I have wanted to write another blog for so long, but I can't be seen flopping about the place with a lap top due to how busy 'he' is and the work I am supposed to be doing to help him with his work. Also the answering of all telephones without hissing. I also had a week in bed ill, so things are very behind. Talking of behinds, I have to be very careful at the moment when I open the curtains in my bedroom, after my daily dance of the three alarm clocks. It is a two way problem, either builder's bum at eye level, (due to scaffolding), or indeed my own if not being careful, when half asleep first thing. The next problem is the slithery plastic layer coating my stairs and hall, to keep the builder's boots at bay. My builder is great, like a tin of Ronseal in fact, he does exactly what it says on the tin, and acts as a sort of keeper/super nanny with regard to my husband, who he describes as 'having a frequent need to scamper around in places where he should not be, including the roof!'
He also acts as an informant should any particularly tasteless DIY take place when I am out of the house. Little speakers appear in prominent places with ghastly ornaments put on top, which I would prefer on a coconut shy. The point of the endless upcycled speakers is so that music can be pumped into any room, at any time, usually with very loud surround a sound and rumbling base.
I received one such alert last week-end as I slowly made my way up a particularly steep hill in Nottingham, pulling a suitcase of bricks, having completed an epic train journey to visit my daughter, with the usual missed connections, missing trains and no loo in sight. I was informed on my mobile phone, that mini speakers had been positioned next to my long purple velvet curtains at eye level and differing heights and looked frightful, I was told he had the look of a menace as he approached the sitting room with an over sized tool box, (my man not the builder). They have since been banished to a less over powering setting.
Luckily since then as the roof has come off the house and the loft extension gets built, my husband has been distracted in between his treble booked clients by the sudden application of 12 solar panels on to the garage roof, and also our ever increasing collection of battered and useful materials in the garden which will form our new home made hot tub and heated iron bath tub, so we can bathe under the stars and alarm the entire town.
Apart from building fuss, which is kept to a minimum as mine actually hoovers at the end of each day, I have sailed through a few things, including my tests for Blue Horizon, finger prick or not, and being a veteran of self injecting anticoagulants at times, there was still lots of unnecessary over complicated mayhem from me. My kitchen turned into a blood bath, probably due to the amount of Aspirin I have to take. The envelope looked absolutely disgusting, with incriminating red finger prints all over it. That aside once it was done and dusted and the results were back, I was most pleased to find that my levels of Nature Thyroid and everything else is spot on. I would never have learned how to do it all without reading for so many months, and without the input of Admins on here and also punters with similar tried and tested medication paths. Also with appropriate mineral and vitamin supplements. Most of the doctors who look after me can also visibly see my new thicker hair and weight loss!
With daily life here some jobs that were making everybody cross at the the thought of them, have magicked themselves way, our smoking kippers sitting room is no more, we had felt to drop a liner down the chimney thinking there was a crack in the liner, with smoke getting into our cavity walls. Actually the chimney sweep set about an inspection with his mirror on a stick, and said the cowl on the top was wrong and for a gas fire. My husband lopped it off while tethered to the builder with a nylon rope, they waited until I had gone out!
Now that is off things are an awful lot better. I am sitting here writing on my lap top in the only warm room in our house, no point heating a whole house with no roof! Our chimney sweep looks exactly like one of his brushes, so many whiskers and hair on end, and he stays for a very long time and tells me as many tales as possible about scandals he has been on the edge of, some of them are too rude for here. Also 'the Lady Chatterley's Lover season' is over for now.
We have been very lucky with the mild weather, as having no roof on the house, only plastic currently could have been a lot worse, the odd hot water bottle and wood burner does the trick, and my main preoccupation has been keeping my elderly cats happy, they are very annoyed about the whole thing, but are better if I keep their pheromone happy plug in devices on all the time, that coupled with trying not to give my elderly tabby's new husband too much attention.
This week has been a little more frantic. yesterday I got up early to take my son to his medical appointment, the first one since being passed on from paediatrics, I had been up the night before being ill, so with sleep deprivation ambled downstairs to open my special rocket fuel cupboard. I have a whole cupboard devoted to coffee, plenty of beans I have bought by mistake which I must get somebody to grind, but then vast amounts of fresh coffee in packets. I see coffee as being as essential as a 9 pack of loo rolls. The first scream of the day from me was opening the little door over my cooker, and disturbing a huge house spider, one of those hairy ones that sits and throbs with knees and everything, it then plopped down onto the counter, I managed to get it into a jar and roll it out of the door. This was better than the night before when one even bigger, dropped down and into my salad on the surface below. Clearly Incy Wincy and friends have realized the extractor fan hose which leads out of that cupboard to the outside is the equivalent to an M1 for spider traffic into my house which is currently not at all warm.
Having avoided spider in coffee and indeed porridge, I knew I had twenty minutes in order to have one of those long showers you need after no sleep, followed by a dash to Rheumatology in the neighbouring town. I felt almost pleased at this idea and set about doing one of those special lady sessions with deep conditioning of the hair, a banishment of any hairy legs and of course a head to toe body scrub. Since losing most of my psoriaris on the LDN and NDT I can now use luxury salt body scrubs. I had just got to the stage of rinsing off the body scrub, face pack and deep hair conditioner when the water failed.Not a drop would come out of the shower or taps. No amount of swearing and shouting would bring it back. I set off for hospital with a hat rammed on, fully dressed with all these products underneath. I will not go into too much detail but that grit from body scrubs if not washed off, literally goes in places it is not designed for.
On my return in heated Ms Marple mode I interrogated the builders and also the solar panel fitters who I knew had been in the airing cupboard linking something up. Actually it was none of them, just a valve in the water tank which had after 30 years decided to seize up and die. Everybody rushed to help and fitted a new one, and I responded with extra coffee, more cakes and glowing comments about all their work on the various websites. I was then able to go and wash all the grit and slime off and I did have very smooth skin and shiny hair.
The next awful thing I did yesterday, was to take my Nutri Adrenal pills and then in a sort of mindless act help myself to some brazil nuts at the same time when on the telephone, I had forgotten to swallow the nutri adrenals supplements. I bit into them thinking they were the nuts. The most vile thing I have encountered since eating soap as a child, (lets not go there). They are repulsive even with water, but chomped on with nuts caused an extended gagging reflex session for hours.
Generally speaking, life is exciting at the moment, I enjoyed my trip away to Nottingham despite epic public transport fails, for which I will get a full refund, and I enjoyed being dragged around the city with a bunch of students and being forced to drink red wine and cocktails. Since my return there are enhanced cleaning sessions going on to try and hold back the tide of dust and grime. I tend to do these in the mornings. The builders very much like my technicoloured onsie and have made themselves what they call an office in my garage complete with small temporary kitchen and furnished with all my old chairs. I make them do the school run sometimes and also take me shopping if I get sudden whim to cook something. They prefer it if I serve tea and coffee wearing frightful clothing.
I am looking forward to the end of the build, the team reckon it will be done and dusted before Christmas, they say working here is easy and laid back... despite my tempers. To ease any irritation with the chaos I have been going to the cinema more often. I walked into town with my husband via his favourite pub and had a viewing of Suffragette, a great film, although on the way home I had a bit of a militant stance to my walk as I goose stepped up the hill to my building site of a house. My next film will be The lady in the Van, I can hardly wait for that one. I can see it coming shortly with me in that mode. I think taking time out to be immersed in something totally different is as good a rest.
Tonight I am cooking a feast for a bunch of people in my house not feeling too well, I have made Tarka Dahl, and also chicken and potato with coriander madras. To be served with salad and brown rice and if I can find any energy home made chapaties. Tomorrow if it is not raining, we are going to spread mulch over our entire garden, something I could not have helped with a year ago. This has distracted him beautifully from deciding he might tile around our log burner with the worst tiles ever, which he salvaged from a highly distasteful kitchen makeover, not of my doing. They looked awful on the wall, in fact he told me they did, but thinks on the floor I won't notice they are awful? What kitchen tiles around the stove in the sitting room, in a colour that bears no relation to the room? Is this a man thing or just the sound track to some more hilarious bickering?
We do agree on most things, we agreed to remove a favourite arm chair from the garage which had been adorned with something rather vile that cats do when shut in by him, this is currently on top of the builder's skip, disgusting them daily. He also agreed that I had not been exaggerating about the size of the bright orange slugs I found on my patio, which made me heave with disgust. Having inspected them on line, they are a ferocious European invader and it is advised that should you find them, alert 'Slug Watch' so they can track them. They seem to monitor their actual site at the speed of slugs as nobody has replied in days. Meanwhile I consulted my friend Dithers who is an artist and a keen gardener as she is easily made alarmed about things that ruin plants. Especially in her case any sightings of the awful crimson lilly beetles that eat her flowers at the height of their beauty, so that she can't paint them.
Talking of Dithers, she did lament on the phone the other day regarding her new job, and about how all the young people in her new office constantly snap chat each other at the week-ends and she would not know what to snap chat. I suggested she lay on her back doing that bicycling legs in the air motion of yester-year, that women used to do, making sure she was wearing the new fishnet stockings her man has bought her that she thinks I don't know about.
More frightful fuss and nonsense soon, is it all true? Yes but heavily censored due to how rude and bad tempered I am.
MaryF
At a loss and feeling ill
