This morning Ady removed the kitchen floor – that’s the layer of laminate that my Dad put down just after we had Davies, the layer of carpet tiles that replaced a layer of lino we put down prior to that and a bit of the layer of crap underneath that we had a go at when we first moved in. When we bought this house we ripped up all the flooring in every room during the first couple of days. There was horrid 70s style shagpile carpet through most of the bungalow (as it was back then) and we lived with bare boards for the first few months until we had saved enough to have carpet fitted. The kitchen had lino tiles which were really grubby and damaged but we quickly realised would have been far better left intact and boarded over as they had been fixed using some sort of bitumen paint which resisted scraping, kicking, evostick thinners, blasting with a heat gun and wallpaper stripper and all sorts of swear words. One of my favourite home videos is the week we moved in this house which has clips of me, Ady and our friend Lee all working on the kitchen floor :). Tonight it’s back to the badly removed bitumen and floorboards peeping through, by this time tomorrow it’ll be overboarded and laid with proper vinyl flooring for the first time ever. Bet I am the first to drop something hot or heavy on it and burn it!
Davies and Scarlett did some more robot making and then played in the garden. They wanted to go scootering but I was being paranoid about them playing out in the street during school hours. I went out armed with hammer and much resolve and a plan to dismantle the chicken shed but after 10 minutes and a few removed nails I realised I was onto a loser and it was far too rotten in places and shoddily put together in the first place (combination of me being the one putting it together, it being a very cheap second in the first place and a collection of rubbish tools helping me put it together) to take apart without causing all sorts of damage so I put it back together again and decided it is better off staying here. There won’t be room to bring it (and I’m not even sure it would cope with being moved in one piece, as I recall it’s bloody heavy – it has a base and a felted roof – and probably wouldn’t fit round the side of the house anyway). So it can stay here and we’ll sort out a chicken shed a different way.
I busied myself instead with an email to Neil on Eigg asking for livestock advice and had a lovely email back later finishing with the imortal line
I hope all your plans work out well (they def. wont work out as you think)
which I love and may make my life motto 🙂
Then we got in the car to go to Eliot’s birthday party. We called in at my parents to collect some chairs we have given to Caz and Bid and Frazer arrived home so we chatted to him for a while. There is roadworks at Arundel which is a dreadful bit of road anyway so we ended up sitting there for over half an hour. This gave us time to mess about with checking the cds for scratched ones, playing Lady Gaga very loud and singing along. I emptied out the glove box and put all random sticky sweets, plastic forks, hair slides, ketchup sachets, reciepts and other tat in a bag to chuck out, spent some time sticking dot stickers on Ady (gave him a gorgeous pair of blue dot earrings which he forgot about for a while and walked round Lidl with still wearing :lol:). We called into Lidl and Sainsburys for party snacks and finally arrived at Caz and Bid’s new house. Which looks a lot like we should live there as it is furnished with our old sofas, table, chairs, cd player, crockery, toaster, pans… while messing with the cd player we realised we’d left a cd in it which turned out to be the disc I’d made for our Bye Then party and made me all misty eyed. We listened to it on the way home and it recaptured all the excitement of that crazy about-to-go-and-do-it time :). All the songs either had Wonder or Wander in the title, the artist or somewhere in the lyrics – Wonderland- Simply Red, Wonderful tonight – Eric Clapton, Size of a Cow – Wonderstuff, Wonderwall – Oasis and Mike Flowers Pops, Wanderer – Status Quo and Dion, Wonder of You – Elvis, Wonderful World – Louis Armstrong, Wonderful World, Beautiful People – Jimmy Cliff, Runaway – Del Shannon….
Various friends were there; Debs, Emma, Katie, John & Aida and their assorted offspring. Fab to see people we’d not seen since we left and talk about education, Rum and other people 🙂 We sat in the garden, the kids ran wild, it was all very lovely. We finally left about 7pm.
We forgot about the roadworks so sat in them for another half an hour on the way home 🙁 Ady called into Sainsburys as we needed milk, Scarlett and I called into Pets at Home as she wanted to check whether they were selling Easter eggs for hamsters (they are!). Back at home I cooked dinner while the kids had a bath and then Ady dashed off on a mercy mission to look at Mum & Dad’s TV which was playing up so the kids and I watched Good Life and ate, then Ady came home and had his dinner while I had a bath.
It was the last in the series of Sounds of the 20th Century on Radio 2 which we listened to every single week when we were on the road last year, the first coinciding with the very start of our adventure – this time last year we were about to leave Steward Wood – odd to be having anniversaries of that already. I sat in the bath and listened – tonight was 2000 which was a huge year for us.
We’d been talking about the year 2000 just yesterday when we drove past the dome as Ady and I did visit the Dome, I think on 5th January 2000. The turn of the century was something I had been aware of impending from a very young age, I distinctly recall being about Tarly’s age and working out how old I’d be in the year 2000 (26) and wondering what I’d be doing – would I be married? (yes, just. 3 months previously in Las Vegas), a parent? (I spent most of 2000 pregnant and the final few months as a mother). I started 2000 with no job having left my job at Bhs rather under a cloud and been interviewed for but not offered my next job as a Sales Office Manager. I discovered I was pregnant just days into the year, and within about 3 weeks of starting my new job. I ended the year with a baby, still on maternity leave and unsure what I’d do next (I ended up working one day a week in the office on Ady’s day off mentoring my second in command to step up to eventually take my job on, and doing a couple of days work a week from home remotely). 2000 was the year we turned our bungalow into a house – the roof had been put on and the stairs had been put in by Christmas but we didn’t actually move into the upstairs until January 2001. Hearing all the music and news took me right back to those moments just as the cd had earlier. Ah music 🙂