Chasing One’s Tail

Sometimes, you get a day from hell. Sometimes, it’s a week and, if you’re really unfortunate, longer than that. Days when everything seems to go wrong, all your efforts are thwarted and frustrated, and every bit of good news is swamped by a relentless stream of guano until you think your head is going to explode.

My week from hell began last week a couple of weeks* ago on Monday when, whilst clearing space for DD’s new bed in her room, I was almost swept away by a massive (and I do mean massive) pile of sweet wrappers hidden in the corner. She had clearly been “posting” them there over a lengthy period (or at least I sincerely hope it was a lengthy period) in order to hide the evidence of her contraband. I’ll spare you a photo. Exhausted from lugging her new bed back and into the house, dismantling and carting out the old bed and tidying up (I must have easily done a hundred trips up and down the stairs. Hot, sticky and utterly dismayed by the wrapper spectacle, it was all I could do to stop my head exploding. The vacuum cleaner was less resilient and gave up in the face of it all by turning itself off and refusing to have anything to do with the business for an hour. Not a great start to the week, particularly in light of DD’s scant appreciation of my efforts, not to mention the persistent getting underfoot to “help” put the bed together. No work done.

*It’s been a hectic couple of weeks with one thing and another so this post took rather longer to get out than anticipated

Tuesday promised to be better. DS had an inset day and somehow the day just got away from me, restashing stuff that needed to be moved out of DD’s room. No work done.

Wednesday and I finally got back to hemming the dress from hell made from ultra stretchy stuff that just none of my machines could cope with for reasons I won’t bore you with. Suffice it to say that an awful lot of experimentation, tissue paper, unpicking and tearing out of hair ensued. However, I had finally got around to calling out Brtitish Gas for my annual and much needed boiler service – it had been making noises not dissimilar to those you might expect to hear standing on the runway at Farnborough airport. The engineer duly turned up (just about within his 2 hour time slot) only to inform me that the noises were the least of my problems and the thing was leaking gas (though oddly not into the house as the carbon monoxide detector was silent). Great, I thought, lucky I booked the service when I did, I thought, now it’ll be fixed, I thought. Ya think? Not so. It seems the parts are obsolete and since the thing was dangerous, he proceeded to summarily disconnect it from the gas supply completely. Marvellous! All I bluddy needed! No boiler. No heating (no problem) but also no hot water. Oh joy! No more work done.

Thursday – much frantic rushing around trying to organise quotes and a replacement boiler. Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, I received not one, but two letters from our insurers telling us our home and contents insurance was being cancelled in 7 days. WTF? It seems that for some reason, our last insurers had registered that we’d made a claim when we hadn’t (we made an enquiry as to whether we could make a claim arising from damage done as a result of British Gas digging up the drive last December – no blog post for that, it was all just too hellish, but FB friends may remember the saga). Former insurers refused to remove the entry despite acknowledging that we had not, in fact, made a claim. Shoot me now! No work done.

Friday – Yet more chasing around trying to organise new boiler, home insurance etc etc. Too exhausted emotionally and physically to do anything else. No work done.

Saturday – Got a dog. All is well again!**

**The boiler was sorted out and fitted on the following Monday (so only 4 days of “field” washing required) and the dog is an absolute delight (more about him shortly 🙂