Apparently blog posts are much more popular if they start with "X Things To Do When" or "How To" or "Why I". I'm holding the latter two in reserve for when things get really dire. Today I spent four hours playing with mediocre children's toys in public in the name of earning money and raising money for charity. Then I cycled a little bit and was bought a Fab. All fairly tiring. I self-medicated with folk music and the last of the bottle of port.
I was bought a Fab as a strange form of celebration. My friend, previous flatmate and soon-to-be-Landlord bought a house. Moving date is in 5 day time. 5 days!
A little context for you; right now I'm house sitting for some friends who are jammy enough to be having a very long holiday in Australia right now. I'm left behind in lovely ol' Scotland with a nice big house, garden, fish and a dog to look after. It's a handful. It is also a most welcome rent break.
The vast majority of my belongings are boxed up and scattered (carefully) around the city and shire - distributed amongst friends of mine who meet to dual criteria of having free space and gullibility. I think I can count 5 places. I'm living out of a suitcase of clothes which I am rapidly growing tired of wearing. They're lovely clothes, I'm not knocking them. I'm sure there are people in the world who would be very happy to call my capsule wardrobe their own. Anyway.
In 5 days (I may have mentioned this, I'm a little excited) Ex-Flatmate will become Landlord and I will become Tennant as we both move in to yet another residence. And there are some things I am looking forward to doing really rather a lot. For your reading pleasure:
- Hire a van, and play at being Van Men. I'm female, but I can still play. The rules are rather fluid but I think points are achieved by the following. 1) Carrying big things, wearing a facial expression that says "this is very heavy but I'm man enough to handle it" even if the big box is full of feathers or packing peanuts, for example. 2) Carrying multiple things, precariously balanced. Extra points for restricting your own vision even if you didn't need to. 3) Parking on double-yellows. Wearing painting jeans, even if you plan to do no painting at all. 4) Driving with the windows open, with an elbow on the edge. 5) Eating Mars bars.
- Re-assembling flat-pack. This is a thing I rather enjoy, possibly because it's a thing that Men ought to do, and women ought to let the men do, but I can do fairly well. Another ex-flat mate is currently in a pickle because I assembled her furniture for her when it arrived and dis-assembled it all years later before the move, and now she has all the bits in her new flat but doesn't know how to turn them back in to night-tables and drawers and stuff. I have promised to exchange me flat-pack-building services for pizza, but only if there is dip. Putting up my own curtains comes in here too. I'll feel like I live somewhere once I've got my own bed and my own furniture and my own curtains up.
- Pictures. Photographs of my friends, to prove to other people that I am liked and capable of social contact. Pictures of me doing cool stuff, to prove to myself that I am young and active and not yet past-it. Pictures I have drawn, just to fill space. And then there's the inevitable wall of slightly incongruous cross-stitch that has to be hung up, because cross stitch is the most time-consuming, expensive way to recreate a very pixelated version of someone else's artwork, and therefore must be appreciated at all costs.
- Unpacking my clothes; rediscovering things I had forgotten, finding them homes in the newly-assembled furniture, wearing my biggest scruffiest university hoodies. These are things that a previous flatmate once banned me from wearing in public. Rightly so, but they are so, so snuggly.
- Painting. My soon-to-be room is blue and green and has a Thomas The Tank Engine border. It will get painted this colour. For the sole reason that it's called Mushroom, and I quite like mushrooms.
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| Tasty, huh? |
- Give back to dog and get an extra half hour in bed in the morning. Lovely dog, far too hard to tire out for my liking. The exercise is probably doing me good, but I much prefer the idea of more available sleeping time.
- Set up the wireless network. Give it a silly name. Connecting to BTHomeHub27735987324 is just so boring. Witty suggestions on a postcard.
And finally...
- Throw a house-warming party! (Please, dear Landlord?!) Invite all your friends round. Hope they bring tasty things. Give the Grand Tour lots of times. Drink nice things, eat nice things. Barbecue, just to "housewarm" the garden. Guests of honour will be all the poor sods who've stored my stuff and helped me shift it. Thankyou you lot!
Ten things, eight things. Pah, you didn't even count em.
