Yesterday officially sucked the festering arse of Satan through a snottery hanky.
00:45 -- get home from babysitting Niece Rowan, having spent all night trying to come up with some sort of spanky new title for the American edition of Book 3, without using the word 'Spanky'
01:30 -- drift of into the restless slumber of the damned.
03:00 -- strange noises approaching from somewhere down the duvet. Now, by this I don't mean She Who Must Never Eat Beans Late At Night was providing some sort of tuba-esque concerto, it was the kitten. Feeling affectionate. Anyone who has a cat will know that there are two types of 'happy noise' made by cats. The first is your regular purring: whurrrr, whurrrr, whurrrr... etc. Nice and straightforward. When they get really, really happy though they chirrup. Whurrrrr, chirrup, whurrrrr, whurrrr. The happier they are the more chirruping they do. And Little Miss Kitten Fish was on a chirruping binge, treadling her way up from the foot of the bed so she could come and sookle. This involves squirming around, making her happy racket, and trying to lick the epidermis off my neck. Yes, thank you kitten for being all loveable, but it feel's like you're trying to sandpaper me to death.
03:30 -- tired with feeling affectionate, the cat decides she wants out. Let out cat.
04:30 -- wonder why I'm not getting back to sleep.
05:45 -- sleep.
06:45 -- alarm goes off. Swear.
09:00 -- finish breakfast, go pick up horsebox and buy wood to refurbish spare bedroom. Even though the bathroom looks like a Government Health Warning on the dangers of letting idiots do DIY. The people who had the house before us had a serious screw fetish -- by which I don't meant that they were constantly 'bumping uglies'... I mean they may have been, but I don't know: It'd certainly explain some of the more unusual stains in the carpets -- everything attached to the walls, is attached by dirty big sod-off screws. Huge ones. And the bathroom is no exception. They've gone for a sort of 'done it themselves' wooden panelling effect all the way round the bathroom. It looks a bit like an escaped mental patient helped them. Bloody awful. But I digress -- today's mission is to go get wood* for the spare room.
12:00 -- finally manage to buy, cut to length and stuff wood into horsebox.
12:05 -- drive off as wood place is closing.
12:15 -- realise that I've left a pile of wood at the lumberyard. Not big bits, just stuff I actually bloody need to finish off the bastarding room. Swear. Swear some more. Swear and curse self for being a stupid fucking idiot. Repeat.
12:30 -- arrive home and rush to phone lumberyard to get them to not throw wood out, or feed it to the rabid beavers that roam the plains of Northeast Scotland. It rings and rings and rings and rings. Not so much as an answerphone. Curse people who work at lumberyard, then realise it's not their fault that I'm a moron, so go back to cursing self instead.
12:45 -- eat hurried lunch then dash hell-for-leather to Googling Brother's house. Now GB has a bathroom that can only be described as bloody horrible. Seriously, it's even worse than ours. The whole thing's been done out in the sort of nasty avocado green they used to think was trendy back in the seventies. When people thought it was a good idea to wear flares, and paisley patterned shirts with collars big enough to go hang-gliding with. I can sum the whole room up in three words -- 'Manky, manky, manky'. Which is why I am here, armed with a couple of cold chisels and a four pound lump hammer. For hammering lumps.
14:20 -- discover that battering the hell out of someone's bogey-green bathroom tiles isn't as therapeutic as it should be. The bloody things won't come off in one piece -- the DIY bastards who had the house before GB and SIL Kim have used the stickiest substance known to man (that nasty yellow squish you get when you flatten bluebottles) to put the bloody tiles up. Every swing of the hammer produces flying shards of razon-sharp tile. This means I get to go through their entire collection of sticking plasters in the space of half an hour. Blood everywhere. Do more swearing.
16:50 -- hammer home to shower and change. She Who Must Be Taken Out In Public Every Now And Then and I are off for a pint in Aberdeen with the NortheastPoliceman tonight and we want to grab a bite beforehand.
17:20 -- leap out of car and into shower.
17:50 -- get out of shower and realise there's no way in hell we're going to get into town fast enough to eat anything more substantial than some sort of nasty burger thing, sold by a spotty youth who's probably spat in it.
18:15 -- decide to check email, just to be sure we know where we're meant to be, rather than where I think we're meant to be. Discover that NortheastPoliceman has family emergency and has had to cancel**.
18:16 -- swear.
18:17 -- finish swearing and collapse instead. Then drive into Inverurie to buy nasty steak for tea and bottle of wine instead.
20:00 -- make chilli and mozzarella salad. Discover a new method of inhuman torture by accidentally rubbing a mixture of lemon juice and chilli oil into lacerated hands.
03:00 -- wake to find Grendel T Kitten-Fish 3mm from nose, wanting to be let out.
* Tee hee -- that sounds rude!
** Not his fault and fully understandable. I'd do the same in his shoes. Though how I'd manage to get hold of his shoes, I've no idea. Maybe hang about outside the Inverurie police station pretending to be some sort of secret government shoe inspector.