It is twenty to three in the morning. I am just at the end of almost sort-of kind-of getting the downstairs ready for the packers tomorrow. They are arriving at 8.30, which is the exact time that I am usually hustling the girls out of the house, five minutes late for school. Upstairs isn’t doing too badly, apart from our room. I have piled it high with the girls’ clothes for the next few days and have done nothing about packing for us. (Ian opted to abandon his UK packing – ie to leave it to me – in favour of making his flight suitably equipped and dressed to meet clients.)
So, today I have taken the girls to school, packed a load more kitchen stuff to take to the house (trying to make Friday a bit more tolerable), met with another builder, cleaned a lot more and come home to a coffee and a flapjack for lunch before starting the tidying that precedes the packing. Of course, I’ve done this tidying several times already this week, but this time it’s serious.
I collected the girls, packed some more, waved Ian off to Frankfurt, packed some more, got soaked going to borrow caster sugar (I hadn’t anticipated baking when I moved the kitchen contents), listened more attentively than usual to Ruth read as she’s made it to a new level, picked up pens while Oriana made cards for her teachers and showed her the letters for all the words she wanted, made biscuits with the girls for Oriana’s class, burnt sausages, unloaded, reloaded and run the dishwasher, completely lost my temper at poor little Ruth, washed the girls and done bedtime stories, done three loads of laundry – the washing and the ironing part – got the downstairs ready for packing “to stay”, “ready to pack” “please leave” “pack Thursday” etc, loaded the car with second-hand uniform, junk modeling boxes, biscuits, school bags, Easter eggs to give away, a cardigan that isn’t ours, and….. and then I crashed the car.
Complete idiocy. Now the other car’s gone to the airport I wanted to put the loaded one in front of the garage so I wouldn’t be parked in by the moving truck. I swung round, went crunch and ripped off half the front. It made a single clunk and has peeled away like a snagged fingernail, leaving a crescent shaped bit hanging off. I daren’t look too closely. I have no idea what to do about it, but need a plan before the school run in less than six hours.
It was probably the most expensive journey, all five yards of it, that I will ever make in my life.
I had envisaged musing upon cleaning and pointing and woodworm and underfloor heating and ceiling tiles, but that will be another day now.
2 comments:
o goodness! i can't say i haven't done it myself--and the bill is always breathtaking. but it is a leetle teeny bit funny. can you drive it like this? or are you stuck?
We can drive it. I hung the floating wires onto something that looks like it's designed to hold wires and it seems to be OK. The bit I ripped off was too big to fit in the car so it moved house with the furniture.
Last week Ian lost the key to one car (now found) and I had to find a late-night babysitter and drive to the new house to collect him. Today he locked the other car's keys inside and Mum had to drive him to the new house to get the spare key. So though my car folly's going to cost a lot more, Ian's done a good job of making me feel better.
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