I had this book when I was little, called This Farm is a Mess! (Okay, yes, I had a lot of books when I was little. This was one of many.) Anyway, in the book, Farmer Woods was notoriously bad at cleaning up around the farm. As you turned each page, the mess piled up — dirty dishes everywhere, towers of clutter leaning more and more precariously as the book went on. Finally the farm animals got fed up with it (even the pigs, if I remember right!), and took it upon themselves to clean. I remember an illustration with all the dishes stacked in the back of the tractor or a pickup truck, getting washed clean in the rain.
It’s probably out of print now, though there seem to be a bunch of copies available on alibris. What I remember most about the book was the way my mother would read the signature phrase: This faaaarm is a mess! (Only, with her Boston accent, it’s probably more accurate to say she said, This faaaahm is a mess!) It sent me into giggles every time, and of course the phrase lived outside the pages of the book.
When my room a disaster area and my grandparents were coming over, she’d stand in the doorway, hands on hips, and declare, “This faaaarm is a mess!” It was my hint to get cleaning. Was the house in need of tidying the day after a party? “This faaaarm is a mess!”
I don’t even remember the last time I thought about that book, but looking around at my cluttered desk just now, eyeballing all the filing I really ought to get done, I had to fight a sudden urge to declare aloud that this particular farm is a mess. Only, my coworkers probably wouldn’t know what to do with me if I broke into the inevitable giggles, so I refrained.
Goal for this afternoon: stuff put away and organized so I can come back to neatness on Monday.
Less-tangible goals that are still housekeeping:
- Get back to the NaNoing, noreallyImeanit.
- Take those red pens I bought and get started on the edits to the Nin manuscript so Hill and I can be one step closer to shopping this bad cat around.
- Also, we need to give the poor book a title already.
- Suck it up and revise “Kate.” I think I know how to fix it. Then figure out a home for it.
- Suck it up and send “Pomegranate” out again. I stopped after three rejections, which is silly.
- /eyes the poor story about Lil, still running from that demon. /sighs
- No less than three posts for WoW stuff that I owe, probably more. (Annalea post-Wrathgate, Bittertongue plots, Lyr-and-Yva scheming)
- I have a ficly story sitting in draft-form that I’d really like to finish.
I think that’s quite enough of a laundry list for this weekend. I’ll be happy to check off even half of it. Sadly, I don’t have a bunch of helpful farm animals to help me knock it out, so it’s all me on this one. (No, my cats are lazy, they wouldn’t lift a paw.)
