Blah erg (revisited)

 

Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that the day did not get off to a good start.  The ME had come back yesterday and I'd much rather have a warm furry orange cat sitting on my head and getting in my eyes and making my skull vibrate with his purring than the ME—which also gets in my eyes and makes my skull vibrate but not nearly so amiably.  I slept something like thirteen and a half hours last night and still could hardly get out of bed this (late) morning.  I was more or less dressed** and wandering around the cottage trying to remember what the hoover looked like because I was due to have handbellers tonight when the phone rang and it was Peter to say that the Mystery Plumber had rematerialised out of the deeps of the void where he's been hiding the last month or so and that when he'd finished with the mystic incantations at the mews he'd come on down to me.  An hour plus, said Peter (said the Mystery Plumber).  I'd better get hellhounds out now, I said, looking over my shoulder in case the hoover was sneaking up on me.  (It wasn't.)

            My experience of the Mystery Plumber's sense of the passage of time ("Oh, yeah, I'll get back to you by the end of the week") made me just the faintest bit wary of his definition of an hour, plus or unplus, so hellhounds and I sprinted out, to the extent that I could find a sprint to strap on, like a rocket launcher in a cartoon, and were back in about thirty-five minutes.  . . . He's on his way, said Peter.

            I have an overflow control something that isn't working with the result that it overflows all the time.  With the result that that entire wall of the house is getting damp and the paint is starting to bubble off the wall by the kitchen door (joy).   So first we went up into the attic and moved the boxes of giftwrap, ribbons, and the box of boxes suitable for putting gifts in to wrap, my old riding gear, a Rather Large Pile of knapsacks and totebags***, a few pairs of All Stars†, and half of a very, very, very long rack of hanging clothes.††  He could then get at the large dome-like plumbing-related object in question.  Whereupon he ascertained . . .

            I have no idea what he ascertained and I don't care.  What I do know is that he had to flounder around in the linen cupboard††† and then take everything out of the cupboard under the kitchen sink‡ . . . so that he could discover that he couldn't do what he was there to do.  Which is stop the overflow overflowing.  Because the carpenter-shaped body‡‡ responsible for my cupboard under the sink managed to build the thing so that a standard human arm cannot get at the stopcock that shuts off the water,‡‡‡ and the Mystery Plumber can't do anything unless he can turn off the water first.

            At this point, more or less, he decided to leave.  I get to ring up Southern Water and tell them that they have to come make their exterior stopcock work, and then find a carpenter with a better practical grasp of human anatomy to do something about access to the inner one.§  And then Mystery Plumber has to rematerialise and do it all over again (although I think we get to leave out the groping in the linen cupboard next time).§§

            Some time during the foregoing poor Tilda arrived.  GO AWAY!  I'M HAVING A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN INVOLVING PLUMBING!

            Tilda having run away and Mystery Plumber having left, I sat down in the middle of the floor and howled.§§§  And then I turned my computer on and sent an email that I was cancelling handbells this evening.

            . . . But don't be silly.  Of course I wasn't going to get away with this.  CANCEL HANDBELLS?  Women have died for less.  Niall answered by return electron that we could have handbells at his house.  So I snivelled for a few minutes and acquiesced to the inevitable. 

            I wasn't at all sure I had any functioning brain for handbells, let alone tower ringing at Crabbiton afterward, which had been Tilda's and my original plan, but thanks to Tilda's presence, which is to say we spent a certain amount of time breaking . . . I mean, introducing Tilda to handbells,# I was not too taxed.   Even with the ME digging its claws into my scalp I can ring plain hunt for a beginner.  And handbells had a curiously rejuvenating## effect so Niall, Tilda and I did go on to ring at Crabbiton.  Where Wild Robert took one look at us, grinned all over his face in the patented Wild Robert manner, and had us ringing something called Union which Tilda and I had never heard of and is like Stedman only different.  It is, theoretically, easier than Stedman, except that the evil Stedman single—the call misnomered a coathanger, it looks nothing like a coathanger###—is even longer as a Union bob which gives you more time to be confused in.  Wild Robert at least had a good time.

            And then Tilda and I came back to the mews and ate roast pheasant with Peter.+  My pheasant, of course, had shot in it.  CRUNCH.  Blah.  Ow.  And now I have to go home to the cottage and face . . . 

* * *

* The claws in the scalp sensation is somewhat similar but since the ME doesn't slip off it's just doing it for meanness.  

** Just in time to take delivery on . . . um . . . two more knitting books.  I have no idea where they came from.  I'm sure I didn't order seven.  The titles look kind of familiar though . . . they must have come to me in a dream or something . . . the same dream in which I sleepwalked to my computer, sleepextracted my credit card and sleepordered them.  Pity the credit card was awake.  

*** Which is of course now shrinking due to the demands of keeping one's individual knitting projects orderly. 

† The bulk of them are on their very own dedicated All Stars shelves.  No, really.  All 400,000,056 of them.  

†† As I keep saying, I'm nearly sixty years old and I never throw anything out.  Except that's not true.  I throw lots of stuff out.  I even like throwing stuff out.  I just keep acquiring it.^  And the truth is furthermore that I like clutter.  I like clutter.  It's not the mere sad result of an inability to throw enough stuff out.  It's a sort of extreme nest-building. 

^ I wonder if hypnosis or CBT would work for sleepordering? 

††† The very full linen cupboard.   One of the things I like is bedlinen.  

‡ AAAAAAUGH  

‡‡ Well, one assumes.  Whoever he/she/it was perhaps is from some other, longer-armed area of the plumber/electrician/carpenter/builder void.  

‡‡‡ Sometimes I wonder about my predecessor.  There are other anomalies.  Like the drawer that threw its contents on the floor every time you opened it.  Or the window that doesn't fit in its frame and has had an interesting little sub-frame rather ineptly built to stop it falling out.  

§ Atlas can do this however.  Yaay.  Atlas, my hero.  He also fixed the drawer.  I still have to replace the damn window. 

§§ The sharp-witted among you will have understood with lightning-like acumen that this means taking everything out of the cupboard under the kitchen sink at least twice more.  Once for Atlas to cut a bigger hole, and once for Mystery Plumber to defeat the overflow monster. 

§§§ Hellhounds enjoyed this very much.  Ooh, can that nice man come back again soon? they say. 

# And she admitted afterward that she found them unexpectedly . . . interesting.  Mwa hahahahaha.  This from the woman who had originally declared she could see no purpose in handbells whatsoever.  

## No, no!  I didn't say that! 

### The line written on a page is supposed to be vaguely coathanger shaped.  It isn't. 

 + Tomorrow I may tell you how I taught Tilda to knit. . . .