The beaver is a proud and noble animal
Notes from a bemused canuck
There has been a fog of pestilence in the office for the last few days. We couldn’t find the source of the smell until today. Apparently, a huge rat crawled into our underfloor heating space and died. It was happily festering away when the maintenance guys found it.
Loverly!
If you can see this, LJ-crossposting works again. Also, if you can see this, there are a bunch of entries that you’ve probably missed on my new blog. Go read them.
Things have been happening that I haven’t had time to write about – real life butting in and all. I’ve been told that I haven’t been writing enough, so hopefully this will keep my reader(s) happy :)
Things on the home front have their ups and downs. My mom was here for the whole of last week. That was wonderful. We had been talking on the phone the week before and I told her how much we had been expecting their trip in February (which has since been pushed back to April) and that we were having a bit of a rough time with Mr Ben Ben and how much we wished she could be here. Her answer was “I’ll see what I can do”. The next day she phones up and tells us she’s coming the following monday :) I love my mom.
Her trip went very well. We made our first foray into Cambridge with Ben and that went rather well. We even managed to sit down and have some tea in Starbucks and he was brilliantly behaved. We also had our first visit from the Home Start volunteer that’s been assigned to us. She’s going to come for a few hours one day every week to give Katy a chance to have some down time. My mom was very impressed with the amount of services that are available to us (i.e. housecalls from our local doctor, weekly visits from our Health Visitor to track Ben’s progress – until he’s about 5! – and the Home Start volunteer services). Sue, our volunteer, is going to accompany Katy to a Mum & Baby group in Ickleton next Monday and apparently there’s a good one in Great Chesterford as well. We’re also going to attend a new mum get-together that is being organized in the village by one of the local ladies-who-organize. Apparently, there’s been a baby boom in the village and lots of new people have moved in, so this will give us all a chance to get introduced.
We’re hoping that all of this is going to make things a bit easier for Katy cause she’s been having a few rough days recently. It really doesn’t help that Ben’s developed colic that hits like clockwork at 6am (and a few times during the day as well, but the morning one is rather impressive in the amount of noise it generates). Katy calls BenBen a Jeckyll & Hyde baby. When he doesn’t have gas, he’s brilliant and smiles and coos and has very advanced motor skills for his age. When colic hits though, all hell breaks loose. We know that things should start clearing up in about a month, but it doesn’t make things easier at the moment.
What else is going on with us… Lemme have a think. We’re seriously thinking about buying a house in Saffron Walden. We’re fed up of our current house. It’s drafty. It’s getting a bit cramped. The boiler is so noisy that it’s become a running gag between us. There’s no one thing that makes it a deal-breaker, but the sum of little annoyances is finally starting to tip the balance. We don’t want to spend another winter there. We have our eye on a house that needs a lot of TLC – as in, new windows, new kitchen, new bathroom, new carpets, complete paint job and that’s all the things we can see from the estate agent details. We’re going to go see it this weekend. It’s listed at £170,000 but there’s no way in hell it’s worth that. We’d consider offering £150,000 if only because we think it’d need about £20,000 worth of work. But it would be ours, and we’d feel no remorse in ripping out the guts and making it look like we want it. We’ll see though. It needs a lot of work. We need to decide if it needs too much work. Watch this space.