When I woke up this morning, after doing the usual petting of the cats and scooping of the litter boxes and checking of the email, I sat down with a big yellow notepad and filled one entire sheet with a To Do list. I divided it into sections, by room of the house, with a big “Other” category at the end. One big sheet of everything I want to accomplish this weekend.

(I love lists. I love making lists – especially To Do lists – and I love checking things off on lists. I’ve tried various computer-based lists, but they just don’t give me the satisfaction of physically checking off each item with a pencil or pen, and seeing a big long sheet of paper full of things slowly get crossed off one by one. I come from a long line of list makers and my sisters and I have happily carried on the tradition of paper lists we learned from our mom.)

Over the course of the day we’ve managed to do quite a lot of things on the list. I went to the library and turned in a pile of books and picked up a pile more. We moved the china cabinet into the upstairs guest room. Richard went off to Fry’s and picked up some extra cables and clips, and strung the cable across the top of the door between living room and dining room for the television (the previous owner had cable hook-ups in every room of the house except the living room, the walls are plaster, and I’m not ready to go drilling holes into them until I’m absolutely positively certain I like where the television ends up). I unpacked a few more boxes and rearranged a few more. We decluttered the living room and dining room. And now that Richard’s on antibiotics for his latest bout of respiratory infection, he was up to going out, so we rode our bikes back to the bike shop to get the new fenders and odometers installed.

While we were off taking care of the bikes, we had about an hour to kill until they’d be ready, so we walked a few blocks down the road and got some coffee and tea and bagels at a little hippy coffee shop. We had just enough time to skim through the local left-wing free newspaper (always a source of endless amusement for the personal ads alone), and then decided to walk around the other side of the block on our way back, which is when I saw the Antiques sign and said ‘hey, want to go check out that store?’.

The first one was a store full of ‘mid-century antiques’, and maybe this speaks to my age, but when did stuff from the 60’s and 70’s become antiques? Yeesh. The second store, however, was more my type of antique store. The aisles are so crowded you’re half afraid you’re going to knock something over, and there are treasures lurking everywhere, even hanging from the ceiling. Huge pieces of furniture were tucked in between chairs and shelves of glassware; old watering cans and toys hung from the ceiling, and there was an entire section in the back full of old cookbooks that I’d have loved to browse through if we’d had more time. As it was, we found a standing mirror in a wooden frame that we really liked, and they agreed to let us pay for it and come back to get it once we had a car. So we picked up our bikes and rode back home, and then hopped in the car and drove back down to pick up our mirror, which is now standing in the bedroom downstairs, just where we needed one.

Richard is off to another Nanowrimo write-in, so I’m home with the cats and my knitting, and my pile of books. I’ve already made it through three of them (including the latest offering in the Dexter series, which was a bit of a disappointment compared to the previous two). And I think it’s time to go forage in the kitchen for dinner before settling back in with another book, or else eventually making my way downstairs and going to bed.

Posted for NaBloPoMo.