autumnal

i've had a cold for the last almost two weeks so haven't been running. tonight i went for a walk instead (still sniffling). it was beautifully misty and atmospheric - the nights are drawing in and the air was damp-ish but not actually wet. it smelled of chimney smoke and the sea. the beauty of autumn comes in many guises...

n has started 12 hour shifts at work so i have evenings more or less to myself for awhile. i miss him dreadfully but i am finding the new kitchen *quite* consoling! tonight is brass band practice so that will keep me occupied. aptly, we're doing a version of eric carmen's 'all by myself' (a song i have hated ever since i had a roommate who played it on endless repeat whilst bemoaning the loss of her knuckle-headed hockey-playing boyfriend. i always think - no wonder - going on like that.) however i think tonight the dreaded christmas music will come out. the whole band will groan but secretly i love it. beats the hell out of 'all my myself' at any rate.

bring it on!

roasties

the house smells of roast potatoes. roast potatoes roasting, my friends, in our new kitchen. even though there are still plumbing issues, and the house looks pretty much as you would expect from 5 weeks of builders, and i have a dreadful cold, and there is so much to sort out and clean and put away that it feels like we've just moved house - i can truly say it is well with my soul.

space

ah my poppets - do you know what this is?

this, my darlings, is our living room with no kitchen cabinets leaving only the narrowest of corridors to squeeze through. this, after almost four weeks (4 WEEKS!) feels like insane luxury. this means that eventually, someday, maybe even before i grow old and frail, we will have a kitchen again.

things have been delayed. of course they have. this is britain. the electrician who was supposed to come on monday postponed until wednesday. on wednesday he did come but said he couldn't do the work till the next monday as we needed a whole new set of circuit breakers or something electric-y like that. the next monday he postponed until tuesday and didn't finish until wednesday. just like that - 6 working days lost. 6 no-kitchen-washing-dishes-in-the-bathtub-banging-head-on-stairs-trying-to-avoid-fridge-in-the-entryway-oh-my-god-this-house-has-gone-feral days.

he left this:

which when we came home last night after work was magically transformed into this:

there is much to do but we now live not only in hope but in an actual living room.

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...

august bank holiday

i am sitting very contentedly in our little patio garden. i have a glass of wine, a bowl of olives (the italian ones stuffed with bits of anchovy - salt in salt - yum). i'm waiting for n to come back from a gig this afternoon but i can tell from google maps that he is still at the pub they were playing in. (h says this is technically stalking - but i disagree. it's because n always leaves his phone location on and his home pc logged into google so when i open google maps on his pc it shows me where his phone is. useful is what it is). it does bode ill for dinner tonight though. at this rate it will be dark when he gets home and we were going to have a bbq. not impossible, but possibly unwise.

i've been out too - to our running club's summer bbq. when i walked into the pub the landlord rolled his eyes at me and gestured into the garden with his thumb - "back there, you lot" he said, somewhat despairingly. it was a fun afternoon - they're a good bunch - although pretty much what you'd expect from a running club with the unofficial motto of "a drinking club with a running problem". (note to self - i should really get someone to translate that into latin for us and put it on a tshirt).

tomorrow is a holiday in britain and we are celebrating by going to ikea. ha ha ha ha ha.the kitchen has been agreed and we are meeting an ikea kitchen planner to check through the order and make sure we haven't missed anything. if all is well we will order and the roller coaster of madness will be launched. i have come around to the idea but i am still leery of what is ahead. on the upside - it will be distracting from all the general crap life throws up and that can only be a good thing. as i get older i find myself overtaken at times with general anxiousness about life, the universe, and everything. i am currently combating this through humour, wine, work, meditation, knitting, love, and companionship - but a good dose of distraction won't go amiss.

i see from google maps that n is still in deal, where they were playing. do you think they are being mobbed by fans? "another song" someone must be bellowing. "i would love to, but my wife wants to bbq" is not a phrase likely to be uttered, is it? i hope its that and not that the car has broken down. i'd better come up with a plan b for dinner i suppose. that is a shame though we can always bbq tomorrow. best laid plans and all.

just checked again - they're on the move :). god, maybe this IS stalking.......

kitchens

it’s friday, early evening. i am sitting at the table with two laptops open in front of me, ikea catalogues spread everywhere and a large glass of wine. i am supposed to be working on the ikea kitchen planner (a soul destroying concept if ever there was one). to be honest, i would rather scrub out the toilet with a toothbrush than spend another minute with that bloody kitchen planner. but our landlady (may she blessed with health and happiness now and forever more because she is amazing, sweet as anything, takes wonderful care of us and hasn't raised the rent) has decided that the kitchen needs replacing, and has given us free reign to design it and have our friend t do the work. n is stupidly excited by this. i have resisted from the beginning because i know how awful kitchen renovations are. and in this house! ai yi yi. may god have mercy on our souls (can you tell i’ve been listening to trashy novels set in the era of victorian england? i’m sorry - i can’t resist. at the moment it’s james clavell’s taipei. it is a deliciously trashy adventure story about the founding of hong kong. they are always saying things like “damn your eyes” and such and it’s difficult to shake off. work seems a little benign after an hour of pirates and opium smuggling.)

anyways i digress. having a new kitchen will be wonderful - the old one is awful - there is no doubt about that. i do not believe it was designed with anything other than a rudimentary knowledge of what happens in kitchens and as such it is a really frustrating place to cook. we have the chance to improve it but with great power comes great responsibility. last week we had to advance directly into the jaws of hell ikea itself. on a sunday. those are hours of your life you are never getting back. interestingly, i have never seen so many pregnant women in one place in my life. ikea is obviously where the modern british women nests. i, however, clearly have no nesting inclination whatsoever and hated the entire experience. how many choice of cupboard doors do you need anyways????? who cares if your counters are white or grey? how can a tile be "trendy"???? i am not cut out for this.

our builder comes back on the 18th and we need to have decided what we want by then, which means planning it out on the ikea kitchen planner software. which sounds easy, even fun. i can assure you it is neither. i can only assume the purpose is to soften you up so by the time you are sitting on your living room floor in tears, surrounded by 200 small boxes of flatpacked cabinets, trying to find the right set of screws for the pttttttbh cabinet or whatever the hell it's called, and failing even at that - you will be too demoralised to go back to them and say this is utter and complete nonsense - stop trying to open up these portals into hell and sell furniture like normal companies.

yep. i'm looking forward to this. oh yeah.

the third night

it's the third night back in the uk from our canada trip and jet lag has once again come to bite my arse. it's always the third night. n is happily snoring away - and i was tired - sleepy even - i put up my book and turned out the light and....

45 minutes later i got up. maybe i should just make myself lie there but i start feeling antsy. tired and antsy and horribly horribly awake. i sleep the first two nights and i always think maybe this time it will be ok - but no. bastard jet lag just hangs out till you've relaxed your guard and then whammo.

oh well. i should really be used to this. and is it so bad, really? so i'm awake. i have some very good books to read, i have a nice glass of wine. maybe it's because i know i have to go to work tomorrow (i worked from home today) but i can go in late - it will be fine. i am going to try to just go with it. be one with the lag. perspectives on jet lag.

sure.

(groan)