Monday 25 May 2009

contentment

it's a bank holiday weekend here in the uk (not that this makes much difference to me, unemployed sloth that i am!). the town rugby club always has bands and a beer tent out in the recreation ground next to our house on this weekend. the last two years it has been wet and cold. this weekend has been beautiful, but the weather gods must be down on rugby as the afternoon has ended in thunder-showers of biblical proportions.

we checked out a bit of the music, but mostly were just enjoying hanging out, reading the accumulated papers that i didn't get around to over the weekend, and wallowing in the contentment of a fun weekend with lots of food and wine, old friends and new friends, bbq's and sunshine. i can't remember the last time i was this relaxed.

*happy sigh*

now you must excuse me, i have a packed agenda this evening of sipping wine, picking at the roast chicken carcass, and, if we can be bothered, starting season 5 of the wire.

btw, humphrey really did run through the screen door the day after we put it up. the mesh held, but he broke all three hinges off. we managed to repair it, and it is still hanging, but dog-destruction remains a problem. we have temporarily solved this by putting a small free-standing gate on whichever side of the door humphrey is, but this turned out to be such a pain on saturday's bbq that we ended up propping open the screen door; an open-door policy, if you will, for bugs. we hope that perhaps humph will learn with time but i fear it may be yet another instance of humphrey successfully training his humans.

Wednesday 20 May 2009

screen door!!!!!!!


people - behold - in all its glory, the marvel of a screen door. now i know the canadians among you will be bemused, possibly befuddled by this, but back here in the old country this is cutting edge. spain and italy have screens, so it seems implausible that there is some european moratorium on the use of mesh screening in window and door applications, yet they consistently elude us in the uk. when we have previously enquired about the possibilities of their installation, we are considered mad, and quite possibly dangerous. (see poppy seeds, below. btw - i have since discovered that what the uk calls blue poppy seeds, canadians call black poppy seeds - they are in fact the same thing. thank you geo for clearing that one up.)

we have sighed, and added lack of screenage to our growing list of british eccentricities, joining their brethren of separate hot and cold taps with no mixer tap and the complete absence of plain cheerios (honey nut? check. 4 grain? check. plain? what are you - some kind of freak??? *sigh*)

but the buggies, they continued to fly into our house by their multitudes. fruit flies - arch enemy of the home brewer. something had to be done. i concluded that if i had to buy the damn door in italy and carry it back i would, so long as there was a screen door by summer. as i was hunting online for said door (i'm more of a carry-on girl myself), i found a site that sold screen door kits.

the kit arrived, and it was proper. way too proper for n and i to unleash our grubby mitts all over it. i left strict instructions for n and our friend j, who is diy-inclined, to make the door up while i was gallivanting in canada for several weeks. sadly, screen door construction paled in the light of an empty house, a full bottle of whiskey, and axies and allies. i can't complain, i would have done the same thing.

so today, n and i, inept as we are at anything requiring manual dexterity, tools, measuring, etc etc etc - we girded our loins, we read and re-read, we measured and re-measured (and re-re-measured) and we tackled the kit.

and it went quite well actually.

now for the windows...