We now have one week to decorate the pants off the place before the plumber returns to install all the equipment that they have laid the 5,000 miles of copper piping to supply and the electrician to connect their supplies that they have diligently been organising. Our job is further complicated by the need to let several walls of plaster dry and the kitchen and bathroom floor dry as they had to have a layer of concrete laid to level them.
However, it is all looking the business and for the first time in a long while I have been able to get the car into the garage and that was despite installing a large chest freezer in there as well. All I have to do now is find some large chests to freeze! Ding-Dong.
We desperately needed the freezing capacity as our existing back-up freezer is crammed full with ten tonne of fruit (not surprisingly to my regular readers) mainly consisting of plums, plums and then some more plums. Now we are moving into Runner beans & Blackberries and these will be closely followed by the apples.
So anyway, this all meant that we had been looking out for a chest freezer for several weeks at the Auctions but to no avail. This week I put in another collection of 'stuff' to try to get some cash and to attempt to clear more of the "we may need it at sometime" collection of useless things. 3 rugs that were not ever going to clean up, our old cassette box full of (and I mean full, some 90 cassettes) ....full of those infamous mixed taps that we used to make before we stepped up to the challenge of swamping our selves with the new fangled mixed CD's! With which we are now swamped now that the mp3 players take us to a new extreme of 30,000 tunes in a box the size of a cassette tape! Madness!
Back to the Auction, Mr Becks (the auctioneer) has a mischievous way about him and as he warms up he becomes more humorous with the odd quip. A few weeks back he finished a 'lot' and then walked past this large and obviously very empty Parrot cage. He stopped and stared at the cage for just a few seconds and in an Eric Morecambe forlorn way he quietly said... "That's a very sad story there" and then swiftly moved on making no further reference to it again. We all looked at this sad empty cage and you know he was making it up but you couldn't help but wonder....
So there is my 'stuff' on the floor with bidders rummaging through it as if they owned it Not yet matey, lets see yer wonga first eh? And right next to it was a chest freezer. My Lot numbers were 158 and 159 and the freezer was 160. Now I had been checking the price of the things and brand new they ranged from £259 through to £390 so I set a maximum bid of £70 and waited.
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| My stuff can just be seen behind the freezer with some of my picture frames leaning against the bed. |
"£30?" he attempted to start the bidding, silence, "£20 then" he looked thoroughly around the room, "It's in perfect working order......", nothing, "Well £10 then" I put my hand up and he acknowledged the bid. Again he looked around the room attentively stretching out the bid as long as he could reasonably do so finally closing the deal with me at just a tenner. Another Thomas bargain! I just hope that it does work, it is on test in the garage and I probably won't bother telling you if it crashes and burns, no I'll just leave it that I got another great deal.
I am, for those of you that are interested, really enjoying running the B&B. It feeds a craving that I have been developing over the last 5-10 years. I know that it is the slippery slope to a full blown obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and I reckon if it don't hurt anyone then why should it bother them. I know that one day I shall get my fingers burnt doing this, but it is a risk that I am willing to take in the pursuance of excellence.
So what strange affliction do I burden myself with? The ironing. I just love producing a smooth garment or linen. Now I don't do pants, the very thought turns my stomach. They say that the sense of smell is one of the strongest when it comes to memories and I can still remember my Grand-mother leaving the iron on my grandfathers pants when she was distracted (probably by me) and the most awful of burning smells that ensued. No, the very thought of scorched pants still makes me feel queezy!
BUT I DO do just about everything else that is not a 'small'. I plan my washing so that I can take it out of the machine just as the thing stops so that I can hang it immediately to minimise any possible creases. Now this may be where I touch the outer edges of the OCD spectrum. If I get interrupted and fail to get them out of the machine in time to minimise those creases, well then I just have to shove them ALL back into the machine again and put them through another Rinse and Spin cycle. DO NOT MESS WITH ME ON MY WASHING DAYS, I'M NOT A NICE PERSON!
It is in the matter of seeking perfection in this area that I have become so frustrated at the problem of ironing sheets, Duvets and indeed table cloths. You see you do all that ironing and then go and fold the bally things up so you can put them away and when you get them back out again, low & behold you have a criss cross of fold creases. Well I couldn't handle this any more and close to breaking point it dawned on me that I could roll these large items up after ironing them and then there would be no creases.
So there I was looking all butch in B&Q buying 4 x 2mtr long lengths of sink waste water pipes so that when I got home I could put on my pinny and become Michael home-maker. So I iron my table cloth, then I roll it onto this drain pipe place a couple of elastic bands on the ends and one loosely in the middle. Then, when I need my uncreased table cloth, I simply position the loose end in the correct place on the table and wooosh I push the roll away from me and the table cloth is laid.
Nothing odd about that ........ is there?
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