Michael Harling's Blog, page 19

The Renovation Resolution

When we last visited the ongoing renovation saga, we were waiting for an electrician to visit. This visit was promised by the electrician who had fixed the blown fuse that had defused our Thanksgiving Dinner, and who had been appalled by the state of the electrics. This had happened before, and no promised visit had occurred, so my wife and I set out to find suitable tiles for the half-finished kitchen.

This is what we have been living with since NovemberWe brought the tiles home and I contact...

WTF Primer

For the sake of my friends and family in the US who might be wondering WTF is going on over here (I mean, what are we voting on, and why, and what’s at stake?), I thought I’d post a primer on WTF is happening, and how we got here.
In case you haven’t been paying attention over the past two years:
David Cameron wanted to prove he had a bigger dick than Boris Johnson (he doesn’t) so he called a Referendum, in which the people of Great Britain were asked if they wanted to stay in the EU or leave....

Lurching Forward

Well, at least we don’t have to wait to see if 2019 turns out to be the shit-storm that 2018 was because the shit-storm has followed us into the new year.


Yeah, I'm looking at you, shit-storm makers!Enjoy the ride!

For me, personally, it's not so bad.
I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, but last year I did propose to make 2018 the year I learned to play the piano. How did I do? Well, I won’t be playing Carnegie Hall any time soon, but I do know my way around a keyboard, and if I have a music sc...

Making Space

One of the best outcomes of the recent kitchen renovation was that it enabled us to get a clothes dryer, even though there was no room for a clothes dryer in our kitchen. None at all. Still, we managed to create some.
That is the enduring challenge of living in a tiny flat: creating space. We’ve become proficient at it, but by now we’ve pretty much conjured up all that is possible, so I was skeptical about generating a dryer-sized hole in a kitchen that obviously had no room for one. I was, ho...

Yes Virginia

Ah, the Christmas season! It must be time to trot out my “Brush With Greatness” story. But first, a little historical context.
If you were to buttonhole a random Brit and ask, “Do you know who Alice Liddell is?” They would most likely look stealthily around to see if there was a cop, or at least a PCSO, in the immediate area, but once they understood that you weren’t a serial killer or, worse, a Chugger, they might smile nervously and tell you they had no idea what you were talking about. If,...

Customer Service UK Style

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll know that, this past week, we had some renovations done to the kitchen that resulted in the power going out. It eventually came back on. Here’s how that happened:
Our flat was apparently wired during the Victorian Era and not upgraded since, so the Kitchen Guy was not surprised when the fuse blew. Neither was I. Some months ago, all the lights in the flat went out, so I called the management company responsible for the flat (let’s call them Leaders) and...

Tales of Renovation

We all have a renovation horror story. Here’s mine:
The Dream
It started because I got tired of putting my hand down on grit every time I touched the kitchen counters.
This wasn’t because we’re slobs; it was the fault of the counter itself, which came in the popular grey/white/black pattern I like to call Crumb Camouflage. Anything falling on that counter was immediately invisible and, therefore, not cleaned away. The solution, most people might suppose, would involve cleaning the counters more...

The Incredible Shrinking Thanksgiving

I don’t generally do a big Thanksgiving dinner here. It’s sorta self-defeating to cook a turkey with all the trimmings, then sit and eat it by myself while my wife has a bean loaf with salad. This year, however, I had big plans.
We invited some friends over for dinner on the Saturday after Thanksgiving to have a full, traditional Thanksgiving Day dinner. It had to be the weekend because, you know, some people work. (On the real Thanksgiving, I don’t think we had anything for dinner because we...

Being Flexible

For the past few weeks, I’ve been flirting with the notion of vegetarianism. The reasons for this are varied, strangely arbitrary and have nothing to do with animal rights (when did they write a Constitution?), the environment, health, religion or any other misplaced conviction. In fact, the reasons are so random, insignificant and seemingly unrelated that even I don’t know how they combined to cause such a radical (for me) decision. I suppose it didn’t hurt that I have lived with vegetarians...

Of Socks Logos and Self-assurance

I bought socks today. Not an earth-shattering opening, I know. However, as usual, my quest did not go according to plan.
The thing is, I don’t buy socks in Britain very often. I tend to buy them in America, where I can buy a bale of them at a reasonable price—plain, thick, comfy, bog-standard socks, and lots of them. The last time I needed to do this was a few years ago. I brought them home, put them in my sock rotation and forgot about socks for several blissful years.
Unbeknownst to me, there...