kitchen part eleventy billion

are you as sick of this as i am? I suppose i haven't posted that much about it - but it does seem endless at the moment. we have kitchen in every room of the house except the kitchen:

the english weather is not exactly cooperating with our eating outside strategy:

and i feel quite eeyorish because i have a terrible terrible hangover today. which is bad on many levels not least that i am 42 years old and really ought to know better. i do know better. i ran the faversham 10k race again yesterday morning and when it was finished, instead of stretching or eating a good meal, i wolfed down rice cakes and cheese and headed to the pub where i proceeded to get, well, frankly, pissed as a newt (a very squiffy happy newt) with the running club. i deserve how i feel today and i will never do this again but oh - i am being punished, i promise you. i did knock almost 5 minutes off of my time from last year though!

meanwhile i may never drink again (see? this is a serious hangover). in all serious i think i may have a drinking break. my body has been yelling at me all day and i think i'd better listen.

in kitchen news (arghhhhhhhhh!) the electrician who was supposed to come today has postponed until wednesday; the floor goes down tomorrow; and terry has painted the walls a lurid green that he swears is the swatch i picked but - well - we'll see. i am in no condition to consider it today.

three down, still married

before we started all this madness, i read a blog by a woman who had done her kitchen. she said she made cabinets for eight hours after work one day. eight hours. i can now tell you with absolute authority - she must have been barking mad. or at least for sure by the end. it is knackering. boring and knackering and worst of all does not combine well with wine. we have only managed one an evening, and tonight the final drawer was only completed with a bit of self bribery:

tomorrow i have a day off and i get to do this all day! unfortunately i am referring to the cabinets, not the wine. when i get bored of that i can start packing up the kitchen. deep, deep joy.

and so it begins

another hop festival...

it's sunday night and the hop festival is over for another year, heralding the imminent advance of autumn and the roller-coaster into christmas and beyond. hard to believe.

it's been a great weekend. our friend s stayed - we were out on the town on friday, and most of yesterday too. the weather has been great and we've drunk rather a lot of very very good beer and heard some truely fantastic music. this morning we popped up to whitstable to visit some more mutual friends of both of us, and, after breakfast, sat on the beach all together and watched kite surfers swirling and leaping in the waves. back in faversham, i went for a run and s biked with me, then we headed off into town again as the brass band was playing. n had a proper gig (in folkestone! on hop festival weekend! madness!!) so it's just been s and i and we've had a lovely afternoon. she's off back to the big smoke now and i am flopped on the sofa with a glass of cold wine and a vague sense that i probably ought to be tidying up or making lunch for tomorrow or something but - well, it will wait.

it feels like liminal space this evening - the pause - the moment before all the action takes off again and we either leap or are dragged into the maelstrom. the ikea delivery is tuesday whereupon the house becomes a kitchen factory. the actual ripping out will commence next monday. a lot needs to happen before that!! but one thing at a time. my biggest concern now is what we find when we start ripping out, but i can't do much about that so we'll just have to see what happens. it is what it is. (it's funny - a few years ago, at work, when we were going crazy trying to get the exec to make decisions on time and not delay the construction of the new building, they kept saying "we are where we are" and it was SO infuriating. but in a lot of north american books and tv shows they say "it is what it is". there's a real difference between those two phrases even though they sound like they are the same. it's like one is more temporal, more fluid. i wonder if it's a cultural thing. i have probably overthought this.)

anyways.

this evening, the house is calm. there are no stacks of boxes and half-built cabinets. it is still summer (despite the encroaching darkness of the evenings). i am going to bask in this as i have a feeling in my bones it may be sometime until it returns...