helen-louise's journal

The garden is progressing. The skip reappeared on Saturday morning, not quite so hideously early (9.30 am). We had already assured a parking space for it via the car of a random friend of one of the next-door neighbours (!). otterylexa came round with big shears and spent a couple of hours attacking the monstrous triffid (which is possibly a buddleia davidii, according to the pictures on Wikipedia). My mum & I chopped the chopped-off triffid into smaller pieces to put in the skip while Richard and Lexa went to obtain a wheelbarrow and skip ramp from HSS, but the skip ramp turned out to be far too large to fit into a normal car.

On Sunday, the skip ramp arrived but the wheelbarrow didn't. Much growling ensued, followed by more chopping up of triffid. Eventually the wheelbarrow turned up at 5 pm. Stupid HSS. I've left a small piece of triffid for the snails to live on, because I didn't want to completely destroy their habitat, but it no longer fills the garden. This means that we have been able to see the vast quantity of rubble all over the ground. My mum & I have been loading this into the wheelbarrow and taking it to the skip. I spent a fun hour yesterday inside the skip, rearranging stuff so the small bits of rubble dropped down into the holes between larger bits rather than taking up more room on top. I think my dad thought I was nuts. Mind you, he also thought I was nuts for carefully removing all living invertebrates from every piece of debris before putting it in the skip, so nothing new.

As of tonight all of the loose rubble has gone and the wuzzie & I have a relatively flat garden that consists of approximately-level concrete. But what is the concrete poured onto? You guessed it. Yet more rubble. Our garden seems to be like Ankh-Morpork, and has been built mostly on our garden. When we first bought the house, we had decking on top of rubble on top of a modern patio on top of an older patio on top of concrete on top of rubble. Now it's just the concrete and lower layers left. Hooray. Breaking that up will require a pneumatic drill and/or pickaxe, and is for The Professionals. The main thing is there's enough space and safe flat ground for workmen to bring in scaffolding to do the building work that needs doing.

I am somewhat alarmed to discover just how much work needs doing, though. We've known for four years that the entire back wall needs to be replastered and have a damp-proof course put in. (The idiots who "did up" this house on the cheap some years ago managed to use hygroscopic plaster, so it's absorbed water from the air and the wall is saturated to the point where it's covered in snails.) If we have any common sense, this has to be done before we get a new kitchen put in, and I'm at the point where I can't stand our (£100 bodged together from Wickes and repainted several times) kitchen any longer. However, I discovered on Monday that the opposite wall is also damp to the point where paint is coming off in flakes, and there's no reason for it to be. I'm thinking we may need to get every wall in the house tested again, which may mean me having to live somewhere else for a while because plaster dust makes me hideously ill. Argh.

Argh. There is a weird solventy smell in my house. I'm not sure if it's gas, but I'm not sure that it's not gas. I went outside and walked around the block, and although some people outside are using a disgusting-smelling barbecue, I'm sure the smell isn't coming from there. Because it's in our kitchen and in my study and, weirdly, very strongly at the top of the stairs outside the bathroom. And when I've poked my head out of the window, all I can smell is fresh, clean air.

So I've phoned the Gas Emergency Line (0800 111 999) and now I have to wait for an engineer to show up. And I have a headache, blocked nose, ears and sinuses from the smell, whatever it is. And a weird taste in my mouth. I don't think it's warm enough to take the laptop outside, somehow. (It isn't plugged in.)

In a way, I'm hoping it is a gas leak, because at least that's fixable. If it's some other kind of organic solvent randomly attacking the house, I don't know how we'd find it to stop it.

Update: Gas engineer has been. Gas smell has also gone. Mystery! I feel exhausted, nauseated and crappy though, so I'm going to bed as soon as Richard's home.

artremis's computer has died, so she won't be online from home for a while. I asked if she could bring it up to London this weekend so that conflux and/or wuzzie could look at it, but apparently she already has to bring the Big Bag of Bisexual Craft on the train and can't manage a computer as well. I doubt anyone feels like running down to Worthing to pick up Ludy and her computer on Saturday morning, but it's worth asking.

Can people who are staying with us for BiFest - so far, these are softfruit & haggis - please tell me what you like to eat for breakfast. Also what sort of drinks and milk you prefer, and whether or not you're allergic/intolerant to soya. If you can eat soya I can make us all pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast, but if you can't I'll have to find time to buy some ready-made ones from Sainsbury's, which may not happen. The default breakfast when Richard isn't around is entirely vegan (Linda McCartney sausages + potatoes of some sort + fried red peppers + baked beans and/or tinned tomatoes), but I can get eggs if someone other than me is prepared to cook them.

I am currently annoyed because I have lost two exam papers somewhere in my terribly messy house. While I was planning to tidy up a bit before the weekend due to aforementioned people staying here, I wasn't planning to tidy up my study. (All of my current students can cope with the mess - some of them even find it comforting (!!)). The lost exam papers are most likely to be in my study, but to be perfectly honest they could have accidentally escaped into one of the upstairs rooms. Doubt they're in the bedroom because I tidied that on Saturday, but front room & spare room are both possibilities, and both of them have boxes & piles of stuff everywhere. Ugh. ( Things we got done on Saturday, for my reference. )

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it, and Happy Tuesday/Bah Humbug to everyone who doesn't.

Today we went out for what is becoming the traditional Christmas lunch in this household - to the Riverside Vegetaria restaurant in Kingston with my parents. They didn't follow us back home because my mum is ill with a bad cold, and the house is far too messy for us to have space for them to sit here. Convenient, eh? ;) Of course, the house is messy because this is the first day off we've had for weeks and weeks. It wasn't actually deliberate.

So this evening, despite being very tired, I've done a couple of hours of tidying/recycling. I've sorted out all of the old bedding to go to the charity shop, plus several items of clothing that are unlikely to ever fit me again. We've also "archived" all my summer clothes in one of the new cupboards above the bed, so they're not taking up space in the drawers at the moment. (Richard wears the exact same clothes all year round, just with an extra layer in the winter. It must be nice to be homiothermic!). I've also recycled all of last year's and some of this year's Christmas wrapping paper for presents that we're giving. I love wrapped presents (and hate getting a present wrapped in the plastic bag it was brought back from the shop in) but hate the waste, so it's a good compromise.

We still have much more battling to do against entropy, but I'm running out of spare energy, so plan to collapse with my new Pokemon Battle Revolution game any minute now...

I am currently suffering from a severe shortage of spoons. Not sure why - there isn't anything specifically wrong at the moment, but I've been feeling that my job entirely wipes me out (all 3-4 hours a day of it). I've gone back to bed in the middle of the day several days this week, which is something I never do because I can't go back to sleep - except I've been lying down and having the hour disappear, which implies that I must have been in some sort of altered consciousness state even if not actually asleep.

So I haven't been writing anything very much, or keeping up with livejournal particularly, or even thinking of other people outside my head. Which makes me feel like a bad person because I usually try to be a good friend to others, even at considerable distance. But feeling guilty is not conducive to spoon regeneration, so I should stop that. Just too tired to think of much.

Today our new beds came. This is exciting, as when we ordered them we were told it'd be 8-9 weeks, and they've come in a little under 4 weeks. Also, when Bentalls phoned last week to say they had our order, it was bed singular, not beds plural. (Richard & I have different preferences for mattresses, and we also consider that 4' 6" is not enough space for two adults to sleep on a regular basis, so we've bought two single beds rather than one double.) I'm not sure when the other one turned up, but it was here today. It was also useful that they arrived on a day that Richard had booked off from work, as it's taken a bit of effort to get them unpacked and airing. Right now, I have more cardboard and Tetrapaks to take to the recycling than ever before (probably about 3 tricycle loads), but no motivation to move from the sofa at all. Must... acquire... spoons.

The plan for tomorrow involves me getting a Travelcard before I go to work, working 3.5 hours at the college of doom, and then going to Ikea to purchase more bed linens and a shelving solution to store cuddly creatures on. (My allergies mean it's a good idea to limit the number that share the bed with us, but we still want to have them nearby.) I hope that spoons will exist by then.

Oooh, Richard returns to tell me it is raining, so there's my excuse for not taking the cardboard out :P

I have been attempting to reduce the entropy of our house. This would apparently contravene the Second Law of Thermodynamics except - fortunately! - our house is not a closed system. This allows me to transfer large quantities of matter out of the system to such useful places as the recycling bin and charity shop. Hooray!

Wouldn't it be great if we only had to bring into the house what we actually use? Like if all the food could enter without its packaging? Even though I try my best not to bring new plastic bags into the house, still vast numbers of plastic bags come in! And there are Tetrapaks and cardboard boxes, and newspapers - why can't you get edible newspapers? I know you can read the news online, but I prefer the physical paper edition. I don't prefer the fact the newspaper comes with a load of pages, adverts and supplements that I don't want to read, though. Hmm.

Am still exhausted and not very functional. Having the kind of sleep patterns where I go to bed because I'm tired, but can't sleep for ages despite tiredness; and it doesn't matter whether I set my alarm for 10, 11, 12, 1 or 2, I'm just as tired when I wake up. Oddly, I only remembered yesterday when I was fretting about the blood sugar crashes that I do in fact have a known chronic fatigue condition, and none of the symptoms I've been experiencing are unusual for that. Sometimes I swear I have so many things wrong with me that I can just forget about one of them for months at a time :/

Having said that, despite being exhausted, things are happening v e r y   s l o w l y. Waking up every day with no expectations beyond getting out of bed and playing some Pokemon has been surprisingly good for me. On Friday I managed to weed the entire front garden - less impressive than it may sound, because our garden is the width of the house x a few feet deep, and is covered with a weed-proof plastic barrier and gravel. But animals rip the weed-proof layer when they come to poo on the gravel, so we end up with green and purple weeds growing inbetween the stones, which looks awful. Now, there are no weeds. The back garden is still infested with an enormous, diseased triffid of doom, but you can't see that from the road so I don't care.

Yesterday I dragged myself into town and bought many strange-to-me food products from the health food shop, then attempted to recreate the burgers from Fresh that I got addicted to in Toronto. The result was not completely authentic owing to the fact I hadn't got all the ingredients, but perfectly nice and edible. (I need to attempt the Fresh mayonnaise too, because I actually liked it, and looking at the recipe it contains almost no oil, so it's acceptable to my evil gall bladder.) I also cleaned half the kitchen and have caused far more worktop space to be available than previously existed, by finding places for things that occupy counter space to live. For example, we don't eat toast very often, so it's pointless having the toaster sitting on the worktop, getting itself full of dust which then smells awful when someone fancies toast and puts it on. Today, I need to find enough energy to wash my hair and attempt to finish the kitchen; and if more energy exists, take the cardboard recycling to the bin in town and/or start on the horrible mess that is the front room. It's possible that I will also make "curried garbanzo filling" (a.k.a. chickpea curry) from the reFresh book come into existence, as I bought the ingredients for it too.

It's frustrating to be operating at around 50-60% of my "healthy" capacity - especially because my healthy capacity is only 50-60% of an actual healthy person's. It's also odd where the barriers are - physical/manual work seems much easier to me than mental/creative work. I have a web site that's been 95% done since April, but I feel as though I can't finish it yet because it's too stressful. I have several stories on the go which should be easy to get done, but I feel as though I have no spare brain to deal with them. I'm sorry to be so... useless and uncommunicative to my friends. Ugh.

This week is being very aaaargh.

Today's drama has involved the Co-operative Bank, who while less evil than the Big Four, are apparently no more competent. We are remortgaging our house for various reasons, chiefly that our current interest rate is extortionate and we have no particular tie to the building society it's with. For various other reasons, chiefly that we are lazy and prefer to deal with a limited number of companies, we decided to move the mortgage to the Co-op where our current account is. This is proving to be rather difficult. ( Read more... )

I have, however, been ridiculously amused every time I've caught sight of the Co-Op's head office address on something as "1 Balloon Street". It makes me think of the best political blog in the world and Mr Balloon's Conservatory Party.

Lately I've been feeling like I don't even have enough time to live my life, let alone write about it. I suspect all the busyness is going to slow down over Christmas, but not stop completely - while I lose some of my students because they go home for the holidays, I gain other students who come home to London. Plus it's not just work that's insanely busy. The floor is taking up large amounts of my time & motivation. And when the bedroom floor is finished, there's still the landing floor, and the bathroom, and the spare room... and the paintwork in the bathroom... and getting the windows fixed. Honestly, owning a house is like one non-stop massive DIY project. Actually, strike the "like" out of that sentence - it is one non-stop massive DIY project.

I also still have Teh Snot, and am thus needing to schedule something like 12 hours a day to sleep :/ This is an improvement over the 15 hours I slept on Thursday night, but still fairly incompatible with getting stuff done.

We got a bottle of concentrated sulphuric acid in the post on Thursday :D I am going to keep it on my desk to scare my students with. And if someone hands me a completely appalling piece of work, I shall feed it to the conc H₂SO₄ for its opinion, and then cackle evilly and point out if it could do that to the recently-living cellulose, just think what it could do to organic matter like you... No, of course not, it's going to be stored in a plastic box on a shelf in Richard's workroom marked "Beware of the leopard conc. sulphuric acid", but I was enjoying that mad scientist fantasy for a while there.

The bedroom floor continues. Richard & I are camping out with our mattresses in the front room. A moment of sheer "us"ness - sitting side-by-side in the bed together playing with our laptops. Ye-es. There have been fewer "buried treasures" this time, just an extremely worn ha'penny from 1864 and an old newspaper, but the newspaper's quite interesting - I might type some of it in later for your amusement (yes, with the copious free time that I have so much of). We remembered to put the time capsule in this time. It has the various coins we found under the floor, a 1p and 2p coin from 2006, a US 1 cent, a Euro 1 cent, and a French half-franc that was masquerading as a 5p coin in Richard's change a few weeks ago. That will thoroughly confuse whoever digs the floor up in 20 years time, I'm sure.

Yaaaaaaaaay! The floor is finished!! We still have to clean the skirting boards and reaffix them to the wall and then move all the furniture back in, but the floor is DONE!!

However, the photo of me loving the new floor looks like a coroner's photo. I don't think I'll post that one in case people think I died. I'll have to get Richard to pose on the floor after all :D