It was my birthday yesterday (pause for congratulations), and we skived an afternoon off.
Firstly we called over to the mechanic, where perlmonger had managed to leave the car boot cover after he’d cycled over to collect the car, then squeezed the bike into the boot, which was full of stuff for the tip. Then we went to the tip.
Then we drove over to Bath, ate fabulous sausage baguettes from The Sausage Shop, and had a last wander round the shops, purchasing a small metal pail to hold food compost in the kitchen (helpfully labelled “compost”). We currently use a big plastic bowl for this, because Modo, our compost heap, is right at the end of the garden, but when we move it’ll be outside the back door, so a small receptacle is ideal, and will take up less worktop space.
We also picked up a funky purple knife complete with sheath, which will be useful for the picnic bag – we plan to be old badgers up there, and take a flask of tea and so forth when we go coast walking. Oh, and an xmyth ornament of a moose reindeer; we have a tradition of buying one a year. I’m very bah humbug about the commercialism of the festering season, but I do like to relax, eat well, see friends, and decorate the house.
After that we went to collect a wooden loft hatch/ladder combo, which I’d scored from eBay. These are usually frighteningly expensive (well, frightening to *me*), but this was a real bargain at 50 quid. Astonishingly, there is no loft access in the house in Hull, and thus there is no insulation either. That’s under organisation, and grants mean you can get it done for £75, but there needs to be access to the loft to do it, and we thought we might as well put in a decent ingress/egress method.
We came home via Ikea – we’ve been looking at second hand kitchens on eBay, but decided that we need to live in it for a while, and so we need to buy some bits and pieces to make it useable. We don’t *think* there are any drawers in the units, so we bought a couple of cutlery holders, and a plastic tray affair for holding utensils, and a silicon tray for making small heart-shaped cakes, and a pack of ten hooks, and a cooker hood. That lot came to £35 – I know Ikea can be a pain, but they’re fab for stuff like that, and how can anyone make and distribute a cooker hood for £29? Beats me.
Back home for 7, as someone was coming to collect the lawnmower, which was eBay’d, along with a load of other stuff. Then the guilty pleasure of fish’n’chips, some crap TV, and bed at 9.30. How I wish I could shake off the after effects of this bloody hamthrax …