The "To do" list and the "Not to do" list

Because I am very easily distracted, I have always been a list person.  My favourite list was the one I made when Ken Oath! and I moved into the first home we bought together.  It was a long and sensible list with things like "Underfloor insulation, sand bathroom floor, investigate drive-on access, paint spare bedroom, fix bathroom window latch, get gas heater serviced, fix dodgy step, build vegetable garden" etc etc.  At the bottom of my list, in a different coloured pen, in Ken Oath!'s hand-writing it says, "Have babies!"  So we did that then of course finally ticked everything else of the list five years later - about twenty minutes before boarding the plane to move to Christchurch.

For the last few months I have been working through a hallway-long To Do list in preparation for putting our Christchurch house on the market.  Last week it was down to fridge-freezer-long and now it is only freezer-long.

Given that I generally do all my own stunts (i.e. a do-it-yourselfer), this means that a) the skin on my hands now resembles the left-over Christmas Day roast potatoes you find in the oven when you return home from your holiday on January 6th, b)  while my hands have been busy, my mind has been doing some serious wandering.

Lately it has been wandering to my "Not to do" list.  Does anyone else have one of these?  These are things that for one reason or another I hope to never do in my lifetime. Below are a few of them. Blogging used to be on that list until someone far cleverer than me suggested it would be just the ticket for Stash reHash, so who knows which of the listed joys I will actually get to experience one day.

1.  Vote Act. My family are under strict instructions to get me psychiatrically assessed if this ever happens.
2.  Be an All Black. Too shouty for me.
3.  Sledge (that rude thing cricketers do). It is simply terribly bad manners and I don't care that you are wearing a sports uniform.
4.  Wear a sports uniform.
5.  Make my children do outdoor winter sports in Christchurch. So unspeakably grim.  Surely people will look back in a hundred years time and consider making children run around outside, in shorts, on a 4 degree sleeting day a form of child abuse.
6.  Moonhop to the North Pole/unicycle across the Sahara/flutterboard across the Pacific Ocean or participate in any other "extreme adventure".  When "extreme adventurers" come on Nine-to-Noon I have to pop a CD on lest I should start shouting at the radio.  I wouldn't want to cause anyone else to shout.
7.  Get my mugshot on the "Wanted" pages of the newspaper. Upsetting for my mother.
8.  Drive a Hummer.  They are for people who are in wars.  And saddos.
9.  Grow a beard. Or even a moustache.
10.  Paint a room beige.  If I had the job naming all the paint colours,  I'd call all the beiges things like "Surely you can do better than this" or "Warning - contains highly offensive non-colour". Then I'd probably need to get another job.
11.  Wear batwing sleeves.  And no, not because I wore them last time around.  I just find them nasty.  Last time they were "in" I ignored them and hoped they'd go away and it worked for nearly two decades. I wagged the day at Fashion School when they taught batwing sleeves in pattern-making class as I hoped I'd never need to use it.  The one time I was required to make a batwing sleeve pattern was in the early nineties when I was working for someone who is now one of New Zealand's top designers.  Thankfully her technique for "designing" was to go overseas on shopping trips and bring back two of anything she fancied.  Then she'd hang one up in the workroom and fling the other one at a pattern-maker's head while shrieking "Unpick!" - never once realising that any good pattern-maker can copy a garment without having to unpick it.
12. Wear a peplum.  On me: Ew.
13.  Wear a jumpsuit. On me: Ew, ew.
14.  Wear godets.  On anyone: Ew, ew, ew.

Best I stop now as I've probably offended everyone at least twice. Plus this is starting to sound like a Listener column which I used to quite enjoy, but now think should be renamed "Stuff I hate" (could one of my Wellington poker+vodka friends please invite the offending writer out as I'm sure she's actually a very nice sort who just needs to get out more). Bit like me. So I'm going out now.  To Bunnings.

The photos at the top are of fabrics that were my backup plan when I came to realise that "Make wardrobe doors" was not going to get ticked off my To Do list.  When I rebuilt my bedroom I couldn't face shelling out dosh for giant white melamine wardrobe doors as that just seemed like a missed opportunity.  I'd always wanted a photo mural there, or to jumbo-enlarge my favourite woodland scene paint-by-numbers picture and paint it onto plywood in just brown and white tones with the woodgrain left as the background. Sigh.  Then I discoved Erin Michael's prints for Moda above and decided to make huge fabric panels like fake wardrobe doors. Well that fabric is harder to find than a Hummer-driver-I'd-like-to-have-a-cup-of-tea-with, so I'll be leaving....air.  But naturally I'll be selling it to the new owners as ... an opportunity!