Friday 20 August 2010

Leaks, and other vegetables...

Slight crises last night. I was a little over-enthusiastic when washing my hair in the shower and didn't notice the shower curtain had slipped inside the bath. The result was a soaking wet carpet in the bathroom and water dripping down the chimney breast onto the wooden mantel in the living room. David was running around with towels etc like a thing possessed.

This begs two questions: why is the shower against the wrong wall so it doesn't reach out into the bath? And why is there carpet in the bathroom? This doesn't acquit me from blame (I heard David telling Charlie it was my fault) but I think allows for mitigating circumstances, along with the fact I am very shortsighted and can barely see where the bath is let alone the shower curtain when I don't have my glasses on.


The evidence against me...

Oh well... the evening wasn't a complete waste of time as I threw half a butternut squash that was on the verge of being thrown out into a roasting tin with half a marrow, an onion, and a carrot, sprinkled them with cinnamon and nutmeg and roasted them. I then put them in a pan with some stock and made some soup that looks like mud but smells gorgeous. And I still have some home-made bread left to go with it.

Bought two magazines yesterday (HOW expensive????), Good Food and Country Living. I bought GF as I was hoping for a discount voucher for the Good Food show in November that Cath and I want to go to. I was very disappointed in the lack of veggie recipes in it, and astounded at the lifestyles of the people in CL. (It says it's a complete lifestyle magazine... I'm not sure what a lifestyle is, and even less sure that I have one). I've lived in rural England all of my life but this was a different world... houses overlooking National Parks, bottling fruit from the orchard, and interior designers used for advice on wallpapers. The cats seemed to like the magazine anyway - they each took turns to fall asleep on it.


Posky approves of this particular lifestyle...

From the ridiculous to the sublime - went to St Mary's Church to browse their bookshop at lunchtime.  Came back with a haul of classic children's books (plus a William Boyd), one of which was Anne of Green Gables which I had to start reading straight away.  I'd forgotten how well written it is, wonderful characters and so funny too.


Book haul...

As if that wasn't enough to raise the spirits, my favourite season of the year is on its way as evidenced by the leaves on my acer - Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, etc etc etc.  I sense some good photo opportunities coming up...

1 comment:

Laloofah said...

Ah, thank goodness for LinkWithin, so I could find this old post! I subscribed to Country Living from about 1985-2002! I kept nearly all of them, too, but ended up giving most of them away when we moved - many I donated to the library, where they were instantly swooped up. I've kept a couple dozen of my favorites, though, along with some articles ripped from the ones I gave away (hey, whadya want for free, a pristine magazine?!) :-)

As for water leaks from the shower, that brought back painful memories of when we were about to put our house on the market in 2008, and I went down to our finished basement to get something about an hour after taking a shower and walked barefoot through a big wet spot in the carpet right in the middle of one of the bedrooms (which we used for storage). I looked up and saw a large and growing water stain on the freshy painted ceiling and fell to my knees and wept. We'd been so cursed to that point (and I had a headache and needed to go to town for my weekly errands and BW was at work). Turned out that a brand new piece of shower plumbing inside a wall on our newly finished remodeled upstairs bathroom had cracked and leaked cold water. We got all of that fixed eventually, but since the damaged ceiling had popcorn texture on it from the 1970s, we had to have it tested for asbestos before it could be torn out and replaced with new sheet rock. It tested negative, but the asbestos abatement guy didn't like the look of the popcorn in the basement hall and den, so tested it, too. It was positive - and so began a long, hard summer of asbestos-laden popcorn removal and new texture and paint. Needless to say, we didn't put our house on the market that summer, real estate prices tanked in this area after that, and you know the rest of the story. All because of some cheap, made in China piece of plumbing that probably cost less than $3!

And yeah, no way should bathrooms (or kitchens) be carpeted!

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