I am not by nature a hugely patient person. I love the internet, and the instant gratification of buying online (WHEE! IT’s MINE!). I am not a huge consumer culture person, but music and film, they’re a huge part of my existence. I like to do things. I don’t get on well with waiting. It’s weird because I’m a terrible prevaricator. Take this, I should be working on my assignment, but while I’m waiting for lunch (well, the egg forming a lunch component) to cook I’m doing this instead. I’ve managed to avoid even looking at the university site all morning, which I think is, in a way quite impressive.
Annnyhow. For one who prevaricates, I’m also terribly impatient. Once I’ve gained momentum I want things to happen, and while I lay in the bath (we have no shower, still), contemplating things and whining about how 2011 has continued 2010’s monetary suckage, and that the whole concept of a year sucking is a bit dumb, because a year is just a human construct. I mean, I know it has it’s basis in nature and a revolution of the Earth, but the whole way we divide time is a human construct, largely. And One year sucking is no more a factor of which revolution of the Earth it is than any other. And expecting the change of position of the Earth to affect suckage, is well, dumb.
So yes. So when we moved we had momentum. We were trying to coax people into building for us. We had excitement. Now I’m just painfully frustrated. I’m frustrated because we can’t cook – and cooking is something I love. I love it because I get to spend quality time with my love, and we dance around the kitchen, we chat, we cuddle.
We. Cook. Together.
At the moment one of us tends the awkwardly placed (camping) stove (on the microwave, on the floor) and while we still talk, there’s no room for messing around gently, because you couldn’t fit a bloody cat in there with us, let alone swing it. So we’re quite keen to get our kitchen expanded out into the dining space, which is on the face of it fairly easy. Plan -> Building regs -> Approval -> Builders and Inspections -> Done. However since builders quote at the speed of glacial movement, actually getting to the point where we’ve got someone who says ‘Yes, I can do the structural survey and draw you a plan, submit it and get things going’ appears to involve several entire lifespans.
Promises, such as “I’ll get it to you before I go on holiday” do, in fact, feel, like they’ve been offered as placations despite meaning “I might get around to it when I get back”. The irony being most of them have commented on how they’ve got plenty of space in their schedules at the moment to do the work, because they’ve not got much on.
Do they not consider the possibility that this absence of work might be linked to the impossibility of getting quotes off them?
Gaaah.
It’s made more frustrating by paying 250 quid a month to store our stuff far away from the house, to keep it clean, while the building work notionally goes on. Were it to actually happen. At any point. This lifetime.
It’s made slightly more frustrating by buying water to drink, because the tap water’s a bit dubious. This’d be not so awful (hate the waste of plastic and energy transporting the water) but I bought Tesco Value water and it tastes fracking atrocious – metallic and sharp (although Kathryn thinks it tastes soft). Odd. Don’t like it anyhow. Which means I’m not drinking much water, which means I develop a headache.
Anyhow, so to give us the feeling of progress we’re going to go and dig the steam stripper out of the unit, and start stripping the wallpaper upstairs. This will, one imagines, give us a faint feeling of progress. I feel that I’m letting Kathryn down though, we both agreed we wouldn’t spend years living in a building site, and come month 2 we’ve still not actually got quotes for building work, and we’ve still not got any kind of schedule. The house is untouched, and I feel bad.
I have to say I have awesome respect for those who are engaged in much bigger projects and who whine far less than me (looking at you Wibble!).
I continue to mentally debate what to do with the Enfield. The G-Wiz has potentially a bit of interest, but the person who Nikki texted my number to hasn’t texted me. The Enfield I’m torn about. I want to get it going, but the probability of that occurring in the near future seems quite small. But then, if we finish the house when we plan – it’s not an unreasonable project…. Meh. The problem then is to store it until we work on it. Plan was to move it to our ‘drive’ (currently a stepped mass of concrete), but then the question arises of what we do with it when the builders are laying the new concrete. I suppose it’d only have to be ‘out’ for a few days. Perhaps we could rent some fencing and fence off the ‘road’ past the back of our house (given that no-one else uses it…). That might actually be a plan.
On the plus side, the new bras arrived yesterday – which means I’ve finally thrown away my selection of awful, nasty, tired, worn, ill fitting, grey bras. Along with them, my shiny shiny new vibrams arrived. And they rock.
As does this: http://hestaprynn.com/
