.... random rants and rambles. no agenda. yet.

... well, they probably are anyway. I wouldn't know!

And what am I doing blogging before 8am on a Saturday morning?! I can't sleep. While I don't exactly do long lie-ins anyway, when I was in Preston I would turn over and force myself to go back to sleep, but now I am here in the place that's hard to spell, I am much more inclined to leap out of bed. I think it's called new-found enthusiasm? It won't last.

[It does seem to be catching, though - when I was letting Harry out for his wee this morning (in my pyjama bottoms and an old t-shirt, shamelessly), I saw three people. While this is really not a very exciting fact, I should remind you that we now live in the middle of nowhere, so three people, is like, a lot.]

So anyway, here I am sitting at our new, huge, white kitchen table. I note its whiteness (a whole other story, which I will explain below). I note how it was part of the Dreaded IKEA Shopping Experience the other day, when C and I stopped being ill for long enough to drag ourselves around IKEA and actually manage to buy SOME of the things on our list and not scream TOO much when the nasty men at the delivery counter looked at us nastily and told us it would cost us £70 to have our stuff delivered, as punishment for carelessly living in the middle of nowhere and having the wrong postcode.

AGH!

Yes, it has been a long week. I'm proud to say that in between sneezing into mountains of tissues, coughing, trying to wade through the masses of bubble wrap in this house, and driving to and from wifi hotspots/the library, we got some work done. Yes, business had to be as usual, or we wouldn't have a business.

Aside from that we have been wandering around a bit dazedly, realising that our new house is quite big and we don't have much furniture - or, indeed, ANY curtains - so we need to fill it with things.

We tried doing the Curtain Challenge first, and went into a tiny curtain shop which was stuffed full of about 7,000 curtain samples, I kid ye not. Very Nice Curtain Shop Woman was very helpful and asked us what we would like, and didn't laugh nastily when I said "I have NO idea. We've just moved into a new house and everything's white," and actually managed to sell us some curtains. However, curtains are more complicated than I ever realised (or ever wanted to even think about), so VNCSW's business partner is going to come and see us to measure and sell us some more, which means that we should be all curtained/blinded-up by October sometime. Seriously.

Everything seems to take so long! Screwing together IKEA flat packs certainly does, as anyone who has ever spent hours trying to work out what the "internationally accessible" instructions are supposed to mean, and where the weirdly shaped metal bits are meant to go, will tell you.

So, you can imagine my horror when C looked at the huge white table that we'd spent ages traipsing through IKEA Hell to find, and then paid £70 so that I could spend more ages screwing together -- and said it was the wrong shade of white. Or more precisely, the CHAIRS were the wrong shade of white. Thus followed a long debate about shades of whiteness, and how important they were (or not) and if we could really face going through The Torture Of IKEA again, especially as we have to go back again ANYWAY because our office is too big for our desks and we have nowhere to put our clothes either?! Oh yes, that is a whole other day's worth of torment.

But after a beer, C decided that the whites matched after all and everything would be fine. Me? If I half close my eyes everything looks white and glowy and vaguely celestial, so whatever is fine with me.

And Harry? He's loving it all. He always does.