Where are we today? Sat in one of the rear-facing bedrooms of the new house, perhaps soon to be known as Zarahemna’s Ziggurat. The view is exceptionally green, with the grassy slope climbing away from me, some sort of light green tree with tidy leaves in front and a veritable wall of darker emerald vegetation behind that in the form of a line of coniferous trees which might have once formed a hedge but have long been allowed to get completely out of hand and are now well on their way to being a forest.
I feel a little bewildered and lost. Lost in the sense that I sit inside myself, watching and observing what is happening, trying to catch up to the reality of the situation I am actually in. My first house is a four bedroom detached affair in need of significant work. I find I am not alone in this. D and S visited this afternoon with their children J (J), V, and P.
We looked around the house together and D and S shared their thoughts about what I should do and what order I should do things in, while I reminded myself the alternative to this would be to sit and work in the house on my own all the time. I resent their presence and their opinions and then I miss them almost as soon as they drive away in their neat white car.
Speaking of automobiles, my new one is a little poorly and so I will drive it over to the garage in Bearsted first thing in the morning to see what can be done for it. There’s some form of timing issue, which I hope can be readily resolved by replacing some sensible part and we can go back, and forward to being able to putter about reliably again.
I have been profligate and purchased a new cabin air filter, and then upon learning I would need a socket set to undo the bolts holding the current filter in place, I ordered one of those from Amazon too. The convenience is startling. Almost all of the things I might conceivably need are either available in hours or days at most from Amazon or can be collected from tool shops, the main two chains of which sit in the same industrial estate about 10-12min away by car.
Everything is some distance away by car. Which is making me feel somewhat keenly being unable to freely use mine.
The big triumph today is getting the water online. An engineer visited yesterday to turn it on, which revealed a drip from the large water tank in the loft, two open ports in the waste under the kitchen sink, which are presumably for a dishwasher and a washing machine and a shower which leaked like a fully open tap.
On the plus side, the shower was able to make that water hot. So the day included a hot shower, which was extremely welcome, I hadn’t felt so grimy and filthy in a long long while. As I sit here, coming to the end of today’s short passage I have running water, a mostly full water tank in the loft and a new shower which both works and stops the water from flowing through it when not in use.
D has promised to lend me his strimmer, which means I can start to tackle what can only be called undergrowth the next time there is a clear, dry and ideally warm evening.