The cold light of dawn

Yesterday did not get off to the best of starts.

I went downstairs, a little after six o’clock, to a cold kitchen. The heating hadn’t come on, and the usual trick of fiddling with the pressure valve didn’t get it going. Oh, great. I fed the cats and took Barney for his walk, then made a pot of tea and put another kettle full of water on for washing with.

I dropped the kids at their respective schools, and then fetched the electric heater out of the garage to warm up my work space. I put my porridge on to cook and then decided to give the boiler another try before finding the number for the engineer. Success on a plate – it worked! Hurrah and huzzah!

The next  travail of the day came after I’d done a bit of work. I had a follow up appointment at the dental hospital to check my lip after the operation that I had last year to remove a particularly annoying lump. The time on the letter said 11 o’clock, so I gave myself plenty of time to find a parking space and got to the waiting room twenty minutes early. I’d brought a book to read, so I wasn’t too worried about a bit of wait.

A bit of a wait turned into an hour and twenty minutes in a very cramped seating area, where I had to twist my legs out of the way every time somebody wanted to get past, including seemingly people that had arrived after me. I was eventually called, and the consultant took all of thirty seconds to decide that all was well and sign off on my notes. In fact, he spent more time talking about the Iain Banks book that I had with me and the significance of the ‘M’, before rather snootily saying he didn’t like SF because he had enough problems with the real world. Git.

The usual niggly set of problems and support calls to deal with in the afternoon, and some mind numbingly dull set up stuff for the purchase ordering system, before Jan got home and helpfully pointed out that I had had my jumper on inside out all day. No wonder the consultant at the hospital had assumed that I was some sort of socially inept nerdy geek. I’m not a socially inept nerdy geek, and anyone who says I am is lying. Oh yes.

I played some more Gun, finishing up the hunting missions by stalking and killing the great black bear with a flaming arrow to the head and then celebrating with a shot of ol’ red eye. Well, actually, it was Cranberry vodka out of the fridge in one of the rather nice shot glasses that Jan had bought home, but for a second I was in the Alhambra saloon knocking back the liquor. Hoo boy!

Next up was pizza and celebrity big brother on the box. Crikey, talk about a wretched hive of scum and villainy. A collection of has-beens, never has-beens, chancers, misfits, tarts, chavs, freaks and self deluded megalomaniacs. Identifying which ‘celeb’ is which is left as an exercise for the reader. I look forward to them all having various nervous breakdowns and tantrums before being booed by the baying mobs outside, apart from Maggot who seems relatively normal. Apart from being called Maggot that is.

I fired up Animal Crossing and spent a hour or so harvesting fruit and nattering with visitors about nothing in particular before retiring to bed as the chimes of midnight struck outside the town hall.

Oh. and the heating came on this morning – yaybo!