Mark is home.
He has been back for about half an hour but is washing up whilst I write to you. This is not because he has been seized with domestic altruism but because it is the middle of the night, and we are getting desperate to go to bed.
He has done reasonably well on his assessments. He has got to go back in a couple of weeks to do some more of the written bits, being too dyslexic to manage those without some serious consideration, but we expected that, so on the whole it is a pleasing result.
I have been cleaning.
I do not think I could have washed up another pot.
My fingers are sore from scrubbing, and one is bleeding a very little bit.
I am quite impressed with this, secretly, what a person of virtue I have turned out to be.
I would feel more virtuous if everywhere looked lovely, but it doesn’t. Mark is going to re-lay the kitchen floor tomorrow, and so I have been engaged in moving everything out of it.
The kitchen floor has been subjected to a series of terrible misadventures. We had an undiscovered leak underneath it for ages and ages, which slowly dribbled until a large pool of water had formed beneath the floorboards. We did not notice it even then. In fact, it was not until Rosie had babies, when we covered a large section of floor with plastic for the purpose of collecting poopy poops, that it became apparent that there was a problem, because the floorboards underneath it simply buckled and lifted up.
Even then we did not find the leak. It was several months longer before we worked it out, by which time the kitchen floor had begun to separate and curl up damply.
Mark fixed the leak and we left it to dry out, which it did, in a warped, tiresome sort of way, filling the kitchen with lots of unexpected sticking up bits, on which everybody regularly stubbed their toes and cursed.
After that came Guffy.
It is not difficult to clean up cat accidents from a smoothly flat floor. It is not at all easy to remove a liquid cat accident which has splurged everywhere and dribbled downwards through the large gaps between curly floorboards.
There have been a lot of those, and no amount of frantic mopping and sloshing bleach down the cracks has helped very much.
The floor was not nice.
We decided the other day that we simply could not entertain lots of beautifully clad wedding guests on a trip-hazard cat-dunged floor, and that something would have to be done.
The something was ordering some new tiles and moving everything off the old floor.
Today I have been doing that.
I have been cleaning everything whilst I have done it.
I have moved lots of things into the living room on our newly pristine, beautifully cleaned carpet, and it is now stuffed to bursting with every kind of imaginable clutter.
The new tiles have arrived.
Mark has got a choice of occupation tomorrow. He can either glue down the new tiles for the wedding guests, build the archway for the wedding ceremony, or fix my taxi, which is still sitting sadly in the back alley. The new turbo is in a box in the shed.
Actually he doesn’t have much choice of occupation really, because I am getting frantic to have a beautifully clean and tidy house. He is going to have to lay the floor, after which he can build the archway.
He can sort the taxi out next week.
After all, it isn’t going anywhere.
