We had unexpected visitors

yesterday. This was very bad news on the housekeeping front. The visitors must have wondered. They had not been in our home before and it would come as a shock to anyone.
The housework has been somewhat neglected of late because too many things have been happening. I did a considerable amount of housecleaning on Monday (a day later than the usual bathroom scrubbing etc) so the house is clean but....well the house looks so untidy that even the Senior Cat and I have noticed it.
We are not tidy people. I am not one of those people who has books ranged in alphabetical order or, as does one person I know, in order of size. We have a great many books and they are - well, everywhere. There is also wool in a couple of tubs and ranged around the chair I sit in to watch the evening news service (wool I am working on that is). There is also the box of sock wool waiting to be picked up and taken to the sock knitters. It had to come here because there is, usually, someone at home during the day.
Wool also means needles, pieces of paper with calculations and graphs, the pin container and the polystyrene blocking boards and the tube in which I keep the blocking wires.
There is another tub with the newly knitted blanket squares I collected from the lovely but elderly lady who knits the squares. On top of that is a tub full of biscuit cutters I need to sort. Duplicates will get passed on to other places. I will keep the rest for making Christmas biscuits for the oldies I keep an eye on. There are pens, pencils and scraps of paper decorating a corner of the kitchen bench - must tidy those and get the pencils sharpened again.
The Senior Cat has books, a steel rule, several pieces of sandpaper, a tin of polish, some seed packets (empty), some copper wire, a torch (waiting for new batteries) and several pieces of timber in an untidy pile by his chair.
And then there are the newspapers. We get two, the state paper and the national paper. I need to read the national one and the Senior Cat likes the local one.  The Senior Cat starts out quite tidily with the papers but, by the end of breakfast, parts of it have been discarded. He has never read the racing guide in the middle in his life - and neither have I. We would not know how to read it. Real estate lift out gets tossed on a chair. He is not buying a house. Cars guide. Tossed. We do not have a car. Advertising inserts...not unless it is the hardware store in the next suburb and he thinks he might want something. Unfortunately the sports section is the entire rear section of the paper and that is attached to the pages at the front of the state paper. He is still frustrated by that.
I will blame those newspapers. If they just gave us the bits we wanted to read then our house would be a lot tidier - perhaps.