Barmy Blue's Bland Blog

Another crow like snowman. This is getting a little disappointing huh?

So. Today mum had a doctor's appointment. her foot's been hurting pretty much since I was working with Napoleon. She blamed it on her new-ish boots. I'm not entirely sure what's wrong. When she first gets up her foot hurts but it's okay when she walked the dog she tells me. As it's been going on so long with no change she made an appointment to see the doctor.

He sent her for a blood test. She doesn't like needles. I lent her my stress ball but she didn't have time to use it. She tells me that the hospital's changed since we were last there. She walked into the hospital but GP blood tests are kind of done round the back now, so to speak. So she had to go to another part of the building. They saw her quickly so that's okay. She tells me the doctor's surgery has changed too. Now you have a checking in station before you get to reception and a sign tells you when to go in.....sounds more like a bus terminal.

There's no verbal call and three patients were playing on their phones so missed their turn. She tells me that the receptionist had to call one guy 3 times and he still didn't look up from his phone. What a time waster.

While she was out getting her blood test I cleaned the windows and put the stickers up. I've been waiting for a chance to surprise her with that but also I just didn't want to do it before now.
I also changed the batters in the living room clock because it was stopped at 12:20 instead of 4:30.

I'm having trouble sleeping again. To be fair if you go to bed at 5am and don't drag yourself out of bed until about 4-5pm then of course you'll still be awake as 7am when you decide you really need to pee again. I've got back into that rut where I just don't want to get up. But that creates its own problems. Besides the obvious problems, it gives you more time to think, too much time in fact. I keep getting this restless energy. I get it now and then. Where my brain thinks let's do something. I'd like to do this or that or we could do that but my body just doesn't want to move. I think about how monumental the task really is then get a little depressed at how pathetic I am.

For example. Putting a new bit of sealant around the bath. The bath has shifted over the years because the house shifted because a neighbour had a massive evergreen tree that Napoleon tried to poison but failed a long time ago and its roots buggered up the foundations of the house. Or so I've been told. When that tree fell down in a storm Napoleon eventually got around to fixing the foundation by digging up a spot in the kitchen and some other stuff. He fixed and re-plastered the wall where he'd taken it out and all but never decorated it so now we have an ugly patch in the kitchen with no paint, wallpaper or carpet but it's okay because we just pile up a bunch of crap in that corner anyway. Bags of stuff. Bird seed. Bikes. Sink he liberated from a job even though we didn't want one years ago and never put in. Stuff like that.

But, because of that shifting problem we have quite a few cracks in the house and there's quite a big one in the bathroom. Also there's a gap between the bath and the wall, less than a centimetre, but when you get in a bath full of water I'd say that gap becomes a centimetre or so. It's been that way for a few years now. We actually had a problem of water running down it and through the kitchen ceiling whenever I had a shower or washed my hair (It's a shower/bath, we don't have a separate shower). So for years we (mainly me) were under the impression that Napoleon would fix it some time. He never has. If he's going to do that we have to clean out the whole bathroom. Difficult since we moved my old toy box in there years ago and have nowhere else to put it. They got it cheap because the lid was put on backwards. We use it as a kind of table now. We have the plants on it.

And. If he's going to fix the bath there's more to be done than just putting a bit of sealant around it. He might as well do the whole house. He'll have to wait for a lull in this work schedule and bring in some friends. So the whole damn house will need to be clean and accessible. If you'd ever seen our house you'd know that's a very daunting task. Also we'd have to be comfortable with strangers in the house. As a temporary solution I taped Clingfilm all around the bath to prevent leaking. It's been very effective these past few years. But it's ugly. I'd like to seal it up nicely but I can't because of all that other stuff.

Now however, if it were to come up he'd just say well put some sealant around it then. So when I think about doing that I think okay, I can do that. I've seen it done before and now I know how to use the sealant gun if I need to so that's great. But I have to somehow clean the area without dripping water down the gap because after seeing the water tank in the loft I'm very worried that the floorboards could be rotting or will rot if I get any more water down there. And I somehow have to peel or scrape off 20 year old bathroom sealant and then fill it up with some new stuff but if I peel away the old stuff the gap will be far too big to just whack in a little sealant. It'd be wider than my thumb. How much sealant would it take to go all round the bath? Would it even stick or would it just fall down on the floor in a big sploppy mess? Yes I said sploppy intentionally, a combination of splat and sloppy. I used the word splop to describe the plasterboard adhesive when I was working with Napoleon.

When I think about how daunting that task is I lose all drive and desire to do it then I get depressed because I feel so useless and just five minutes earlier I was happy and energetic thinking I want to do something. Maybe something useful. I know. I could seal up the bath. Yeah. I can do that.
So. I think that's enough rambling now.

Bluebiird out.