After repainting the hall, and getting the new carpet fitted (it came yesterday) the hall has suddenly got three feet wider. Wow, I can probably fit bookshelves in there now. After all, it is the only room in the house that doesn't have them...
I had to make an emergency dentist's appointment for today, having lost a large lump off one of my back teeth on Sunday (I think it may have dissolved in all that rain we had). The tooth itself wasn't hurting at all, but it had a really rough edge where it had broken, and my tongue was being rubbed raw, so I took the first appointment they could give me. Now the last time I went for an emergency appointment I had to wait for ages (only fair); what I'd done involved root canal work and a crown and lots of follow-on appointments; it cost a small fortune and I had to have quite a few of those numbing injections which make me feel sick. I really wasn't looking forward to today with enthusiasm, even 'though our dentist is really quite a nice person (for a dentist).
This time... I was taken as soon as I got there; it was quick and easy to fix; I only needed one injection, so I'm still feeling like a human being and it didn't cost the earth either. And, and this is the really good bit, we had a family check-up and clean and polish due next weekend, so he just did mine while I was there, so Handsome will have to take the boys and I can stay at home (and read).
Next time I might look forward to going to the dentist...
On an entirely different note, apparently there are two hundred pupils and a fair number of staff absent at Mouse's school. The school only has just over seven hundred students, so that's quite a large proportion there - I'm amazed they haven't made the press (although possibly Mouse is exaggerating quite a bit...) . They do however, definitely have a rather nasty little virus spreading quite fast (symptoms are nothing like the dreaded SF), as well as (according to Mouse and friends) quite a few people who have caught extreme hypochondria as well. Thankfully (cross fingers, touch wood) Mouse has currently caught neither virus nor hypochondria.
Mouse is playing his saxophone tonight, at a SWRI birthday party... the SWRI's birthday, I think, not an individual person. That'll be a whole new experience for him! Hopefully there'll be cake to reconcile him and the other kids who have braved the old ladies.
Currently we are having a stunning autumn; the trees are wonderful colours and the mornings are bright, sunny, and not as cold as they can be at this time of year. The colours look even better when the sun is shining on them and there's a dark sky behind - a description of the view from my office window this morning.
But the clocks changed last weekend, so dusk falls before I leave work, and this for me means that it is nearly the dark days of winter. I get so depressed when I don't get enough daylight, and in about a month, I'll be leaving in the dark and coming home in the dark every day. And it'll stay like that until February. And we're not even allowed to buy incandescent lightbulbs any more.
It seems so pointless opening the curtains before I leave the house, knowing that the first thing I'll do when I get home is close them again. However, I don't think I'm capable of leaving them closed in case the few neighbours we have think we've stayed in bed all day! I don't know why I care, but I do. It would even be quite an ecologically friendly thing to do, it would keep the heat in...
And, even worse, at this time of year I lose vast amounts of personal reading time, because I read in the car (not whilst driving, obviously) and now I can't.
I've been attempting to make some posters on Glogster, because I found it by accident and thought it looked like fun. It is, lots and lots of fun, and I have now spent many happy hours that I did not have making posters that I do not need (but will use). I'm partial to bits of software and webware that allow completely inartistic people (such as myself) to make pseudo artistic stuff, although Mouse came by a short while ago and said "Muuuuuuum, you're not leaving it like that, are you?"
I left it like that.
We went across to Glasgow today, to take Hairy some essentials (clothes, underwear mainly, and home-baked bread) and to take him shopping. We met him for lunch, and then headed for a supermarket with a shopping list written by his flat-mate. Unlike most of the males in my family, Hairy does not cook. This isn't from lack of encouragement; Handsome and myself have been most vociferous about cooking being an essential life skill, and Mouse cooks without encouragement (and sometimes without checking that we don't need the ingredients for dinner). However, Hairy does appear to have fallen on his feet - his flat mate cooks and apparently loves to cook, and is prepared to cook for him. The least we can do is provide the ingredients!
We got to meet the new girlfriend as well, as she was at the flat (with the self sacrificing cooking flat mate and boyfriend) when we got back with the shopping. They made us tea, and made conversation while we drank it (quickly, so we could take our old selves out of there before Hairy got too embarrassed). Hairy seems very happy, his friends are lovely (and polite to parents, which is definitely a good thing), the flat looks fine for a student flat, and is considerably cleaner than some I've seen. Everything's looking good.
I think I'll stop worrying for a bit.
We have spent the whole of the last two days scraping wallpaper off the hall walls - I knew the hall was large (sprawling bungalow) but I previously hadn't realised that the walls were quite as vast and endless as they now appear. It's lucky that we're replacing the carpet as well, because it's a bit covered in tiny bits of scraped-off wallpaper as well. We had the kit for removing wallpaper without fuss (steamer and proper scraping thingys), but they do not work when the previous wallpaper has been put up with araldite...
Despite having showered twice today, I still have wallpaper paste in my nails and my hair - how did it get there!
However, eventually we have clear walls in the hall, so tomorrow Handsome is going to put lining paper up, and then we'll paint it - something light and cheerful, exact colour still to be decided. Tomorrow, while he's doing that, I'm going to make quince jelly, and chutney with all my remaining green tomatoes - if I can find somewhere to buy jam jars in the morning.
Mouse actually managed to get from where we live to the moderately large town where BF lives today, by bus, all on his own. Actually this is more of an achievement than it sounds. The bus service (which rejoices in the name of the Blue Bus, even although it's white) only runs three times a day - morning, middayish and evening - and takes approximately an hour and a half to do a journey that takes Handsome and myself slightly less than twenty minutes by car. But it does stop absolutely everywhere in the process. Mouse and I tried to find the timetable online last night (so we could be sure what time the middayish bus came) and it was really, really difficult to find. To be honest, 'Blue Bus' is not really a unique search term, and even when we added in extra words like timetable and a few place-names it still took a while to narrow it down - and it hadn't been updated since 2007...
But he made it, and went to see a film about zombies with BF, which he thoroughly enjoyed. And luckily for him we were there to pick him up so he didn't have to brave the Blue Bus again.
I have a week's holiday next week, Handsome does too because it's the October half-term. We have some plans - decorating and such-like.
However, today my weekly library run came in, with all the books I had marked as things I wanted to read. All of them, at once! If the Amazon thingy was working I'd put them all in the sidebar, but it isn't, so I can't.
I already had the new Terry Pratchett, but now I've got the new Sarah Waters, Audrey Nifflinger, Laurie R King and Christopher Brookmyre as well. And some other stuff too....
I'd probably just get in the way helping with the decorating, I'm sure Handsome will do much better on his own. I could even read to him while he paints.
I have just spent hours of my own precious time wrestling with a particularly unwieldy bit of webware trying to set up something that I have to do for work. It is slow, outdated and extremely frustrating. And it doesn't do even basic things that I expect it to do, like being able to drag and drop things, or re-size images, or go back.
It is so sloooow - like slugs in treacle.
And I absolutely have to use it, no choice, because that's the way the system is.
After not having heard from him all week, Hairy finally answered my msns and texts yesterday and confirmed that he did actually, finally have somewhere to live - and that he was moving in today. He also confirmed that he has Mouse's jeans, but that's a different story... I am so relieved. I've tried very hard not to worry about him sleeping on other students' floors, and moving from flat to flat, but I have really not been happy about it. As I may have mentioned before, my worry gene is dominant. Of course we haven't seen this flat, or met the girl he's sharing with (not his girlfriend - she's in halls), I hope she's the tolerant type. But no matter what, it has to be better than him being of no fixed abode.
Thinking back, some of the student accommodation Handsome and I had all those eons some time ago when we were at university together was pretty appalling - we had a little reminiscence tonight about some of the horrible houses we lived in. One of Handsome's rooms was so cold that we used to crawl under the layers of quilts and blankets to switch on the electric fire at the bottom of the bed before we had to get up. And the one I stayed in on my own while Handsome was on his working year was so dirty that I lived in my room for a year rather than go into the filthy downstairs rooms. It wasn't cleanable - the mould in the walls had already been there for generations.
I'm fairly sure that Hairy won't actually put up with that sort of thing. His standards are higher than mine were at that age! He is also protected by quite a few laws that were not in place when we were at university. But then, he won't have all that experience to laugh about when he's older.
