So, I went to see my mom (deliberate) this weekend; I’ve not been down for a while and consequently the list of things that needed doing was quite long. I did start to wonder about how my dad kept up.
(skip past this bit for the wittery kate talk)
I… bought fencing material and fenced off with barbed wire both ends of the river (after 6 years of people trespassing and damaging my mum’s garden the fight just got a bit nastier; incidentally, while Nikki I’m sure (being a farm-lass) would have had no problems dealing with barbed wire, I found it almost as much fun as it looked like it’d be); put up the new washing line; repaired the gate; removed the excess fencing from the gate post; ‘repaired’ my mum’s car door lock (it jams, locked, irritatingly); cleaned up mouse crap from high up where my mum couldn’t reach; put up a shelf and hangy things in the shed (well, technically, my mum, in a disturbing character change has decided to become much more independent (she’s perhaps fed up of having broken things around the house waiting for me to visit) so I drilled holes and she screwed the bits of wood up); I also prepared but didn’t put the edging up on the bridge (I think we need some ‘nicer’ wood). This took up the large majority of the weekend and when I left, just before lunch today I was knackered.
I also checked and found out why the speaker in my car was working intermittently, the ‘quality’ soldering I’d done when I put it in (like a lot of other jobs) was rather botched, so it’d snapped. I put that on my ‘when I get home’ list. However, when I got home I did the supermarket shopping (Woot, I have food!); finally fixed the frying pan that’s been broken for months (now it has a screw made from some high-quality-metal or other which will I’m sure soon add the daily requirement of rust to my diet); the saucepan that’s had a loose handle and thus sat on the table for weeks; the broken wire to the speaker in my car (‘cos I couldn’t go to work without it working!) and now I am… knackered.
Oh, I also watched Jean de Florette, with my mum, which turned out to be excellent and added to the strangeness (my mum had been excitedly showing me screwdrivers earlier in the day, a quality I presumed I’d inhereted from my dad…) when my mum professed a need for a widescreen telly. I tried and tried to persuade them when my dad was alive, but no need for a widescreen telly ever existed before… suddenly now, I’d given up hope and watching stuff on the ex-rental telly with the poor colour rendition and the flickering from bright to dark had become kind of normal. And then, suddenly, she’s all ‘I need a widescreen telly’. The world is going odd.
(and stop skipping)Â
Anyway, I had a long chat with my mom about moving. About not being able to afford to stay in Bristol and thinking about moving Northward… I kind of expected a flurry of ‘no’ – me being further away will almost certainly mean less of me seeing my mum. But there was none. My mum basically said ‘for god’s sake, get on with it’. So, now I’m thinking about it more meaningfully. I’ve even got a Birmingham Univeristy Hospital application form sat on my desktop waiting for me to fill it in.
I guess I’m starting to step outside my comfort zone again. Which is kinda scary. I was talking (I do a lot of that) to Trey about it; and it came down to the fact that I want to leave this country in 2 years. Either I can struggle in Bristol, probably not be able to get the kind of house I want, and so on; or I can move up North, get paid the same, live in a cheaper area, almost certainly find a house I actually want, or at least that’s appropriate and in my price range (and has a garage, hell, I’ve seen a few on Fish4 just scanning the listings). This will hopefully also allow me to save up a bit, and having a garage will mean that left-hooking Rebecca and getting her all prepped for the journey shouldn’t be so hard. So I’m going to give a couple of places a ring on Monday afternoon, see if I can’t scare up some jobs.
Of course, this is in addition to writing my dissertation; and I’ve realised I really need to start preparing Rebecca for Pride. The call is still out, incidentally for Stewards. We just need two shiny people who’d like to be stewards around a shiny, shiny black Minor. Go look at (last years, okay, I know) the Pride of Minors website. The car that needs stewards is Fifi, the shiny black one, driven by our mate Guy. Go’wan, y’know you want to be a star…
Anyway, I seem to have stopped, and I want to go play with this form, so I can get it sent off nice and sharpish like. So. Yes. I’m also very tired, and quite hungry (all I ate for lunch today was a slice of plum and chocolate cake).