In Prospect

Looking ahead, it's a slightly odd though reasonably cheerful couple of weeks I'm facing. I'll be in school for only three days. Chinese New Year falls this Sunday and the attendant holiday means we'll only have a couple of days next week, and immediately after I'm off to Medan again (having been there at roughly the same time last year) for a recruiting trip. It won't be all beer and skittles in Indonesia but it will certainly make a refreshing change from the usual routine.

To celebrate this bit of elbow room I've decided to get a bit of cleaning done around the house - not that I'm treading on the toes of my more-than-capable missus. I'm targeting the books and CDs which come under my jurisdiction and were last overhauled just before Hari Raya, back in September of last year. In fact, I'm more than a little pleased with myself having completed the bibliographical work in the front room before dinner.

I'm not sure why I find cleaning stuff and getting it in order quite so satisfying, but I do and it's useful to exploit that feeling in terms of delivering relatively civilised standards of living. My default mode is determined laziness and I need to find every loophole I can in the defences of that mode in all aspects of my life. Another aspect of the general utility of the cleaning is to act as a reminder of all the tasty material I'm lucky enough to own (if you really can own books and music) and the good sense of milking it for all it's worth rather than blindly acquiring more and more - as it's so easy to do, especially when one has a little more time on one's hands.