4 November 2023 (Saturday) - Reorganizing Spare Rooms

I woke to the sound of Treacle squeaking so I took her and Bailey out into a damp garden at five o’clock. Just like yesterday, both wandered round and round before finally coming back inside.
I tried to get back to sleep, but I was cold, and the rain was rather noisy up against the windows. And then my phone started whinging that it wanted a virus scan. At six o’clock in the morning.
I got up at seven o’clock, made toast and had my usual look at the internet. It was still there. My brother and nephew were posting that they’d done an hour’s drive to Brighton where a coach would collect them ant take them to Liverpool for today’s football match. Let’s hope it goes better that the last one. The other week they went on a seven hour round trip to watch a 6:1 defeat.
 
I really didn’t fancy Dog Club this morning what with the torrential rain. The problem is that having volunteered to unlock every week I’ve rather shot myself in the foot as there is only one set of keys. I posted to the Dog Club admin group that I would unlock and come home and found myself on the brink of a “I’m more ill than you are” argument. I sighed. Dog Club is such fun. Is this about to dissolve into one big quarrel too?
I got my waterproofs on and walked to the car (which was quite some way away) and drove over to the Dog Club field. The roads were like rivers. I unlocked just in case any brave souls turned up, and came straight back home. Were I feeling a tad better I might have taken the dogs, but they would have just got wet and filthy. As it was the walk to the car, from the car to the field gate and back again, and (having parked up) walking home got me soaked.
 
I sparked up the lap-top, tuned into Steve on the radio, and listened to the clues for the mystery year… The Grand National was cancelled, M-People were in the charts. I had no idea. Thirty years of Doctor Who was the giveaway. 1993.
As I strained my brain on the mystery year I also struggled with geo-puzzles. I pretty much immediately solved the one which yesterday had given me co-ordinates which were north of the North Pole. And armed with a hint about another geo-puzzle I wasted an hour getting absolutely nowhere.
I then spent a little while on Google Street View virtually driving round the Romney Marsh. There’s half a dozen geo-puzzles in the area in which photos of roadside locations are given. All you have to do is find where the photos were taken. But one view across the marsh is much like another and I didn’t locate any.
 
Seeing a lull in the rain I took the dogs round the block. As we walked we met OrangeHead. Back in the day me and Fudge used to meet her a lot; she earned her sobriquet from her vividly dyed hair. These days she is much more restrained. She was walking a small pup; her old dog had died. As her pup and my pups sniffed each other we reminisced about old dogs.
I suggested she and her new pup might enjoy Dog Club; she said that she’d heard good things of it (result!) but getting there without a car was problematical. Perhaps I should have offered a lift?
 
We came home and I fell asleep in front of the telly underneath a pile of dogs. Once “er indoors TM had returned from craft club we went to the spare bedroom, We’d had the walls re-plastered a while back, the painting was done. It was time to make a start putting the room back to some semblance of order. Shifting furniture about took some doing, then as “er indoors TM cleaned and dusted I got the old desktop computer back together and working. It took a little fiddling about; eventually I made the amazing discovery that plugging the right cables into the right sockets made a load of difference. The thing is twelve years old and it would be far cheaper to replace with a new one than to bring it up to modern specs, but it has something which is something of a novelty these days. It can play CDs.
I then went through some of my old rubbish. Some I want to keep; much of it is fit for the bin. As I rummaged I found an old picture that had been drawn in the late nineties featuring me and the people with whom I worked at the time. I can put names to all but one of the characters. Sadly I have no idea who it is between the woman with the clipboard and “Big Gay Al”. Interestingly the chap who was portrayed as “Big Gay Al” went on to become the president of the British Blood Transfusion Society.
 
I then took a deep breath. The next thing to be done in the back room was to get the books and DVDs onto shelves. I don’t want to put shelves on the walls again, so bookcases it is. Back in the day there wouldn’t have been any delay; I would have taken my Espace to the shop, got new bookcases and chucked them in the back of the Espace. Everything fitted into my Espace. Much as I like my car, it isn’t big. So I would be stuck with the vagaries of delivery drivers. And who will deliver on a Sunday? I want to get on with sorting that room.
After a little fiddling about I ordered two bookcases from Argos who claim they will deliver tomorrow morning. Even though it is a Sunday. Will they? Time will tell; it always does.
 
“er indoors TM boiled up a rather good bit of dinner which we scoffed whilst catching up of episodes of “Bake Off”.
I should really have an early night in readiness for the bookcases which will be arriving tomorrow; possibly as early as seven o’clock…

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