In with the new

It is a glorious day today. When I rule the world (one day, it'll happen, you just watch) Annual Leave will be well, the same old Annual Leave, but you'll also get a handful of Sunshine Days. I'm trademarking that. Maybe about 3 of them? Who knows, I haven't really thought this through. But here's the idea. You get three days that you don't get to allocate ahead of time. They're on top of your normal holiday allocation, because I am a nice, happy, benevolent Dictator. These are days when you get up, walk to work (or cycle to work, because I'm in charge here and I have made the world a happy place where traffic jams don't happen), but then it's so nice you want to put on your hiking boots and some uphill clothes* and just keep walking.

This was my work, today. Not bad, eh?

So you just phone in.

You: "Hi Boss, it's me. Y'know it's so nice out here, I think I'm gonna have today as a Sunshine Day."
Boss: "Ok."

Just think of the mushy intangible wooshy-wooshy societal benefits. If I climbed 3 more hills a year I'd be ever so fractionally fitter and happier. Extrapolate that to the whole population and there's a monetary value in it. We'd all wear through our walking boots franctionally faster and outdoorsy shops might sell an extra pair of boots or two a year. Win win, right?

Hello, welcome to this weeks musings. That was tangent #1, before we even got started.

This week I have half a kitchen. Going to give you a run-down of the last-know state of play w.r.t the kitchen.

• The contents of the kitchen-that-was are mostly in the spare room. Behind a substantial barrier of worktops and miscellaneous kitchen components. Just chillin' out with most of the camping crap. 
• The soon-to-be fixtures and fittings of the new kitchen are mostly in the front room, forming yet another substantial barrier, this time between me and my fridge. 
• The contents of the hallway (yes, our hallway has contents - it's a 2(ish) bedroomed flat and we have at least a 3-bed house's amount of stuff) are on my bed, with a giant purple beanbag that I once thought was a good idea. 
• A few other soon-to-be-kitchen bits are also on my bed. 
• L and I spent our weekend scraping off the old paper, sticking up new lining paper and painting the whole caboodle green. 
• There are 14 individual sockets in that room and I've papered and painted around all of them. 
• None of the right angles actually are, and all of the walls are bigger at the top than the bottom. 
• The kitchen itself is a now green empty-ish shell currently inhabited by some lovely and highly competent joiners, who are very rapidly filling it back up again.
• The radio is tuned to Radio 1 for the first and possibly last time ever. 
• We've moved out! While carnage ensues at home we've taken over a holidaying friend's house. This has proven to be an inspired move. 

Ok, there are pictures. 

These are L's decorating dungarees. Aren't they cute!

L went off to the theatre and I went home and cracked out the green. It's so green!

The rest of these are the current state of play now that the Professionals have moved in.

See that? That is possibly the best bit. That little white box - it's for putting dirty dishes in! Yippee!

Ok, so this turned out fuzzy, but I'm going to leave it in so you can see where our funky new cooker is going.

We're particularly excited about the bendy corners. 

This is the sink that I won't have to do all of the washing up in!

This time next week we'll have a finished kitchen, more or less. Then we'll fill it up again and do a bunch of before and after pictures. With a real camera, not the crappy one on my phone.

This time next week we'll also have had many tent-pitching adventures for me to tell you about. No rest for, well, me.

Till then!


*Uphill clothes are clothes you wear to walk up hills in, according to L. God knows what you wear to get back down them.