I have often thought, in my life, how very nice it would be if things happened in a discrete fashion, so that you could enjoy them or endure them one at a time. Maybe people with more organised lives do this. It certainly couldn’t hurt.
Then there are folks who complain about their lives being humdrum. The old routine and all that. I have written previously of how very treasurable I find boredom to be because, round here, it is a rare commodity.
I would have liked, for example, to have stopped feeling sick before I had quite so much work to do. I am, however, in the process of discovering how to manage my condition. The condition is that five exploratory keyhole incisions have left my intestines narrowed and bound up with scar tissue, which is what has caused the last eighteen months of surprise hospital admissions. Because of the number of constricted passages, quantities of fibre cause a blockage. Now I know this and if I am not to spend the rest of my life on little bowls of gruel like some character out of Dickens, experimentation is necessary. What I found out two days ago is that a veggie burger in a bun and a few fries is too much. Now I recognise the problem I know the solution, which is to not eat for a couple of days but drink plenty in little sips, which is what they did every time I turned up in hospital. Whilst this is happening I feel horribly sick and only want to sleep. I have a feeling the process of discovery will be slimming. I wonder how many points you score at Weightwatchers for intestinal blockage?
Then there are plumbers. Central heating, rather than internal. The builder, beginning and being partly resident for six months, needs to knock down the outside wall which currently accommodates the boiler for the heating. He suggested, therefore, that the best place for the boiler would be in the downstairs toilet. I called the plumber in, mostly to express my opinion that situating a boiler in a downstairs toilet is an ideal way to ensure that spanners get dropped down the toilet fairly frequently. The plumber agreed and is coming on Wednesday to install a thing called a combi boiler in the airing cupboard. I suggested to the OH that the airing cupboard, thick with the dirt of ages, would benefit from a coat of paint, so that the boiler was not installed over old filth. Not only did he agree, he did it, which as I have been suffering from jammed burger, was a welcome intervention.
Simultaneously. in the way of things round here, the neighbours at the bottom of the garden had their massive fir tree cut down. The massive fir tree has been a difficulty all the time we have lived here. It cast its canopy over my garden. After many years of trying to grow stuff in the flower bed beneath and failing miserably because shed pine needles make the ground acid, I gave up and concreted that end of the garden, putting a little garden chair store in the corner, edging the rest in a shape with black paving edges, burying drains, carving JL 2007 on top and then filling the hole with very white gravel and a nice big stone. Well, of course, the pine needles continued to fall, so my raked gravel zen garden gradually turned into a very stony flower bed that for some years I cleared until I became carer for my demented mother and no longer had time. Now the tree has gone, which is an immense relief because I was always expecting it to fall on my writing shed and squash me flat, I have emptied the garden of the gravel, which I have tossed through the garden sieve to separate the needles from the stones and then retired to bed with my metal shoulder and the other frozen one on fire, which was all right because I was taking my jammed intestines there anyway.
Today I shall pressure wash my concrete bed, wash the stones in the wheelbarrow and then, with that area cleared, I can start emptying the bit under the boiler and the garage.
I vaguely recall, long ago, when I was a young teacher, wondering whether I should go to work with a cold, or flu. I did go with flu, the first Christmas I was there and lay groaning on the chairs in the staff room.
What a wimp I was! I had fully working intestines at the time, most of my internal organs, wasn’t married to an alcoholic, had never cared for anyone insane at my own expense and, in short, had barely lived.
It’s amazing what you can do if you try. Right now I am going to try pressure washing a zen garden.
Meditatively, obviously.
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Please do not buy anything in the shop, yet still. I was going to get the help of the S&H to mend the link, so I know if you have bought something, which I still do not know, but I needed his assistance with another computer matter. This undertaking occupied a whole evening with the OH on my computer and the S&H remotely in my computer from Wales and they sorted it out between them. What they sorted I may be able to tell you next week. Meanwhile that was enough unpaid work for a week from the S&H who will always do computery things for his old mum. Whilst this does make up, in part, for all the worry during the years that he was trying to run a business without actually getting out of bed, I nevertheless do not like to trespass on his good nature, willingness and cheerful disposition. This being part of my ongoing efforts never to morph into my mother, who took any sort of willingness, turned it inside out and wore it as a hat, with a grievance.
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