Life without ingesting antihistamines...

... is somewhat itchy. Even my face has been getting in on the act, which is unusual. I predict that this experiment will end before the weekend is over. My new, magic, anti-histamine cream needs to be applied directly to the source of the itching, and I am not entirely convinced that the tube will last all that long (nor spread as far as is necessary)!

Had a bit of a rough drive to work this morning. My drive involves a steep hill, and I held the car on the clutch for most of this hill, which involved quite a bit of queueing. There was a bit of a funny smell - kind of the same smell as appears when brakes are sticking and about to die in an expensive, and potentially life-threatening, way.* I don't think it's the brakes; clutch sounds more likely. I do hope I haven't killed it.

Anyway, I hope that the car will get me home (to my parents' house - 1 1/2 hours drive away) this evening without any problems. If it does, I think that we can call it a blip, and I can avoid showing off my (actually quite impressive) clutch control skills while queueing on a hill in future. The handbrake's there for a reason! It's booked in for a service and four new tyres on Monday (Argh! Expensive!), so, assuming it makes it that far, I shall get it checked out then. If it does not make it that far, I am in for an unfortunate evening. Last week I was late because the cat was sick;** it would be great to arrive early today...

Tomorrow, of course, marks the day of cleaning very dirty bits of organ. I do hope there is not too much wire wool involved - it's like a tiny little cactus, and leaves tiny little spines behind in my fingers, sometimes. Very irritating. They are not easy to locate, nor to extract.



*As they did on my Peugeot 205 a few years ago, when the brakes failed at some traffic lights. Turns out that the problem was not an entirely harmless stone in the mechanism (although, in retrospect, a stone doesn't sound all that great), and was instead that the callipers on the brake had seized up. Good job the handbrake worked!

**I spent last week cat-sitting, which was fun apart from the clearing up of the cat sick. I maintain that I do not want a cat of my own.

The weekend is here!

Hooray! A chance to drop items off at charity shops, and refill fabric conditioner bottles; to play the organ in a small variety of different contexts; to feel bad about not having the time to visit Mother on Mothers' Day; to get up late on Saturday.

Only two more weeks before the Easter break. I get nearly two weeks off at that point, which will be a relief. I shall kidnap Anne and force her to make Easter eggs for my family, and attempt to achieve large amounts of organ practice while the church is open, thus heartily annoying anyone who wants to actually go to church to sit quietly and peacefully. If one is doing it correctly, the majority of organ practice should probably be quite boring to listen to.

I shall also hopefully get a chance to recharge my batteries, and may be able to write better afterwards. How I wish that I could stop feeling so tired! I might write something less deeply unsatisfactory than this post. That would be a novelty.

Moving, part 1

We are SO not ready to move house tomorrow. We spent most of yesterday evening "packing" because I wasn't feeling well and he had to sort out some stuff for work. Pretty much all of my clothes (excluding coats) are now packed, but the loft still isn't empty. It's probably (hopefully, at least) mostly empty boxes, but I know that there is a rug, a candelabra and a suitcase, plus two fans still in there.

Most of my craft items are not packed. They live in two cupboards and I have this vague idea that I will probably transport them within their drawers. The same for the filing cabinet and its contents, even though I know that this is a stupid idea. I hope that HWSNBN will leave the craft items as they are and let me work on them while he drives the van to his mum's house to collect the boxes in her garage. Or that we will be able to leave a whole cabinet exactly as it is and simply wheel it into the van (I have removed the two boxes of oil and palm oil, so what remains is a lot lighter. One drawer is pretty much unspun wool alone).

I found the key to my bike lock yesterday, underneath the sink in a plastic cup. Why on earth didn't I think to look there earlier? Where else could it possibly have been? I am slightly disappointed, as I expected to find two keys together and I did not do so, but one is far better than none at all. I have put the key in the key cupboard (the place where I was initially confident that I would find it), so now all I need to be able to do is to find the key cupboard when we unpack and I will be sorted. I suppose that I could have put it on my key ring, but that would have been cheating.*

HWSNBN has been really weird these past few days. He has been slightly tetchy, but has not had any long-term shoutiness at all. I don't know who this unusual stranger is, but I would like to keep him. It is so refreshing getting in to bed at night after a stressful few hours to find this friendly person, rather than a resentful seethe-monster, there waiting to hug me. If this new patience lasts, I just got me a wonderful new boyfriend! Hooray!

So I have an interesting evening ahead of me. HWSNBN will stay at home and pack more boxes, and I will go to the new house with my parents, Robert and Anne (Serena might also turn up) and clean enthusiastically. I have the shake & vac (but the super-strong stuff) which I shall be using first, and then we wash a lot. If we are fast, we might get home at a suitable sort of time. Whether or not we are fast, the new house should be ready for us to move in to tomorrow. By the end of tomorrow evening, we will be installed!

Then we must clean the old house.


*In other words, I am so tired that this did not occur to me.

Busy weekend

This weekend promises to be uncomfortably busy. I no longer have to go climbing this evening, which frees up several hours to practise the organ and bake a cake for the vicar's leaving do on Sunday, but I shall be out of the house between 10.00 tomorrow and about 15.00 on Sunday. I think that I might invite HWSNBN's mother round for dinner on Sunday, too. That will ease the pressure.

In 'Other News', I am struggling with the hymns for tomorrow's wedding. I really hope they become firmly embedded in my psyche this evening. The problem with them is that I have decided to play the bass line with my feet, which I have not quite mastered yet. If I get it right, it will sound much better with feet than without, but if I get it wrong it will be very embarrassing.

Will update on Sunday. If I get sufficient sleep over the weekend, I may even be able to get it together sufficiently to say something interesting...