Black Doggerel

so last week the council housing officer phoned and told me they'd be finally coming to do my bathroom on May 4th.

Fine, I said. I'll be ready.

This morning I got woken up at 8.30am by a bunch of guys wanting to rip my bathroom out. Me? TOTALLY NOT READY. BECAUSE IT'S MAY THE FUCKING THIRD TODAY YOU WANKERS.

Now? It's 15.30. They told me they'd be gone by 16.30. Last I looked, my toilet hadn't actually been plumbed in.

I NEED TO GO SO FUCKING BAD RIGHT NOW.

so this afternoon two Bournemouth Council workmen knocked on my door to tell me they're coming to refit my bathroom next week.

I am grateful, truly I am. All I do is live here and out of the blue, people come and say NEW BATHROOM FOR YOU! It's not going to cost me anything. I might even be lucky enough to get a shower out of it, and I want a shower like burning.

except this: AUGH I HAVE TO CLEAR EVERYTHING OUT OF THE BATHROOM AND THERE ARE NO SPOONS.
AUGH THERE WILL BE STRANGERS IN MY HOME FOR AN UNSPECIFIED AMOUNT OF TIME AUGH.
AUGH THIS IS MY TOILET THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT DO THEY KNOW I NEED TO PEE EVERY FIFTEEN MINUTES?
AUGH MY HOME IS A SHITHOLE AND THERE ARE NO SPOONS AND THEY WILL BE JUDGING ME AUGH. I KNOW I'M SICK AND MY DOCTOR KNOWS I'M SICK BUT THEY'LL JUST SEE A LAZY FAT BITCH MAKING EXCUSES AND THEY WILL JUDGE ME SILENTLY AND HARD. AAAAAAAAAAAAUGH. DO NOT WANT.

So if you come to see me, I'm sure you'll be impressed
By how well I'm behaving and how well I'm dressed
If you come to see me, hope you're coming soon

OMG OMG OMFG slave2tehtink is coming to see me! In May! She has tickets and everything! WOO FUCKING HOOO!!!

I'm going to need to clean.

( Making plans )

This is better than being offline, but not by very much. I've spent most of the summer lurking invisible on AIM and not talking to people much, but you don't necessarily need to talk to people to feel less lonely - because they're right there, a mouseclick away, any time. Now I feel cut off and miserable.

So I got off my fat white arse and cleaned.

One thing I ought to watch, living alone, frequently depressed and bone idle by inclination, is the state of unspeakable squalor I let my flat get into. I swore I wouldn't, when I moved in here, but I lied. The trouble is that I very easily just let myself not see it, or not care.

The dog and cat hair on the floor had actually felted in places - at least, in the corner where the dogs' water bowl is. It's clean now though.

The flat is still filthy and cluttered with junk and crap, but it is a bit less filthy and I feel better. I am amused by how much my cleaning upset the dogs. Spike velcroed himself to my legs and followed me round in determined "I'm a working dog and I'm helping whether you like it or not" mode. He tripped me repeatedly, scattered the sweepings pile several times and barked at the broom. Squish whined and hid. They're very relieved that I've stopped. Pity I'm going to do it again tomorrow.

...Spike and Squish and I just spent the night on the floor in the communal hallway. Because I'm a fucking idiot.

Mum went to hospital yesterday with pericarditis. That's not why I slept in the hallway. Except it kinda sorta is. I slept in the hallway because when I had to walk over to Mum's house yesterday to feed her cat, I didn't take my dogs with me. Maisie isn't used to them any more and would have been a bit freaked, especially without Mum there.

But I took my keys off Spike's leash to go to Mum's house. And when I took the dogs for a last pee at midnight, I forgot I hadn't put the keys back on his leash. And I locked my fool self out.

According to the man from the Council that let me in this morning, their emergency number for idiot tenants with key issues is manned 24/7. So I could, in theory, have got let back in last night. But I didn't know that, and besides, I had to wait for a neighbour to be awake enough to answer a knock at the door and kind enough to look up the number and make the call for me.

Note to self: Give spare key to downstairs neighbour. I never want this to happen again.

I'm going to have to stop referring to my mother's house as Grimmauld Place. Since she stopped drinking, recovered from the cirrhosis and became a grandmother, she's gone from strength to strength. She's cleaned the house from top to bottom (with only minimal help from me), and she's also repainted and replaced all the nasty old carpet, and if the place doesn't quite look like an Ikea catalogue, it's not for lack of effort - and it certainly smells like one.

So the house will henceforth be known as Phoenix HQ. It's accurate on more than one level, and what's more, it's canon.

(Of course, if I were a real stickler for canon, Mum and I would both have to be dead. But I think we'll let that one slide.)

Today she replaced her old lounge suite, and since we managed to borrow a cousin with a trailer, I've bagged the couch to replace my nasty old blue dog couch. It's twelve years old and it's had some hard, hard wear (I slept on it for a year when I moved back to Mum's, and Squish partially ate it when Mum was dogsitting, got drunk and forgot to feed him) - but since it was a good quality suite to start with, it's still an improvement on the one I had. Plus, it's leather and it's not bloody blue, which makes me happy. The cats liked it too - especially the hole in the seat which lets them climb about inside it. Going to have to do something about that, but I need at least three more rolls of duct tape.

in other, other, news: thank you cottonmanifesto! I squeed myself when I opened the envelope. Marmite as soon as I get to a supermarket!

please forgive non-postiness. I'm in such a slump. Leg continues to give trouble, and there is new trouble from the girl parts with unscheduled bloodshed.

My mother is doing unbelievably well with both grandmotherhood and sobriety. When my niece was born, my sister was terrified and disappointed that Mum wouldn't be strong enough or together enough to help with the baby - she was too weak to even lift her at that point. But she's rallied and recovered like you wouldn't believe, and been a huge help.

I'm proud of her, I really am. I was convinced we were going to lose her, and not only did that not happen, but the fragile drunken trainwreck's been replaced by the confident, competent, funny, sparkling woman who raised me. I am so very grateful.

I need to keep reminding myself of that. The day before yesterday she arrived on my doorstep with about 500 carrier bags full of stuff that I have absolutely nowhere to put. She's been celebrating health and sobriety by having a massive spring-clean, redecorating and de-junking of Grimmauld Place and she packed up every single thing that belonged to me (and quite a few things that didn't) and dumped it all on me in one go. It's in a huge pile on my kitchen floor. I don't have anywhere else I can put it. My own flat needs cleaning, dejunking and organising so badly, and I just don't have the will or the energy to even think about starting. Right now I can just about keep up with feeding everyone, walking dogs and changing litter trays often enough to not have the flat stink of cat piss, and when the extra pile of stuff showed up it was all I could do not to have screaming hysterics.

just keep breathing.

am also grateful for my dogs. we had so much fun in the park today. our friends the three Shih Tzus were there, and also the most adorable Whippet puppy - impossibly tiny and fragile-looking, like a Disneyfied mouse on stilts, and so bouncy and happy. She found Spike a bit overbearing (who doesn't!) but she was very taken with Squish and there was much play-bowing and rompage. I could have watched her all day.

I am so tired of cats and mess.

Am attempting to tidy up a bit before I start with the hoovering. I would usually hoover in the afternoon, but it will help drown out the fireworks. That was my excuse this afternoon for putting it off till this evening, and it's a good one, isn't it? It's even perfectly true - but still an excuse.

Thankfully, the cats are proving a big help with Spike and fireworks. While they're awake and active they distract him tremendously, and while he's still pretty bothered he's not as bothered as I expected. I wish to hell I didn't have to take him out after dark, though.

Hamish (Blade) kitten is getting fat. He still has a waist when you look at him from above, but only just, and when he rolls over - well, his belly is magnificent, tan and silver with darker, gunmetal spots and luxuriant plushy fur like a mink's, but it's also kinda huge. Not sure what to do about it. I generally feed all four of them from one dish, and they like to pick at it through the day - and none of the others are overweight. He gets plenty of exercise - hours of zoomies and swingball and hockey and wrestling - so all I'm doing for now is supervising the day-old chick feeds to stop him stealing anyone else's, which he does if given half a chance. I may be no lightweight myself, but I've never had an obese pet yet and I don't plan to start now.

Naamah Cat is on my lap getting in the way of my typing by playfighting with my hand. She's biting and clawing me surprisingly gently with her front end, but she seems to forget to pull her punches when she brings the back end into play. Ow.

Firefox update is still getting up my nose. I reloaded my bookmarks OK, but the actual bookmarking procedure has a bug in it which means I can only intermittently bookmark pages, and then without titles. I have found a new theme, though. It's not nearly as nice as the lovely black one I used to use but at least it's mostly monochrome and has a bit of texture to it. Am checking the themes page daily and no one has yet come up with a white-on-black theme that's 2.0 compatible. Bastards.

Won't be om IM tonight, or at least not till after I've hoovered and done the litter trays, and maybe not even then. I'm still in my incommunicado mood and anyway, weekend.

Oh, for fuck's sake. I took the dogs out and discovered piss all over the floor in the downstairs stairwell. What the everloving fuck?

I don't know if it was Sloppy Drunk Guy in the flat next door but one, the GSD puppy having a bad housetraining day or what, but I do know it was semi-dried, which means whoever was responsible had left it there at least an hour or so without any attempt at cleaning up.

Rang the Council's "Antisocial Behaviour Officer" (we actually have one of those!) and left a grumpy message on their answerphone, more to forestall anyone thinking it might have been my dogs than in the belief they can actually do anything about it. I've no fucking intention of cleaning that up myself.

In other news, the futon collapsed for good when I lay on it last night - the heavy mesh panel that goes under the cushion part detached completely from the frame and basically dumped me and Squish on the floor. Buggerfuckpisswank. Luckily, I had a moment of inspiration and remembered the stack of carpet tiles someone gave me when I first moved in. They're scratchy, bile-coloured and nasty and the only use I've had for them so far has been to put them underneath things like dogcrates to avoid buggering the lino, but a stack of them underneath the futon proved to be the absolute perfect solution. I R SMRT!

Feeling slightly better. I let the kittens play in and on the old dog couch for a few hours while I took cute pictures of them (and Spike) popping in and out of the cat-hole, then I shut them all in the bedroom and hauled the damn thing out of the flat. Shiny-Headed Cheerful Neighbour earned himself a few Brownie points by helping me get it down the stairs and I've left it leaning against the bins outside. One of the good things about living on a mildly disreputable council estate - people are always dumping furniture, mattresses, TVs and old fridges out there, so there are fairly regular collections of these things. I feel mildly guilty nonetheless, but I really needed it gone.

Talked to Mum and Sister T on the phone. Sister T is going to drop off her house key here tomorrow morning so I can go and sit on my arse at Grimmauld Place with no internet tomorrow while the Housing Association do something to the cavity wall insulation. Mum started to get hysterical about the electricity - she's been worrying for a week that it's going to OMG RUN OUT OH NOES. The fact that it would have taken me two hours of walking to refill it (and she has her car running and is driving again!) simply didn't register with her - IT MUST NOT RUN OUT!

"Mum", I said, "why do you even need the electricity on there? So the house-elves can watch daytime TV? There's no-one living there, the fridge and freezer are empty, why's it so urgent?"

"Um... now that you mention it..."

So I got out of doing that chore.

Cannot post pictures because my battery recharger isn't recharging my batteries for no reason I can think of, and all my batteries are flat. How strangely apt.