Floored by a flawed floor

A naughty little Armadillo

From the desert town of Amarillo
Would puff upon a cigarillo
Having satisfied his peccadillo
                (just saying)
Tremendous Tuesday. Well, it was decidedly average until I remembered that the builders had painted the kitchen floor blue. This is not a style statement, the blue spludge dried hard and was all gritty like the edges of swimming pools, to aid adhesion when they put down the latex before the floor can be tiled. I think it'd be good to paint our feet blue, then we'd never fall down!
When I got back they'd poured a pool of dark green über-gunge on the concrete, to bring it up to level for the plywood to sit on. Of course, it was still wet so we can't walk on it and have to do a little dance around the edge to get to the toilet or the back door for egress.

I nipped to the toilet while looking for my shoes to go to gymnastics.

I didn't get my badge so will have to keep practising the Frog Balance which is really holding me back. When we returned, Jof had got home and seen the green gunge, and 2 little footprints that had miraculously appeared in it while we were out.

Personally I blamed foxes, I threw doubt on their status as footprints in the first place and also said the builders must have done it with their size 3 bootless feet.

As far as I'm concerned, it's an insoluble mystery. Jof has commissioned the upstairs toilet which will save a bit of time.

Last night there was a nocturnal toilet visit at 0200 which means finding suitable protective footwear against nails and rocks of plaster, making the 150 yard yomp to the downstairs toilet using only street lamps for navigation, and avoiding all those loose, missing, or squeaky floorboards any intrepid adventurer will likely meet on their travels. I also like to use the manual contact test to detect wet paint.

Wyatt's a boy to do?

School happened, as it does. Afterwards, I interviewed the builders on how they were getting on. They have taken away quite a lot of their rubbish and have put skirting boards down and installed a sink in the new bathroom.
The carpenter was making a lot of noise sawing upstairs so I tried the computer. I was half way through the first level of Phineas and Ferb when one of the builders installed a lamp by the front door and turned off the electricity so he didn't die. This meant that my games session died instead so I tried the TV: no luck there, can't think why.

 I tried to help Bud put stuff into the loft to clear the way for CarpetMan (next week) but the lights didn't work there either.

I was forced into my own bedroom and played Lego Heroes, western style. All my villains were cowboys like Cool Hand Puke and 3 Teeth McGinty and they all ganged up on Wyatt Burp and his posse of outlaw deputies or something.

But I was saved by the return of civilisation and watched TV till Ben arrived and we continued Legoing stuck on an island in my room. All the woodwork around the outside of the room is newly painted so we sat in the middle, inhaling all those lovely volatile organic compounds until Beavers. We scooted down the secret passage and probably would have failed a breath test.

Calpol is so passé, man, everyone's doing Briwax now

By the time I got up, the paint was already being applied. Once the woodwork in the lounge and my bedroom had been cleaned and the kitchen ceiling painted, it was time for the doors. I helped by pulling up a load of the reddish carpet tiles (super-classy) in the lounge and filling a binbag so full it couldn't possibly support its own weight. The atmosphere is saturated with the dust of 60 years of out-of-date decor with tantalising hint of dog. The doors are from the bedrooms. In the 1950s the style of the 4-panel Victorian solid wood doors went out of fashion, and everyone wanted flat doors. So the easiest way was to tin-tack a bit of hardboard to both sides of the door, hiding the panels and making it exceedingly boring. Nowadays, of course, the fashion is to remove the hardboard, strip the paint off the door, lament the damage caused by the tin-tacks, and to enjoy the wood as nature and the original makers intended. It helps if you wax them a bit to make the wood happier: the man at the Strip Joint told us to get BRIWAX, the best, apparently. Briwax is very whiffy stuff in a tin and it gives off noxious fumes that make your head go whizzy and flashy if you breathe it in. This is why it's banned in the States. Srsly, though, can you really imagine the youth of the USA loading up on Briwax at £12 a tin and going forth into the world to wreak havoc? (Woah, I got totally Briwaxed, man.....) Back in the 1970s the 'in' thing was to have a gobbet of glue in a crisp packet and to sniff it. Have we really moved on to furniture polish? Anyway, the doors look really good. While Jof painted skirting boards, she said we really needed fresh air that didn't have Briwax in it, so we got my bike and made it out of the house for 530 pm or so and visited the Health Centre park (small but strong on giant climbing logs and teenage girls) and made the long hop to the Pyramids beach for a promised ice cream. Everything was shut so we climbed on the WW2 tanks and threw some rocks into the sea, finally finding a shop by the sunken garden and I had my raspberry Cornetto. On the cycle home I was again floored by my nemesis, the pavement outside the Old Gravediggers Pub. The gap between the man and the car wasn't quite enough and I crashed.
Later, the live band playing at the pub over the road were still going, and a fight broke out onto the pavement.

Sofa, so good

Saturday so up at 9. He pulled the old "Exchange TV remote for empty breakfast plate" trick, finished 100% of food in 3 1/2 minutes: funny, that.

Jof has been harping on about sofas, wardrobes and dressing tables. I am interested in sofas: I like the 2-seater jobs like Elizabeth has. So the deal was struck: go to Hedge End (outside Southampton, don't talk about football) and spend a little time agreeing on a sofa set, then go to 3 swingparks as a reward.

First, we ditched the inherited TV, some foam, bottles, cardboard etc at the tip. Found the sofa shop and played hide-and-seek and Ninja attack in amongst the groovy selection of soft furnishings arranged for my personal delight. Actually, it didn't take long to identify a set (big sofa for Jof, 2-seater for me, chair for him and bonus footstool and 3 distressed tables) that didn't match the lounge decor but I bet ErinsMum will approve. At that price, I should coco.

The whole process (including Ninjas) took 1 hour so we all deserved lunch at the Giant Sainsbury's nearby. I had soss mash'n'peas with added choccie cake and I was stuffed. Then, while she went to Marks'n'Spencer, it started. 1. Hedge End recreation ground. An ace park. Full marks for this one, with the closed-at-weekends Citizens Advice Bureau car park right next door for easy access. It has an exercise park, splash-paddling pool with squirters, 16 boulders, zipline, beams, metal trains, swinging basket, ground-level trampoline, swings, 2 willow tunnels and a large spiderweb rope complex with climbing walls. This is a good park, highly recommended for little people tired of important shopping.

2. Moorgreen Park, West End, Southampton. Rubber floored, this is a small local park only but is quite inventive in its facilities. The swinging bowl (smooth not roped) seemed a little risky and the climbing frame was small but the roundabout had a timid 5 year-old and his mother so formed an alliance immediately. We showed off our park prowess to great appreciation from the doomed duo, we could whizz the roundabout much faster than she could and we were soon the centre of attention with much adulation, applause and laughter, the way I like it. We did the seesaw, bouncing carriage and tripped over the camouflaged rubber tortoises and then the 2 teenage girlies vacated the boomerang swinger. We got on and messed about as only we can, he fell off and that left me with no opposing weight: I plummeted and skinned my ankle on touchdown. Much howling later, we left. It's a small park, not worth the journey on its own but was good until I got damaged.

3. Hinkler Road, Thornhill. Large, central to a dour council estate with forbidding tower blocks all about. The park itself was pretty good, actually, with exercise machines, well-appointed skate park, telegraph pole-style posts and rope pyramid of formidable construction. Very good, 8/10 and none of the feral youths attacked us at all although there were some unfamiliar words and phraseology. My damaged foot got much better. After losing each other in Giant Sainsbury's a few times, we made it home and they abandoned me and started painting again. But I didn't care because Jof bought me a Lego Hero.

A Mind like Mousetrap Cheese

Happy Friday!

Today Follower Fiona told us that for the last 3 days, the charity bucket in the foyer of Bud's workplace had a load of Lego kits in original boxes. The plan was, remove them all and compensate the bucket with banknotes in an envelope. However the delay in retransmitting the vital intelligence report meant that the charity van had taken the bucket away 30 minutes before my retrieval agent got there. I guess our minds just turn to Swiss cheese as we get old, lucky that'll never happen to me. And no, you can never have enough Lego.

Speaking of which, in Libya back in 1975 I referred to the cheese in the Tripoli Grand Hotel as 'mouse-trap' cheese, as you do. They all thought I meant 'Cheese of low quality and value that is fit only for a mousetrap', whereas I clearly meant the cheese with holes in it, like Mr Jerry Mouse always eats. Thus simple misunderstandings can span generations.

#

After school it was the time I had been waiting for. Our 3 bedroom doors had been stripped of their 9 layers of legacy paint at "Strip Joint" so we got all squashed up in the car again and giggled our way through town with yet another door for him. On the way we passed Fawcett Road which is a perfectly good road with many second-hand shops for Studentland and tattoo parlours and shops to help people smoke herbs or buy wines of distinction. In fact it has a pub called the Fawcett Inn which makes the olds laugh, they once sold a fizzy beverage called "Fawcett Inn Cider", why they find that funny I shall never know.

Anyway, I am not yet fully literate so pronounced it "Fawkitt" and thought this was so funny I wound down my window and shouted fawket fawket fawket in a variety of perilously close accents at all the nice citizenry with their lengthy tattoos and green dyed hair. At the door place we exchanged 1 for 3 (and £75) and I investigated one of his store-rooms and we got even more squished up for the return journey. The reclaimed doors do look rather good, actually. I'm looking forward to having a bedroom door again.

After swimming (Leyton from school has joined my swimming group, but only as a red hat. This means he is a swimming beginner, not some kind of cyberspace operative.

I hope that his surname is Buzzard or Stone or Orient) we picked Jof up and started painting. We had to do the ceiling and wall above the stairwell so we rigged up the 2 ladders plus a couple of planks thing (yes, we were the couple of planks) and I did some rollering without plunging into the 9-foot void below.
The builders have finished plastering at last and have done the banisters and the floorboards don't shift under your slippers any more and it's practically the Ritz.
Later, he painted, Jof cleaned everything in sight and I cleaned my own room!

7YO OHAC WLTM GSOH SWF PnP

Oh, no, sir. You can't have those floor tiles in the kitchen. They may have been hand-made by eu-subsidized Spanish artisans, but they're too thick. Try something with less character.
Eventually we got the ones Jof first found and liked, for she was supposed to choose anyway.
At school kicking-out time, Erin pestered her mum to come to the park for Park Thursday and we all trooped back to our house for an inspection.
Erin had inspected it before we even bought it so she could tell the difference: she got bored in the garage, looked at the cacti, and came up to my room to play car-arranging.

Meanwhile Barry the Builder (can't afford Bob) brought Ron the Roofer and they talked about roof slates. The electrics man has connected the whole downstairs so we don't have to have extension cables snaking everywhere: the garage now has light and the loft works as well.

The builders have plastered lots and they have started on the kitchen floor and oh dear there's a lot of painting to do. I have elected to have my bedroom shelves painted red and yellow.

But it was still Thursday so we all hit the park (bonus Erin - don't often get one of them) and got 2 hours of running around, a mass game of football with Ben and the JBs and random kids various, and quite a lot of chasing-the-suspiciously-older-teenagers around the park.

Not absolutely sure why we have developed a connection with them.

A bird in the hand is worth 27 on the toilet

We have recently bought a house in a tree-lined road, very sought-after area, the estate agents told us. And it is nice to have on-street greenery and to listen to the pre-dawn Tveetling of the birdies and the chaka-chaka-ing of the magpies and the hoo-hoo of the woodpigeons and the dipdipdip of the fledgeling blackbirds who haven't got used to the existence of cats yet and all the other avian accents you get. But all this aerial wildlife means roosting and an above-average crapita per square yard and sometimes it is difficult to drive away in the morning because of the Pollockian streaks of guano on the windscreen and the sheer weight of layered bird poo on the roof. I think, on balance, the airgun should stay in the loft but it's a close-run thing.

I have been in discussions with my handlers as to the future layout of furniture etc in my room. It's a fairly large room so plans are to have the bed and clothes cupboards etc down one end in a dedicated bedroom area, and to leave the window end completely clear for Lego-ing and toyboxes. Sounds a bit "Let's form a posse and then split up" but it's compartmentalization.

Jof has taken a cheeky day off without telling me. She could have spent the whole day at home with me cutting out sharks and feeding me chocolate. What a con. I actually espied her in the hairdressers on the way home from school with Erin.

This afternoon Bud got the large old-style cathode ray tube TV down out of the loft (inherited from previous owner) while the builders were there to help. This worked. He then carried it down the stairs whereupon it slipped from his dusty grasp and fell, breaking one original-to-the-house, can't-get-them-any-more banister spindle and bringing the builders running. It did not crack asunder. Despite this, the builders have plastered all over the place and a bout of shelves has broken out upstairs. While I was tramping with Pops, they chose Spanish hand-made tiles for the kitchen.