Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

Since fin­ish­ing my course, I’ve been tar­get­ing a mam­moth To-Do List off­line that pretty much con­sists of all those thing you think “I really must get around to doing so-and-so…”, but you never do because they always seem so lengthy, time-consuming and mono­ton­ous. And just so you know, they’re actu­ally even more lengthy, time-consuming and mono­ton­ous than you would sus­pect. REALLY. So take this as your warning.

Cur­rent, brain-thawing tasks have included the following:

#1 Form Filling

The last couple of weeks have seen me bur­ied under paper; filling out forms and pho­to­copy­ing what seemed like every bank state­ment, payslip and proof of I.D. we’ve ever accu­mu­lated in the his­tory of ever, in a bid to attempt to move closer to K’s (new) place of work. At one point I became con­vinced that at the rate it was going, the next thing asked of us would be a full internal exam­in­a­tion and a stool sample.

We’ve been on wait­ing lists for access­ible prop­er­ties for some time now in our cur­rent area, but since K’s pro­mo­tion had led to her com­mute almost trip­ling in length, it seems far more prac­tical branch out and sign-up out­side of our Dis­trict. It’s coun­ter­pro­duct­ive to spend years try­ing to get a place and mov­ing, only to still have a really shite com­mute and fork out a for­tune on pet­rol, just so we can stay “local” to the areas we grew up in. Not to men­tion, by mov­ing closer, K will be able to con­tinue her role as my primary carer, so to speak. I don’t want to have to resort to some form of Home Help unless there is Abso­lutely No Other Altern­at­ive. Unfor­tu­nately, start­ing these pro­cesses in a new area effect­ively means start­ing from scratch and hav­ing to go through our liv­ing situ­ation and my med­ical his­tory, mobil­ity lim­it­a­tions and equipment/adaptation require­ments ALL OVER AGAIN.

Arse.

#2 Finally Ditch­ing VHS

Since I-can’t-even-remember-when, we’ve had the final, paltry remains of my once-humongous VHS cas­sette col­lec­tion rot­ting gently under the bed. Retriev­ing them from their musky grave and lob­bing them in a box so that I could finally go through them was like excav­at­ing ancient rel­ics. As of yes­ter­day, I began the (pain­fully slow) pro­cess of trans­fer­ring them to DVD. A task best not left for the faint of heart, espe­cially given the right load of old shite that I just can­not seem to LET. GO.

High­lights have included: The entirety of my Prince VHS Col­lec­tion, Bootleg foot­age filmed of a Placebo gig I went to over 5 years ago (ori­gin­ally pur­chased for about £25 off Cam­den Mar­ket the fol­low­ing week) and a small col­lec­tion of video com­pil­a­tions, recor­ded between 1985–1988 by my par­ents, that fea­ture all the car­toons and com­mer­cials of my early childhood.

Low­lights include: See­ing Bob Gel­dof in an advert for milk (circa 1985) and think­ing that, actu­ally, he used to be rather rug­gedly hand­some, in a tatty Irish kind of way and the sev­eral minutes of abject, incon­sol­able, hor­ror when I thought that my 1987 Teddy Rux­pin and Ovide com­pil­a­tion video was scrambled bey­ond repair. It turns out that the cas­sette is fine, but I think the dust from the old tapes has knackered the heads inside the VCR, so I’ll have to swap it for my spare.

#3 Going Paperless

This is con­nec­ted to one of the (many) reas­ons we want to move: we have a mold/rising damp prob­lem and des­pite vari­ous pre­vent­at­ive meas­ures and dam­age lim­it­a­tion meth­ods, we still find it eat­ing through our bind­ers and paper­work at the bot­tom of the shelving unit. I no longer have any of the metic­u­lous hand­writ­ten notes that doc­u­mented my 3 year learn­ing jour­ney through my first Open Uni­ver­sity qual­i­fic­a­tion. Everything that I made cheat sheets and memory-joggers for got gnawed away by gross, furry, green stuff — it broke my little aca­demic heart watch­ing all of those years’ worth of work just put out for the recyc­ling men. *Sob* Now, if I ever want a refresher course on any­thing I covered dur­ing my Web Devel­op­ment courses, it’s back to con­ven­tional books from Amazon. Bugger.

To com­bat this prob­lem (and pre­serve everything else that I own before it gets totally mangled), I’ve been read­ing some online art­icles about the trans­ition towards cre­at­ing a “paper­less” (home) office. In a more prac­tical sense, this actu­ally means “less paper” as opposed to “no paper”, but I fig­ure the prin­ciples of trans­fer­ring my notes to a digital format for archiv­ing pur­poses will at least go some way towards com­bat­ing the stor­ing issues we’re cur­rently hav­ing with bind­ers full of paper. It’s going to be a mon­ster of a task, scan­ning hun­dreds of sheets, and I have no idea how suc­cess­ful it’s going to be or how long I’m going to stick to it. But, it seems a good idea. In the­ory anyway.

Actu­ally, it seems a nuts idea that is going to take fuck­ing forever and I’ll totally run out of steam half way through and wish I’d never even star­ted it. But at least I’d have star­ted with good inten­tions, right? RIGHT?!

When I lose my mind in a fortnight’s time and smash my face into the scan­ning glass as a form of light relief, please make sure to com­ment here and tell me it’s all going to be ok, won’t you?

Ta.