash-strapped uni students wouldn’t get any value out of them. Another 3-4 garbage bags of stuff thrown out or recycled, made a heap more space in the study.

Only things left to do now are to finish tidying up the study – my desk had a heap of paperwork that needs tidying up and filing, and I need to empty out my desk drawers. I have a bit of junk lying around on the floor too – some of it needs to be filed, some needs to be chucked, and some needs to be put down in the shed. My goal is to soon be able to actually get to my rowing machine that is yet another thing that has been neglected in recent months.

At least I haven’t neglected my family that much – a couple of weeks ago I had a week in Adelaide for work and caught up with my sister and my parents, and then this last week I was back in Adelaide and spent yet more time with my sister and my parents, and with Leanne’s parents too. The only down side was that my uncle died on the weekend – quite sudden (although he was very ill, he was expected to recover). I’ll be flying back to Adelaide next weekend for the funeral – the only happy thing to come out of these occasions is that it’s always a good time to catch up with the extended family – but that’s something we really need to make more of an effort to do during happier times too.

I’m trying to avoid any more travel for work before the end of the year (not sure how successful I’ll be there) – it simply takes too much time away from being able to do the things I need to do. There’ll be more than enough travel to keep me amused next year, I feel.