It is a nice Sunday afternoon and I am sitting quietly at home in my office. I am surrounded by a collection of old computers in various states of disrepair. The oldest is probably about fifteen years old. It is running an old version of Microsoft Windows that is no longer supported. It doesn’t have a lot of memory, and the cover is off from the number of times I’ve taken it apart to tinker with one thing or another that is broken.

I’ve been using this as my primary email machine for many years, and I’ve spent much of the weekend cleaning out enough old emails and moving the ones I want to save to appropriate archives so that I could catch up on some of my other emails. Currently, there are about 23,000 unread emails on that machine. On one of my cellphones I check a couple webmail accounts, where I have about 5,500 unread emails. On a different computer, I check an old email account I don’t use that often and find about 30,000 unread emails there. With the exception of the last account, I’ve more or less kept on top of the emails to remove spam. A lot of the remaining emails are from various organizations, mostly political and non-profits, that are trying to get my attention for one cause or another.

Some of these emails I simply delete. Others, I save in my archives in case I ever want to refer back to them. There are thousands and thousands of additional unread emails, that I’ve determined that I want to keep in one archive or another and have been saved to special folders.

Years ago, when there was much less email, I used to save pretty much every email that I sent or received, and at one point, I sent off a large collection of these emails to a researcher at Harvard to study. I never heard the results of the study.

Kim and Fiona have set off on some adventure, mostly to give me a little space to work on all the projects that need to be dealt with. Probably second on my list is working on the Experimental Memoir. As part of NaNoWriMo, my goal is to write 50,000 words for this. Between work, travelling, speaking at a conference, trying to catch up on everything else, and stay on top of current events, I’ve now slipped to nearly a week behind.

To succeed, you need to write an average of 1,667 words a day. I am far enough behind, that I need to write over 2,500 words a day. We’ll see how much I can get written today, and how the coming week goes, but I may abandon the effort soon.

On top of this, there are plenty of daily tasks to be addressed. Yesterday, I took Fiona over to the music store. We have two old clarinets. One is a clarinet that I played when I was Fiona’s age. Some of the corks and pads have come off, and it needs a general fix up. The music store sent it off to the folks they deal with for repairs and it should be back in a couple of weeks. The other clarinet, I believe, is one that my brother got at a tag sale once. It was in a beat up musty old oboe case with a broken handle. It just didn’t fit properly and Fiona wasn’t all that excited about using it.

At the store, we bought a new case. This one is much more like the backpacks that have come to dominate the school scene and Fiona was very happy with it. We picked up some new reeds and a kit for cleaning the clarinets. We moved the old wooden clarinet into the new case and I spent some time helping Fiona get going with the clarinet.

I was pleased to see that even with an old clarinet which isn’t in the greatest shape, I could still play a little bit. Right now, Fiona is working simply on getting the clarinet to make a nice sound. Later, we’ll work on reading music and learning fingering, although she does already know a little bit about reading music.

There are various piles of dishes next to me in the office as well. I need to carry them out to the kitchen, and run a load of dishes through the dishwasher. However, right now, I can hear the washing machine in the basement spinning.

For the past two weeks, Wesley has had stitches in. Because of this, he needed to have a cone around his head and couldn’t run freely in the yard the way he likes to. Yet even with his injury, he was large and strong, and pulled on the leash when Kim would take him out to do his duty. From that, and perhaps other stresses in our lives, Kim’s back has been sore and she hasn’t been able to do the laundry. So, today, on top of everything else, I’m trying to run several loads of laundry through the washer and drier.

When I used to work from home, I did much of the laundry. On top of that, I would hang it out to dry. During the summer months, I would hang it outside. We don’t have a clothes line, but we have a lot of lawn chairs, so I would hang the clothes on various chairs. In the winter time, I would hang the clothes from a drying rack in the basement.

It would take a while for the clothes to dry, so it was hard to get more than a load done a day. However, it would be a nice break from whatever project I was working on. Between Kim’s sore back and me being gone for several days, there is a lot of laundry to be done and there just isn’t time to hang all of the clothes out to dry.

So, I select the biggest, heaviest pieces of clothing, like sweatshirts and towels and hang them up to dry. The rest I throw into the drier.

After I started another load, Kim and Fiona came home. Fiona had a couple bags from Goodwill. They are full of old stuffed animals. Kim is concerned about bringing home stuffed animals from thrift shows, out of fear of importing bedbugs, lice or other vermin into the house. So, she told Fiona to put them into the drier at a high temperature first thing. Unfortunately, the drier was already in use, so the bags have been set next to the drier and are waiting their turn.

Another big task waiting to be done is bottling cider. Currently, there are three large jugs of hard cider sitting on the dining room table. One is ready to be bottled. The other two need to be racked off and allowed to settle.

Before I left, I had ran a dishwasher full of bottles. I covered them carefully and so they are ready to be used to bottle cider. When I bottle the first batch, I will then clean the jar and then rack off cider from one jug to the next to allow them to settle. Later, I’ll do Fiona’s Radio Show with her and if I have time and energy after all of that, try to sit down again and write a little bit more.