One word? When seven would do…

Work for me this morning. It was an odd one as Yvonne was off sick, one of the Saturday assistants was on annual leave so we had Big Boss Brenda who is a proper important librarian (and runs the reading group) and a relief member of staff Sherrin who runs homework club which totally changed the Saturday ‘vibe’. Jan and I christened it ‘Articulate Saturday’ and competed all morning to use the best long words in context which was fun :).

Brenda had done the rota and put me down for 3 hours on the enquiry desk and one hour off so I had a lovely dossy morning really. I like manning the enquiry desk – it’s fairly quiet, you get to sit down, you have full internet access and the queries you do get are usually interesting and varied. I joined 6 new borrowers, printed off details of campsites in Sussex, dealt with tracking back the movements of a book which someone rang to say they’d borrowed yesterday from us and found an envelope containing a large cheque in the back of, took an enquiry about keeping Giant African Landsnails as pets (for which I printed some stuff off the internet and ordered in a selection of books), read a bit about consipiracy theories on the moon landings, chatted to someone about floristry and wedding flowers, chatted to someone else about the house they’ve bought in Lancing as a weekend and holiday home to retire to in the future and are visisting at weekends and dealt with an assortment of regular library characters including ‘Fred’ who is 93 and used to go up the stairs in the library 3 at a time. He has Altzheimers or something similar and regularly works his way round the staff telling us the same stories two or three times per visit, the special needs bloke who comes in and asks if S Club 7 have released any new cds and leans right over the desk clearing his throat noisily on a regular basis and Mr Bye, our in house alcoholic (think I mentioned him before, he has taken a shine to me). This morning he was so drunk you could have got high off the fumes from standing next to him. He giggled and said to me ‘I’m as drunk as a….’ and then wandered off again. He kept getting up from the computer he was using and stumbling across to me at the desk, forgetting what he’d come over for and then stumbling back to the computer again doing aeroplane arms as he went :lol:.

We also had a Community Saturday table set up for the Lancing Musical Theatre group which consisted of about 12 girls ranging in age from 6 to 14 dressed in tutus, leotards and ballet shoes and wandering around the library. It was like a sit com in there today :lol:.

I spent my ‘off’ hour doing a new display in the junior library of Food and Cookery. This consisted of two aprons stapled to the wall surrounded by photocopied book covers of kids cookery books and cut out picture of various cookies, cakes, apples, tomatoes and more. It was ‘busy’ but looked quite effective.

I got home and Ady headed off to Tom’s where he was assisting in the felling and chopping up of some trees in return for bringing the wood home for logs. He was gone for hours but brought back a whole car filled with logs :).

Davies had presented me with a home made bookmark for Valentines Day and I’d bought all three of them a chocolate orange each. Ady bought me a bottle of pink fizz and cooked a lovely dinner (with a starter :)).

The kids were playing with the lego, then another construction toy called Klikko which came from a charity shop and then building marble runs. I decided I was going to have a bath today no matter how I managed it and toyed with options for heating water:

1. Fit some sort of hose to the shower upstairs and run it all the way through the bedroom, down the stairs and into the bath. Possible flaws in this included lack of hose and potential for flooding / trip hazards.

2. Moving the microwave into the bathroom with the aid of an extension lead and zapping bowlfuls of water to tip in the bath.

I eventually went with the four biggest pans in the kitchen, filled with water and put on the four gas rings on the cooker then toing and froing with them til the bath was full. I instructed the children to stay in the lounge and made it clear that a collision with me and a pan full of scalding water would result in hospital visits for all of us and lifelong scarring. I was concerned that by the time each new lot of water had boiled the previous lot would have already cooled down and indeed that did happen to a degree but not sufficiently and it was actually slightly too hot but I refused to add any cold to it.

It took a full 90 minutes and was not as full as I’d have had it usually but it was a bath. In hot water. And it was bliss :).

While all the water was ‘cooking’ I did some baking as I was in the kitchen anyway and I made some cheese scones and some M&M cookies. Baking, in a kitchen that was lovely and warm with all the gas rings and the oven on was very theraputic and followed by an hour long bath, with a cup of tea, and a book, and a proper hairwash all had me feeling much better about the whole world :).

The kids had the bath after me and I washed their hair then left them to play in it.

We’ve kept the fire going all day in the lounge so it’s been lovely and warm in here and kept heaters on in the bedrooms so they are warm too so it’s all felt not so bad today. The plumber is back sometime tomorrow so fingers crossed for it being sorted on Monday assuming it is something easy and straightforward. I spoke to my Dad and along with promising to get the plumber round he also listened to a prolonged rant from me about my mother and made all the right sympathetic noises. I am sure he will now tell her and I’ll end up being confronted by her about everthing I moaned at him about but it felt good to get it all off my chest.

I brushed Tarly’s hair and tied it back in a plait which we all decided looked pretty and tidy but not particularly Scarlett-like. They had their tea (pasta) and then spent some time connecting on Lego Star Wars DS.

I realised the knitting pattern I’d been following for a jumper was beyond me and had abbreviations in I didn’t understand along with two sets of circular needles and other stuff so I found one I can manage and unpicked and wound up all the wool again from what I had been doing.

Ady came home, I read some Humphrey and the kids went to bed. Ady made a lovely dinner and I’m now feeling pleasantly tipsy, full of nice food, warm, clean and tired.