Too much is never enough

This weekend I have:

• Made peanut butter waffles for my housemate and one of our friends
• Had a chat with a friend about a situation that is concerning her at work
• Gone for a walk through the woods to the plant nursery to get more plants for my garden
• Potted those plants on and tidied up the garden
• Made wild garlic pesto from scratch
• Done a load of washing
• Assembled two flat-pack bookcases and filled them with books
• Hemmed a piece of fabric for our tablecloth and made four matching napkins
• Fixed a hole in the shoulder seam of one of my jackets
• Altered the sleeves on a dress for a friend
• Unpacked several more boxes of things in my room
• Did a complete stocktake of all the zines in my distro, and calculated what I owe to various zinesters
• Had a shower and washed my hair
• Had a conversation with my sister on the phone
• Read the paper in it's entirety (minus the sport section)
• Tidied the shoe section of my wardrobe
• Watched "The Itty Bitty Titty Committee", the most recent episode of Glee and 500 days of summer

And yet at eleven o clock on Sunday night I can't shake the feeling that I haven't done enough, that I should have accomplished more. I can't work out if this is a genuine case of poor time management (which is why I have tried to list all the things I feel I have achieved) or if I have unrealistic expectations of what I can/should achieve on my two days off from work. I didn't get up until eleven today, and it was one o'clock before I got round to really doing anything, which made me feel like I was wasting my day.

I think part of the problem is that in my head I also have the list of things I "should have done":

• Gone grocery shopping
• Made a mixtape for a friend
• Written several letters
• Hoovering and general cleaning
• Finishing unpacking all the boxes in the living room and my bedroom
• Made lemon wine (which would involve buying sugar)
• Made a flyer for the "big lunch" street party I am organising next month

And as long as there are still items left on my "should have done" list then I feel dis-satisfied with the things I have done. It is eleven o'clock, I am tired but I can't go to sleep yet because there are half unpacked boxes all over my bed and I need to sort them out not only so that I can climb under the covers but so I can feel that I have crammed that little bit more into my weekend.

From a less self-critical angle, I do wonder if my feeling of underachievement is partly because I feel like I haven't really left the house. I walked to the bus-stop to meet my friend on Saturday, but that was only a few minutes away from the house. And when we went for a walk through the woods to the plant nursery, the end of my street backs on to some steps that open out onto Woodhouse Ridge so we were able to walk seamlessly from my street to the nursery without ever stepping outside of the woods.

As me and my ex boyfriend used to be fond of saying about our troubles, "of course - these aren't real problems, these are Guardian reader's problems". (A turn of phrase that came about after I read increasingly ridiculous questions week after week in the Saturday supplement in a section that allows readers to present problems such as "I have a candlewax figurine that has a film of dust and dirt on it. How best to clean it?" and actually get a serious answer. That is just an example from the most recent paper, there have been far, far worse ones in only the last six months.)

I may or may not have achieved enough this weekend. In the grand scheme of things however, I guess there are more important things to be worrying about.

"Moving furniture around"

I have been moving furniture around my living room, trying to work out the best arrangement in terms of aesthetics and practical use of space. Swapped the sofas round, decided they looked better before, so swapped them back again. Decided the two (full) bookcases in the alcoves either side of the fireplace would look better pushed up against the chimney breast rather than where they had been against the far walls, so had to empty those, move them, then restack the shelves. The room is now starting to look pretty good.

The only thing that is disturbing me is that as I think to myself "I am moving furniture around" I simultaneously remember an anecdote someone once told me about how when they were a child, their parents would sometimes shut themselves in their bedroom and explain any noises the child later questioned them on by saying that they were "moving furniture around".

Yet another innocent phrase that I can't think about in the same way anymore.