my vacuum cleaner's blowing out instead of sucking in

Or at least, I wish that was the problem.

You remember I told you about a delightful plumbing situation that happened a couple of weekends ago? and mentioned that all we'd had dealt with was the immediate problem. Well, now things are even more fun. Last week, the bath was draining into the toilet - which was moderately scary but not too horrible. As of yesterday, the toilet is draining into the bath. Can we all say it together? EEEEWWWWW.

So our dear plumbers are coming at the crack of dawn to pretty much dismantle the entire bodge job that the people who renovated this house 7 years ago did, and redo it in something that keeps with current building regulations. Joy and bliss. Remember, we've already had to get proper damp proofers in to completely redo the previous "damp proofing" bodge - and when our boiler breaks down hopefully in a couple of years time (I mean, I hope it lasts for at least a couple more years), we'll have to rearrange the entire kitchen so the gas outlet is actually the right number of metres away from the wall rather than bodged in place. Argh.

All that being said, I am actually still pretty glad we went for this house as opposed to most of the others we'd seen. It's a bloody nice house - which I hope you'll all see on 16th. And most
of the other houses needed even more work. The frustrating thing is simply that the previous renovators did everything on the cheap and not very well, so we're having to spend money to undo other people's mistakes, instead of spending money putting in new exciting features ;)

Some stuff about how my brain works.

This is one of the rambling personal entries I've been meaning to make for a while (think: months) and hadn't got round to. May be interesting if you intend interacting with me in person.

Ways in which my brain is odd:
1) I have a broken parser.
There's nothing wrong with my hearing, as far as I know. When someone talks to me, I hear the right number of approximately correct sounds at the right volume. But at times, I have trouble interpreting it into sensible English. Have you heard the joke about the navy colonel who sent messages like "Have found some fish and chips, please send a dish and all men." instead of "Have found sufficient ships, please send additional men"? Well, the former is how I often hear things, especially when tired.

I'm not quite sure why I'm telling you this. Most of the time after mishearing something I immediately work out what it should be. If I still don't get it, I'll say "Huh?" or "What?" or simply tell the other person what I heard for them to boggle at. The thing that is quite strange is that, although I'm more likely to misunderstand things said by people whose accents or speech patterns I'm unfamiliar with, my parser is broken even when I'm talking to someone I know really well.

This is also why I'm so likely to hear double entendres in innocuous statements, and why I'm so good at making completely unintentional dubious remarks. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

( More broken brain... )