Updated blogroll

I JUST updated my blogroll and as always I know there are others I have meant to include but which have slipped off my radar this morning. But I will include them again.

Cheekiness will not be tolerated so there

I HAVE never been one for cheekiness at all and while the Young Wan is 15 going on 16 years old it is not something I have allowed in herself.

In our house growing up we never did the 'I hate you' shouting at our parents, we wouldn't dare. Though I do remember my brother telling our Dad to feck off once when he was feeling brave and standing at the top of the stairs as my Dad stood at the bottom with his leg in plaster up to his thigh. Trouble was as this was definitely a no-no in our house, the stairs and my Dad's broken leg didn't stop him going up after my brother who made his escape by jumping out his bedroom window onto the coal shed below.

So it has followed in my household, not the leg in plaster and stomping up the stairs bit, but in the back cheek and general cheekiness not being stood for. I hate seeing cheeky kids and there are some cheeky young brats out there, what on earth will they be like as teenagers? I don't mean stifling humour, far from it, but the parents who seem oblivious to disrespect for want of a better word.

Like the many phases kids go through this is an ongoing project. Most phases kids go through are just that phases and something that passes. However cheekiness is an ongoing phase that needs to be constantly checked. The Young Wan isn't cheeky or should that read isn't allowed to be and it is definitely something that is ongoing, the checking I mean.

Take this weekend for example, she was full of it, lots of backchat, insolent comments as well as doing the 'if I ask enough times the answer will be yes, eventually'. Only it didn't work out like that all she managed to do was massively p*ss me off.

At one stage yesterday she grabbed a pair of trousers from the new house saying she needed them for drama. When I got in tonight she was looking all dolled up and I realised in the whole painting and decorating work in the new house I missed something so I asked her tonight 'why did you need those trousers for drama?.

I am sure she regretted her answer as soon as it came out of her cheeky mouth.

*Big Sigh Huff and Puff* 'I didn't say drama I said I was going to the DCU open day' with more attitude than I will stand for. No harm to her but I will not be spoken to by my daughter like I came down in the last shower and haven't a clue. Unfortunately for herself Nanny was also here and also knew she said drama. So she not only had me giving out about the attitude she also had her Nanny giving out.

But all this made the alarm bells ring for me and I have just checked on the internet (God bless it) and the DCU open day was actually last week. Turns out despite being grounded she had an afternoon (well a half an hour after school) with the boyfriend. Ha thats the last time that happens. Honestly at times I could throttle her. But if she wants to be picked up after school by her Nanny this is the way to go.

We will be having more words tomorrow, well I will and she will listen. Ha she probably won't but that hasn't stopped me yet ;)

Some photographs

BETWEEN working, painting and moving I have hadn't time to really blog or take photographs, well except for these three and photographs of the ongoing coverage of the work on the new place (for a future ta da post). So just to show I haven't dropped off the blogosphere here are some pics with an overriding rain theme!

RM column November 9th - Big Mother is Watching

RM column November 9th - Big Mother is Watching

Imagine being able to log onto your computer at any time and being able to pin point the exact location of your child? While this type of technology is something we have heard of before using mobile phones; apparently in the States (I won’t say where else?) parents are doing just that.

Only they are not using mobile phones, these global positioning systems (GPS) are being sold by a company and are sewn inconspicuously into the lining of a jacket. Costing about $500 initially and an additional $20 a month, the jackets enable parents to track the child all day long.

Sounds fair enough if you are into that kind of thing. Luckily most times I don’t really worry about where the Young Wan is, she is not out and about with pals in the evening and most weekends are spent with me.

However there is a little part of me thinking that it could be useful when she runs to the supermarket for dinner and takes an age. I have my suspicious that she dawdles and this little device could prove me right.

Course I could just follow her down if I was really suspicious or indeed I could just run to the shops myself. So I can’t see a use for it for me, if indeed I even wanted to track my daughter down like a criminal.

But in fairness I can understand why some parents would resort to these tactics and I certainly would not judge them for doing so.

What if your child is having a rebellious phase where they are running amuck and you are reaching the end of your tether. With the jacket at least you can know where they are and take things from there.

The system also has a geofencing service where parents are notified if the child crosses beyond a circumscribed area.

All this certainly won’t solve the problems between the teenagers and their parents but you will know where they are.

Course that is providing they actually like the jacket, will wear it and won’t leave it behind them in school or a pal’s house! Getting a teenager to wear a coat you have picked out is not as easy as it might appear. The amount of clothes I think the Young Wan will like are quite often met with complete and utter distain and a look that tells me she thinks I haven’t a clue.

Never mind the fact that unless something is nailed to herself she is quite likely to lose it. By October the Young Wan was already on her second school coat. All the kids in the school have to wear the same coat. Robbed coats and mistakenly taken coats are part and parcel of school life, or at least so it seems for the Young Wan.

Can you imagine the readings the GPS would give you there? The robbed/mistakenly taken coat could be on a bus to town and you are watching this wondering why on earth your teenager is going into town, when they told you they are heading straight home. Only it is not your teenager it is another child.

I can appreciate the fear that parents feel and the need to protect our children I just don’t know if this is the way to do it. What do you think?

RM column November 2nd - On packing rubbish

RM column November 2nd - On packing rubbish

The home move is still ongoing, I tell you it is not easy to do while working and not certainly not easy to sort through some 12 years of hoarding.

Some people are hoarders and some aren’t, we are the former unfortunately for us with regard to the move.

While a lot of stuff has been packed and moved to the new place, the flat doesn’t look like much has been moved at all. So far the Young Wan’s room is kinda moved completely, bar clothes she needs, her bed and some furniture.

And would you believe the room still manages to look like a complete and utter tip, well I would.
So while the packing is an ongoing thing and working full-time means little is done until the weekend – the fact that I don’t drive means even more delays as we wait for obliging friends with transport to help shift stuff.

At the same time we are painting the new place, when I say we, I actually mean mostly me, the Young Wan in terms of overall painting is more of a hindrance than a help. Maybe that is unfair because she was instrumental in providing the finishing touches to the bedrooms.

We would both start with the rollers, while I apply the paint quickly and with as minimal splashage as I can, herself is swooshing paint all over the place, she is covered, I am covered and anything within a particular radius is covered.

On top of that there is a lot of flaffing about; by the time the Young Wan is ready to begin to paint I have nearly the wall rollered.
There is absolutely no point in trying to hurry her along, but we discovered that one thing she is great at doing is going along after me and touching up the areas I can’t reach with the brush. So we are both happy and working away together in harmony and that suits me fine.
The packing is another matter.

Where I am using this move to clear away the clutter and hoarding I talked about earlier, it appears the Young Wan has been doing the lazy man’s burden method of packing.
Despite being told to cull, hard, I have found bags with dubious things in them, such as rubbish, stuff like single socks that I know have been single for some time or bits and pieces of paper.
So not only has some rubbish been packed, stuff that should have been thrown out, but it has been moved to the new house despite the fact that I am trying to make the new house a new start with no clutter.

And now it will have to be unpacked and then thrown out.

She has been warned though that if I find anything like that I will go spare, I will throw a wobbly, so her best bet is NOT to do that with any future packing.

I wouldn’t mind but I have explained really simply what we need to do and the best way to do it not to mention why they are being done that way. Herself has generally ignored those instructions, done it her way and in some cases knocked us back half a day over the short enough weekend moving work because of basically bad packing.

Besides all that things are going well, slowly but well (fingers crossed). And thankfully we are not stuck to deadlines to move which would be a nightmare, it would all get done but it would be a stress-ridden nightmare.

At the rate we are going it could be another couple of weeks, ah well, what can you do?

RM column October 26th - Not all advice is welcome

RM column October 26th - Not all advice is welcome

All parents will be familiar with advice, sometimes good but often unwanted and certainly not asked for. Advice from someone who is clueless can be an absolute pain in the arse.
I get it all the time regarding my teenager, sometimes from people who are not parents at all and at other times from parents with young children/babies who generally haven’t a bloody clue how to work with teenagers.

It has been my experience the best advice I have received has come from those parents who are enviously laid back with regard to their parenting, or who appear to be. They generally have an amazing relationship with their child that is based on nurturing and supporting and who do not throw their hands up in horror at the scrapes teenagers can get themselves into.

One of my favourite pieces of bad advice was from a woman in her twenties who has no children. We were talking about teenagers and drinking and I was saying how the Young Wan asked me about alcopops.

Explaining the high alcohol content and the sweetness of the drinks I told the Young Wan they are a dreadful way to drink and can lead to all sorts of nonsense, not to mention dodgy situations.

The Young woman I recalled this to said ‘surely you should just tell her not to drink’.
Ahem quite, like that is going to work. I would much prefer to start a conversation with her about alcohol that doesn’t begin with a weighted lecture, surely that is making alcohol into forbidden fruit?

I am reluctant to say it in case by doing so I change everything, but my own experience with the Young Wan has backed this up, she has absolutely no interest in going out and getting pissed like many of her peers. I am not stupid or blinkered enough to think this will always be the case but for now it is and I am happy with that.

There was the time recently when another person was aghast that at 15 years old the Young Wan isn’t already a cordon bleu chef, okay that’s a slight exaggeration but they did think the Young Wan should be able to cook many different dinners.

Maybe she should and while she can do some things, mainly in the food preparation area, ie ‘Young Wan, will you peel some potatoes?’ as well as cooking chicken curry I do not expect her to be able to whip up a tasty dinner from the contents of our fridge.

So this person was absolutely astonished that the Young Wan doesn’t make dinner every night. Sometimes when this happens I start to mumble excuses and feel like a failure, this particular moment I just looked at him and said ‘it is easy to see you have young kids’.

Maybe his kids will grow up and will have dinner waiting on the table for him when he gets home, somehow I seriously doubt it. And I don’t mean to paint a picture of the Young Wan incapable of preparing something for herself, she is not but I am not willing to risk a burnt and inedible dinner just to prove a point to some eejit who has mad notions about a child should or shouldn’t be able to do.

Not all kids are the same and neither are parents, some advice which has made sense and works for one family doesn’t for the other. So just because I don’t take someone’s advice on board doesn’t necessarily mean I think it is rubbish (though I did in the instances I spoke about above) it just means that I think it probably won’t work for whatever reason in our house.

Like others I need to learn when to give advice and when to listen. All parents have to find their way and have to learn what works and what doesn’t. And being lectured to by other parents doesn’t really help it just frustrates and annoys, advice is welcome but only when it is asked for.

RM column October 19th - Transitional fun

RM column October 19th - Transitional fun

Well Transition Year so far is a blast, the Young Wan is having a ball and loving every moment.

The year is divided up into segments and she is just about finishing the first one and if that is anything to go by it will be a good year.

So far among the new things she has done is Spanish, music and home economics; she has also had an outdoor activity break as well as a trip to a hospital to talk to some people who work in various roles within the health service.

Home economics has been great and we have enjoyed her newly-learned chicken curry on a number of occasions. Her lasagne didn’t make it home because she said it was awful but her brownies (which looked more like they should be called creamies) were lovely and her chocolate muffins.

Trouble was her cooking partner hates nearly everything so the first time she made the curry she didn’t use any veg at all because of the other girl. So we had a chicken curry with about 10 pieces of chicken swimming around a frying pan with lots of sauce.

However that’s a minor complaint and not really one at all because at the end of the day she now has a dinner she can make, a dinner that could be ready some evening when I get home from work.

And on top of it all and probably more importantly she really enjoys it.

The day to the hospital also seems to have been massively enjoyed by her class.

She came home ranting about wanting to be a radiographer having been to a talk where they were shown funny x-rays and the like.

My own suspicions of her new career path is that it has more to do with seeing such films of the crazy things people do to themselves.

She laughed her head over one x-ray which showed a man to have swallowed a lighter.

I hadn’t the heart to tell her not everyday would be that, eh, fun. But I am impressed that staff in the hospital managed to impress a gang of 15 year olds, no mean feat.

Once this rotation of different classes ends the Young Wan will begin the next batch involving other new and exciting possibilities.

While I am still dubious about Transition Year I am delighted to see the pressure off herself, I am delighted to see her enjoying new subjects, she is also enjoying being a senior in the school.

I remain to be convinced about the benefits of not studying fully for the year but as I said I appreciate the pressure being taken off.

The next big fun thing, or so she thinks, is work experience. Apparently other kids she knows got paid for their time and I have tried to tell her that getting paid for work experience is extremely rare and not normal at all.

She looks at me like I am mad, but we will see just how mad I am when she finishes up her week and is given a big smile and hearty handshake for her troubles.

So for now for me the jury is out on Transition Year, it has been fun, informative and all sorts of things but only time will tell on the whole picture. But I can say I am glad the pressure is off because I don’t know who was more stressed over the Junior Cert exams, her or me…

Some random news bits

A COUPLE of news items have caught my eye this week all for different reasons.

Our Taoiseach, one of the highest paid leaders in the world described himself as 'poverty-striken' in relation to other country leaders. Given his larger than the industrial wage payrise alone the turn of phrase is an absolute disgrace to those who, despite our affluence, are living in poverty in Ireland today. Having felt a couple of quid away from poverty at one stage in my life, the ignorance of what it means to be in that situation is astounding. And that is our country's leader. And yes Bertie you will be waiting a long time for someone to write about how poverty stricken you are. Shame on you.

The arson attack on a family in Omagh which went today from the worst fire tragedy in the North to murder. The descriptions from people outside who tried to help are etched in my head and the family's screams should forever haunt the perpetrators.

What started off for me as an incident I heard on the morning traffic news causing delays became more real for me as I passed the carnage of a truck which drove onto the middle island on O'Connell Street. Then I heard the news later and that a teenager was hit by the truck and then read John's blog and his account of nearly being hit by the truck. A pal of the guy who was hit has commented on the post and it was good to read that despite some appalling injuries and surgery he will be okay, in time. You can see my photographs on Flickr.

Then the Herald ran a piece today about a landlord who has been found guilty of bugging her tenants. Charming. It also begs the question, why? One of the main reasons I can think of was control. I once lived in one place where the landlord because it was physically his house, believed he could walk in when he liked, tell us that we could not have visitors, complain about our belongings, you name it he thought it. My belief was that he may own the house, but as I paid rent it was my home and no longer a place he could just walk into as he pleased. The court ruled in favour of the tenants and now the landlord, Edel McKenna and her mother Rita have been ordered to pay 10 tenants €115k. I don't think the award was enough. You can read the story on the BBC site.

Beam me up Scotty

My last post for Science Week was hastily cogged together at 11:51pm last night to get it in for the midnight deadline and it ended up a bit pants, no real explanation in it and I didn't get to write what I wanted to at all and what I did write was a bit disjointed so I am starting this earlier with the hope of putting more effort into it.

Today's title is an invention you would like to see in the future. So what would I like to see? All the thoughts I have seem to be massively inspired by Star Trek, hopefully there is no rule against that.

I thought what about a food replicator, it could solve world hunger, but I keep leaning towards a teleporter. Can you imagine the possibilities? No carbon footprints, no waiting in airports, no long hours travelling, just instant arriving.

Course the benefits are infinite, doctors could be anywhere in the world for emergencies in no time at all, days off could involve popping to say Egypt to see the pyramids in the morning, to the Ritz in London for afternoon tea and then off to the States to snap sunset in the Grand Canyon. It could make worldwide travel financially accessible for everyone. Course it is not all about people being moved instantly from one location to another, items would also be moved, it could bring a whole new meaning to the term mobile home.

So in the future I want a teleporter :)

Science Week - the Rubiks Cube

As part of Science Week loads of people, urged by Mr Mulley, are blogging about their favourite invention from their childhood, and maybe something better will come to me but for the moment all I can think of is the rubik cube.

The rubik cube completely caught our imagination in teh 1970s. We were all doing it and we all knew people who could do it, some of whom would try to show you their technic but it never worked for me I'm afraid.

I could get one side and that was it.

I even entered a fancy dress competition one year dressed as a rubik cube in Butlins, in a costume I made over a couple of days with the saying 'I may be a rubik but i am no square' and was beaten by someone in brown cords, a brown jumper with a sign saying 'I am from the planet of the apes'. Poo to that, if it had been the sign they had the year before I would understand as that was 'special branch' with all manner of twigs on them.

But I didn't win (more on the link), big ahhhhh.

Teenagers are not the only ones who need privacy

PARENTS have been mislead, completely and utterly. Here we are trying to give our kids/teenagers space/privacy, when the little ahem dears do not return the favour.

In our house part of that lack of privacy for adults is obviously down to the fact that I have an (AHEM) en-suite bathroom so that means my bedroom is a rat-run for everyone who comes into the flat and who needs to utilise the amenities. Therefore the Young Wan does too. In fact my room is her room or so it has become over the last couple of years.

When she was younger this wasn't a problem but as she has gotten older and maybe as her room has gotten messier, she has spilled over into the only space in the flat that is mine, toilet runs aside of course. And my lack of privacy has gotten worse and it is starting to wear heavy on me.

As parents we believe that we need to give our kids privacy, we need to show trust, we need to allow them to grow and develop. But wait a minute what about when they consistently violate our privacy or maybe it is just herself. But if there is something to be hoked through, she has done it down to traipsing friends through my room.

At one stage it was so bad that I would threaten to lock my room and leave her a bucket in which to do her ahem business in, but I couldn't bring myself to carry out the threat, who could. But looking back on it given recent events, it really doesn't sound as bad a threat as it once did, jaysus tonight it actually sounds reasonable.

That is because all hell broke loose tonight, I don't want to go into it because I won't violate her privacy in that way, but I am actually quite upset about it. I know I blog about our lives, sometimes warts and all but I have my own boundaries regarding that and there are lines I won't cross.

Needless to say I am counting down the days until we are in the new house and my room is no one's space but mine and I am so gonna put the biggest lock on the door and woe betide any Young Wan who even thinks about going in there without permission.

See what happens when you don't have the camera

COURSE the one day I am on the bus without my camera I see this, luckily I had the camera phone but it isn't the quality of size I would like. How and ever, I am happy to have been able to catch it at all. It was one of the few wet mornings we have had and the bus was all steamy and the GPO looked great and the crowd of people sheltering under the front looked even better.

Half-sitting half-lying

WELL I am now half-sitting half-lying on the sette with the laptop on my lap, it is as light as a feather, a glass of wine is poured and I am about to watch the second half of the last episode in series one of Heroes.

If my aching bones don't stop yelling soon I might not enjoy it, course in a couple of weeks I will have a bath to soothe my aching body. All the laundry is washed and my living room resembles a Chinese laundry as clothes are hung on every thing possible to dry and as with the bath in a couple of weeks, there will be no more launderettes, yeharrrrr, and radiators on which to dry clothes if I want. The heater is plugged in and of course in a couple of weeks I will only need to turn on the central heating.

Kinda makes it all worth it, doesn't it. And I cannot wait to have a housewarming/early birthday party in the new house, with a real Christmas tree in the corner now that I won't have industrial strength carpet tiles to grapple with to brush/vacuum up pine needles. I seriously cannot wait.

As an aside work on my domain has ceased, but I'll resurrect it shortly when I get a chance to get back to it.

A painting update - sorry about that...

OH MY GOD who would have thought painting a house would take so long, but it really is. Because we have been living in the flat where we are for the last 12/13 years I want the new place to feel completely new and have opted for a magnolia theme throughout the whole place, all fresh and new and lovely.

Working makes it harder to get it done sooner (so does not having a car) and the fact that it has mostly been the Young Wan and myself with paint brushes bar two evenings has made it all the slower. But I am delighted with today's efforts helped by a pal Mick. The living room is completely done bar some glossing and I am beginning to hate gloss, with an absolute passion. We also need to scrub the emulsion splatts and streaks from the laminate flooring, despite our best efforts to be clean painters we just arn't.

The hot press is in the living room and were a brown colour as was the frame around the door, so they are half done, I have painted the door frame and need to gloss the door but it has never been glossed so I'll get some undercoat ensuring that I don't to give it about three coats before it is done.

My room is completely finished, yehar, and the Young Wan's room only needs a coat of gloss on her door, the frame having been done this evening. We have been using the space underneath the Young Wan's loft-bed to store everything that has been packed and there is no space to move, so we cannot pack anymore until it is moved up to the new place. And I haven't a clue when that will happen, God I wish I had a car.

I will endeavour to get back to the new house some evening this week if my energy levels permit and finish the little glossing bits here and there and make a start on the kitchen and then we are a-rocking and a-rolling. Meaning we will get back to the a-packing, a-arrgghhh.

When it is all done and cleaned up, I will post some photographs of before, during and afterward. (I know I have said this before but so!) I should have been taking a lot more during, but when you are on a painting mission all other creative thoughts go out the window, (once brown gloss now a lovely magnolia).

So having spent six hours painting today the Young Wan and I are completely and utterly cream-crackered, my back hurts, my head hurts, my feet are screaming, I am dotted nearly all over in emulsion and my hands and fingers are covered in gloss. Oh and I have a permanent smell of gloss in my nostrils, nice!

I cannot wait for a weekend when I am not under pressure from painting, packing or unpacking and it will come soon time really soon.

Because I am working next weekend and won't be doing anything there at all I am going to try and get back and finish the painting over the week, I won't hold myself to that completely, given how tiring it is. Having worked five hours last Sunday on my feet constantly I was so knackered last Monday. This week will be busy enough without the added pressure of trying to get to the house when I am no more in the mood to do so. But I'll see how I feel as the week goes on. The ideal day would be to go up tomorrow evening and make some inroads into it all, I can't see me do that somehow.

And don't get me started on living on take-aways while we are doing this, we are both sick of them. But tonight we didn't get home till 8pm and the last thing I can think of doing is cooking, nevermind the fact that we have no food in, so a take-away it is then.

The latest time schedule and one I am sticking too is that we are due to move in by the start of December and will be well in by Christmas. What an amazing thought.

On a positive helping-hand note Nanny is back next week and she plans to sent a couple of hours unpacking during the day while we are at school and work, which will be brilliant.

I know this is an ongoing post and I do apologise for that but it is all encompassing for me. This move is one of the biggest life-enhancing times for the Young Wan and I and we cannot wait, you have no idea.

I'm loving it...

WELL I am absolutely loving the new Mac Book Pro, it is a seriously sexy machine, light and lovely and a far-cry from the heavy and cumbersome Dell, which I liked a lot apart from the heaviness factor which I loathed as I carry it about a lot.

But this Mac, mmmmh, from the gorgeous packaging to the click of the buttons to the magentic power lead. Trouble is with moving and painting I haven't gotten to play with it as much as I'd like. I only hooked it up to the internet tonight and I am really enjoying it's slickness.

I also got Final Cut Express which is one nifty film editing programme and one that my initial forays into tells me that I need to do a lot more messing about. I've been checking the manual, all more than 1000 pages long.

Do you check the manual of things when you get them? I tend to and normally while using whatever it is I have the manual for. Course it is handy reading for the bus too. Does that sounds mad? But if I have a manual it is probably for something that I really like or indeed love, such as the camera. I perused the Nikon D50 manual on the bus all the time while referring to the camera menu. I suppose sometimes everything is so busy, the bus can be a welcome half-hour to 45-mins of me time.

Course I could take it further and spend quality time with the new computer on the bus, but I just wouldn't do that. I have only ever seen one person on the number 10 on their laptop and at the time I thought 'what an eejit'. I imagine that you have no sooner booted up than you have to get off. He could have been travelling from UCD across town but still and never mind people who may wish to liberate you from your machine.

Trains are a different matter, they are generally longer journeys, though my previous existence travelling back and forth from Tallaght begs to dispute the difference between it and the journey from Dublin to Belfast. Anyway is much harder for someone to run off with your puter on a train.

I have some housekeeping to do on the new baby yet, I need photoshop and other programmes and I need to upgrade to Leopard which was available days after this beautiful machine was ordered. My initial glances tell me it only costs a tenner to upgrade so grand. Some of the new functions will be very welcome, such as allowing the Young Wan to surf, of course it is sites I allow and for a time period I specify and then it switches off.

While I have used macs a lot in work over the years, for the last long while I have been mostly using PCs and only popping on the Mac for photo work, so it will probably take a little while to get completely au-fait with it all. And will take some time for me to get to grips with Final Cut so over the next couple of days I will be doing some serious messing, some of which may end up here and I say may, it may not in the same breath. Anyway back to playing.

You never know what you will see on the bus

SERIOUSLY, I have said it before, you never know what you will see on a bus, so it is always worth having the camera handy.



It isn't completely in focus but you get the idea and if you can take a better pic of this (they have been there for a few days anyway, maybe more) please do. You can see them above Doyle's Pub as you go around from Dolier Street round the side of Trinity. I love the way they are hung out, it has to be something done by a fella, eejit. Still it has provided me with some mirth on the morning commute.

Some more things ticked off the moving to-do list

I AM absolutely knackered, we spent the day in the new house painting. So far we have managed to paint the Young Wan's room, the only thing left is to gloss her door and window sill. My room is also completely painted and my door, window sill and frame is glossed, so mark a tick against my room.

I used the last of the 10 litre tub last night on doing the bathroom which needed two coats to cover the green it was previously painted. So this morning I went to the local DIY shop, is it woefully sad to admit t I do enjoy walking around DIY shops, got more paint, bought more lavender plants (I am determined to have wonderful pots of lavender all over my back yeard) before heading back to the house.

So I began at 2pm-ish and gave the bathroom a second coat, glossed the doors and doorframe, then I glossed the little outside hall. All this took me and the Young Wan five and a half hours.

My feet are killing me, my back is yelling at me and I felt ill afterwards from all the paint fumes.

So what is left? The living room and kitchen, painting walls and glossing of doors. I'll go up one night this week after work and start the living room, I really hoped I would have that done this weekend, but how and ever. And that is before the last of the packing is done here.

Next weekend I hope to get some of the lesser-needed furniture moved up, book shelves, my dresser and the sofa. When they are moved along with my plants and other things I can really take stock on the last things to be done. It has been a long move, but it is hard to do while working, without a car and with the outrageous amounts of stuff we have to sort through. So the pace is suiting me, I still feel under pressure with it, but the pace is working.

At some stage soon I will post some before and after pics, or maybe I will leave that until we are in fully and you can get the full picture. Okay I am now officially turning off.

Another autumn pic - probably more to follow

Autumn leaves makes me feel fine...