On lists, laziness and lingering

This time next week I'll be on my way to Reno. Just one day after that I'm heading on to my favourite place in the world...Black Rock City. This will be my third year at Burning Man, and I'm more excited than I can say. I am also, unfortunately, more unprepared than I can say. I came home from the European regional burn, Nowhere, around a month ago, but due to circumstances beyond my control (ok, ok, due to laziness and lack of organisation) my bags are still sitting, full of dirty clothes and dust, in the dining room. Funnily enough, the stuff I need for a week in the Nevada desert is the same stuff I needed for a week in the Spanish desert. All of this is a particularly convoluted way of saying I have a lot of laundry to do. And laundry is just number one on my to-do list; a list which currently comprises 24 tasks of varying length and complexity. Within this list there are three seperate sub-lists, one with a sub-sub-list of its very own. I am the queen of to-do lists. If only I were so good at to-doing.

One thing I have to do is work out my plans for my first night in the US. My flight arrives in San Francisco on Thursday afternoon, but the friend I'm travelling with doesn't arrive until the next day. This leaves me to decide whether to get a hotel room near the airport or to sleep in the arrivals lounge. I have a fairly tight budget for this trip, and the hotels are pretty expensive, but do I really want to spend 24 hours trying to sleep, eat and use the toilet whilst guarding my belongings? Funnily enough I don't, but the $60 saved would buy me quite a lot of beer. It's a tough call. How do you think airport security would feel about me pitching my tent by customs? I could pull out the roll mat and sleeping bag and set up a comfy little camp, with all my bags and gear stowed safely inside. All I'd need is a supply of snacks and a wide-necked bottle and I could stay put for the whole 24 hours.

On infestation, irritation and insecticide

I've lived with at least one cat since I was three years old. The one I have currently, Bob, is lovely; nearly as pretty as he is affectionate, and not quite as affectionate as he is stupid. Over the last few days however, something has occured which I have never experienced before, and which makes me want to lock poor little Bob in the shed for the rest of his life. Fleas. Just typing the word makes me itch, although that could be the dozens of bites I'm covered in. The worst of it is how dirty they make you feel. I know and you know that cleanliness has nothing to do with the issue, that any pet can pick them up and bring them into any house, but it makes me feel slatternly and unhygienic to have this problem in my home. And I don't know how to fix it. I certainly can't afford to have the place fumigated. Do I just treat the cat, keep hoovering every day and hope that it goes away? Or make myself an all-in-one bodysuit out of bin bags and duct tape in an effort to protect my poor, vulnerable skin from attack? Answers on a postcard please...

On picnics, poppets and perfect weekends

For the last few years my birthdays have fallen a bit flat; often marred by tube strikes or torrential rain so that few people were able to join me to celebrate. This year however, tops my list of all time best birthdays. I had a weekend full of fun. We went to Torture Garden on Friday, then I ended up staying at a friend's flat until late Saturday, chatting and barbeque-ing and generally relaxing. On Sunday another friend and I shared a birthday picnic. The weather was glorious and loads of people turned up. We had music, hula-hoops and plenty of wine, and generally had a fantastic time. It's a long time since I've enjoyed a birthday so much, and it was lovely to start my second quarter of a century in such fine style. I feel it bodes well.

I mentioned briefly before that people always want to talk to me when I'm in fancy dress. Well, this weekend I found an even more certain way of starting conversations with strangers: carry a doll. I have a poppet that I made at the Nowhere festival this year, and on Sunday I took her with me to my birthday picnic. On the way home I couldn't fit her back in my bag so I carried her, and the number of people who stopped me to chat about her or ask if they could hold her was unbelievable. When I explained to one lady why Mini-Meg was so grubby (she was born in the desert and has a slightly dusty quality), a gentlemen sitting opposite me started telling me about his home in Saudi Arabia, and how much he misses the desert. I may have to start taking her out more often as I love any excuse to chat to people. Admittedly, hauling her around does make me look like a bit of a lunatic. At Nowhere one of my friends pointed out that those of us who made them looked like those Victorian woman who lost babies and went mad, so were given dolls to nurse in lieu. I don't see anything strange about it though. Mini-Meg and her little friend Cara Muneca had a wondeful time at the picnic. She told me so when I was tucking her in that night after her bottle...

On DIY, de-treeing and desperation

Due to a complicated set of circumstances, I am currently living alone in a house which is far too big for me to look after, but which I'm not in a position to sell. Just lately it feels a little bit as though this house is out to get me. I don't know whether my brother (who used to live with me) did a lot of maintenence stuff without me noticing, or whether things have just recently started to go wrong, but I seem to have an awful lot of things to fix lately. For example, yesterday the toilet door fell off. Right off. The top hinge came out of the wall and it fell flat on the carpet. Once I'd established that I hadn't crushed the cat, I started to panic about how I was going to manage to put it back up. Nobody ever teaches you how to rehang a door and, when you look at it lying there all heavy and horizontal, it does seem rather like a two person job. Despite this, I dug out the tools and got stuck in. And I did it! Granted I got a splinter in one finger, cut another, dropped the door on my toe and somehow managed to hit myself in the face with an electric screwdriver, but the important thing is that the door is back in place. For now anyway.

Having proven my skills with the door yesterday, I decided to tackle the garden today. It's been a couple of months since I mowed the lawns, so they bore a certain resemblance to meadows. I think that's quite an attractive look but I doubt the neighbours agree so I went back into the shed for the second time in as many days. On approaching the back garden I saw a larger than usual weed growing in the middle of the lawn. But no, that's not a weed. That's an oak tree. Some bastard squirrel has risked death-by-cat to bury an acorn in my garden and has just left it there, and now there's a thigh-high oak tree where no oak tree should be. A brief but effortful attempt to haul the thing from the ground was enough to establish that it liked that spot, it enjoyed the view from that spot and it had no intention of leaving that spot thank you very much. Back to the shed for a spade. Insert spade in ground. Lever. Handle comes off spade. Right. Good. So this is how I came to be kneeling in the middle of a meadow, digging around a small oak tree with a large serving spoon and wondering why nothing is ever easy. All I wanted to do was mow the lawn, not molest arboreals with culinary equipment. Sigh.

On finances, friends and fancy dress

Lately I've been making a concerted effort to think positively. This is quite tricky as I'm naturally an 'every silver lining has a cloud' sort of person, and goodness knows there are plenty of clouds in my life right now. Not just wispy little pink-tinged numbers either. We're talking huge storm clouds of unemployment raining fat drops of poverty on my life, with thunder and lighting thrown in for good measure. See how well that positivity thing is working out? Seriously though, not even the most hardened optimist can claim that poverty is fun, but what it has served to show me is how incredibly kind-hearted and generous my friends are. Last night I went to a meeting at a pub, with every intention of nursing a lemonade all night. In the event though, people declined to acknowledge my refusal of drink offers and I wound up getting absurdly drunk for a Wednesday night. Likewise, tomorrow I'm off to an event I would otherwise have missed, thanks to the generosity of the lovely friend who insisted on buying me a ticket. I'll get through the night on water and on the contents of the hipflask I'll be stashing in my cleavage. Classy.

Speaking of the event tomorrow - it has an 'underwater love' theme, and I will be strapping myself into a green corset and foamy skirt, applying copious amounts of silvery face and body paint and lashings of pearl jewellery to turn myself into a nymphy, mermaidy, anthropomorphic representation of oceana type thing. All very lovely, but the bus ride through Brixton could be...interesting. I spend more than my fair share of time in fancy dress on public transport, and it never ceases to amaze me how the Londoners who religiously avoid eye contact and never ever speak to people on the tube, suddenly want to talk to you (and even sometimes have their photos taken with you) just because you're dressed as a pirate/bondage panda/oversized pink carebear.