I oh-so-nearly succeeded in the Stay Awake and Talk to Tony challenge last Wednesday. I watched Autumnwatch at eight and stayed awake no worries. (Sadly it's finished now; pity. Springwatch lasts for 3 weeks :-( This only lasted for two and had red deer on the Isle of Rhum, and seals somewhere out in the Hebrides and autumn birds in Lancashire, and badgers and hedgehogs and foxes and lots of things.) Anyway. I stayed awake for that, then was watching Jane Horrocks in "Who do you think you are", which traces family trees for celebrities. Was watching, watching, watching. Nearly half past nine. Washed the dishes. Watching, watching, watching. nearly quarter to ten. Tidied kitchen. Watching, watchi ..... Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Fortunately, at about 2 minutes past ten, The Builder woke up. Realised the time. SHOUTED. Made me jump!!! Was certainly awake then. Talked to Tony. Had another glass of wine, started to drift off again. Went to bed.
Said I'd turned into Tony! Although it must be said that I do not enjoy half past five am at the moment. It's pitch dark and a bit damp and a bit chilly and an ideal time for snuggling back under the doona and going back to sleep!!!
I can't decide what the cat is doing, either. Every morning (including Sundays :(:(:(:(:(:( ) at about 04:53, he either jumps onto the chest of drawers and plays with the light tassel and knocks things off until The Builder sits up and roars, or he bites The Builder's feet until The Builder sits up and roars. I am undecided in my mind whether he is just being wakeful, playful and annoying, or whether he's decided that our alarm clock is perfectly obviously going to fail this morning and he must simply get us up himself. I suspect the latter. On the other hand, he's perfectly capable of being annoying too!
I had a day off yesterday. A WHOLE day! I don't think anyone had noticed. Apart from me, and I didn't say anything :-) I still had to get up early, though. I might have had the day off, but The Builder did not. Half past five on a Saturday. Gloom. Sigh. :-( And again today, as it happened. Half past five on a Sunday is just rood, it is. Very Rood Indeed!
So. What to do with my day? Well, a little cleaning, tidying, washing and ironing. I chatted to Lindsey on the MSN Messenger. I had cocoa and toast and boiled eggs. When The Builder left at 06:15, Marlo and I snuggled in the nice, cosy dining room and pottered a bit. I transferred some photos from my camera to the laptop. Mid-morning I decided to go to the Post Office to post a form for Simon and some letters for The Builder. On a whim, I decided to drop into the village butcher's shop (we are a very lucky village indeed. We have a Post Office AND a Butcher. So many villages these days have neither). And discovered that the butcher has many things in common with the fish and chip shop (we've got one of those too!). To whit: It is very good quality; it is much enjoyed by locals and people who travel to get to it; there are large queues on Saturdays. Actually, the fish and chip shop has such large queues on Friday and Saturday evenings that it's almost unusable at the times you might want to buy a take away dinner, though it is open quite late. We had fish and chips on Thursday last week when the queues are more bearable. The butcher is open until 12:30 on Saturday lunchtimes, and does a roaring trade up until then. He knows everyone (except me!) by name, knows what they have, and teases the little old ladies mercilessly. I waited and waited and waited and then bought some gammon and some fat sausages and a pork pie. I do not myself eat pork pies but The Builder does. He tells me it was a very fine pork pie!
He was home at lunchtime, Saturday (and today, Sunday. They only work the mornings at weekends). So he and I went into Chesterfield and ordered the wood for the new raised beds and didn't order the bricks for the paths because the brick place was shut, then we went into Sheffield. The Builder has a new phone. Or at least, he did have a new phone. He'd had it for about 4 days. And it abruptly stopped working. No worries, thought we. We'll take it back and get a replacement. Then we'll go shopping and then we'll go to the allotment. Don't do it. Do not get a phone through Phones 4U. If you should be foolish enough to ignore this advice and go to Phones 4U and the handset should die -- DO NOT take it back to replace it on a Saturday afternoon. We had to wait for an hour or so before anyone could deal with it, then it took HALF AN HOUR to persuade the man that he could exchange it, that he should exchange it, that, by law, he HAD to exchange it. Then he did exchange it. He was wriggling very hard though. Can't think why. It was perfectly obvious that there was a fault with the handset. Wasn't going to cost him anything to exchange it. Sigh. Took about 10 minutes to exchange a kettle at John Lewis, and that included queuing time at lunchtime on a Friday! Managed the supermarket shopping after that but had lost the will to do anything else so abandoned the allotment and went home.
Where I had a wine calamity. We had eaten dinner (lamb chops, tiny, tiny potatoes from the allotment, tiny, tiny caulis from the garden, little leeks and carrots from Waitrose and a red currant gravy (red currant jelly made by me with currants from the lottie) ). The Builder went to sleep. I decided to broach a new wine cask. Couldn't get the cardboard bung thingy open. Tried harder. Still couldn't get it open. Tried to pierce around it with a blunt knife. Cardboard bung thingy appeared to be stuck hard on. Tried to prise it away with the knife. CRISIS! Pierced the bladder!!! Alarm. Run about and fish out the large glass jug. Try to decant wine into that. Wine trickling through breach in bladder. Small plastic thingy over spout glued firmly in place. Wouldn't shift. Prised that off with blunt knife. Hole in bladder getting larger. Decant wine into glass jug. HORRORS. Jug not big enough. Rush about. Grab large, very expensive teapot from collector's dinner service set. Fill that. Fill two wine glasses and a tumbler. Drink tumbler contents while cleaning up wasted wine from benches and floor. The cat watches all this with amused interest. The Builder sleeps through it all. Fails to notice all the containers filled with wine this morning and asks in a musing way if I have taken the new cask back downstairs into the cool room. Restrain self from throwing jug of wine at him. Wicked waste that would have been!
Just under an hour and we can go home. Now all we need to do is to persuade the students to leave at 5 o'clock. 24 hour opening doesn't start until tomorrow!!
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