Happy days
[NB: I wrote this Saturday morning.]
The Langdale household had a very exciting day yesterday. The most exciting things that usually happen in our house are that Kirsty has made brownies, I'm home from hospital early (although the excitement then is more curiosity and/or concern) and Hollyoaks has been cancelled. The latter hasn't yet happened, but I live in excitement that it one day could! Ok there's probably other exciting things that happen, but it's only half 9 and I can't remember.
But I can remember yesterday, so let me tell you. Charly's parents and brother and sister were visiting, and they did some wonderful things.
*****
Charly's Mum bought us a vacuum cleaner, that works in real life and everything! Thankyou Charly's Mum! And so, charged with the prospect of being able to clean the floor, I set to work, little knowing what madness would befall me. I vacuumed my room, which didn't take long; I vacuumed the upstairs and downstairs communal areas; I vacuumed the stairs.
While on the stairs, I noticed that (k, this is going to be hard to explain) the "corners" of the stairs - where the vertical bits meet the horizontal bits, and where the edges meet the walls - probably hadn't been vacuumed in a decade or so, so I got the vacuum tubey thing and vacuumed them too. Those of you who are aware of my Monica tendencies can predict where this is going...
Becoming intimately acquainted with our stairs yesterday evening led me to notice that the skirting boards both sides, the dado rail, and the entire banister thing probably hadn't been cleaned in a decade or so either. Out came the hot soapy water and a cloth, and I spent the next 3 hours of my life cleaning the aforementioned offenders.
Amusing as this may be, the real excitement lay in the newly discovered fact that spending a lot of time in a stairwell is a very sociable thing to do. I could talk to my upstairs and odwnstairs housemates all at once, and most of my housemates spent at least an hour sitting on a very clean stair, chatting to me and everyone else. It was a very social event.
And after we housemates had finished our various tasks for the evening, we had an impromptu house night in the lounge, and talked... well we started on painting the bathroom and making a calendar (not going to elaborate), were on the delicacies of Brighton society at half 12, and were just moving on from the Thatcher years when I gave in to sleep...
*****
Charly's Dad, to move on, spent his afternoon yesterday in our house:
1) bleeding the radiators
2) fixing the whatevers that didn't now work because the radiators had been bled (something to do with pressure?)
3) fixing the radiators that were still holding out defences
4) teaching us how to set the boiler to come on etc.
Thankyou Charly's Dad!
So, this morning at 8am (would have been 7:30 but one thing wasn't set right) we had an hour of blissful warmth. And, although my room has 3 outside walls, 1 of which is permanently wet, my Daddy was right in that, being a little spaciously challenged and containing the boiler itself, my room really does get... well alright not "warm" in the objective, global sense of the word, but warmer than the rest of the house!
So I'm happy, and strongly considering conducting all my business henceforth with my housemates, the medical faculty and anyone else via telegrams back and forth under my door, so that I don't have to open it and let the warmth out. And my housemates will be happy, when they wake up or get back, because they've been waiting a while for the heating, and clothes might not take a week to dry any more!
What an exciting day!
*****
This morning, I emerged from my warmish cocoon (no pretty wings though) to find that one of my housemates had already left with her future to liaise with her past for a while and another two housemates were just leaving for the library, at half 9 on a Saturday! NB: Not Normal. Tonight we're having a planned house night, and Kirsty's getting some ice-cream and facepacks for the occasion. And today I have to get myself a grounding in the general medicine apertaining to cancer. And wash some clothes. And eat breakfast. I'll do that now - I'm hungry and I think that for once we actually have milk...
xxx
posted by Cathy @ 8:42 AM
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