E-mail from my brother: Stab! Stab! Stab!

A new mail from my brother and the bathroom saga continues!
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Hi Fay,

So it’s good news on the scan front I read.  Hurrah!  Words can’t describe how good that news is.  You’ll also be pleased to hear that we’ve got our bathroom finished and we’re happily taking showers and having hot soapy baths like normal people again.  Not really.  The bathroom is not finished.  Obviously your good news has lifted our spirits immensely … but hey, we could really do with a proper shower now the night time temperature has dropped below zero degrees here.

It took two days this week to waterproof the new bathroom floor, one day to get the tiles partially laid and will be next Tuesday before they’re finished.  Then we can fit the bath, toilet, vanity unit etc if the project manager can find the back of the fag packet he wrote his plan out on and fish out the old envelope he jotted down the subcontractor numbers on and give them a call to come round.  Juliette says that if it takes another week before there’s even a hint that we can finally have a shower she’s moving out and taking the kids with her.  So I’ve paid off the builders to go slow and look forward to watching Lord of the Rings Extended Edition and sleeping in until I’m no longer tired!  Yay!

Part of me thinks I should have done more of the work myself but then there’s that pesky learning curve.  I polyfilled the nail holes last week and it’s amazing how such a simple task can become a problem.  The first set of holes looked like I’d mixed the polyfiller in my mouth, sneezed it onto the wall and then wiped the residue off with my cuff.  Come the end with a bit of practice I got the nail holes looking like they’d been polyfilled by a team of nano-robots and lasered true by the Swiss.  But I just don’t have the time to be mucking about at the moment, the daily grind continues.  We had a washing pile so large this week that it was voiced by Brian Blessed.  The Ice Box where we’ve been taking flannel baths has lived up to it’s name this week too what with the temperatures dropping below zero and all.  It means that if you flush the loo after 2am you have to wait until sometime after the sun has come up before the pipes unfreeze and you can flush it again.

We had our project manager come round this week and all he could talk about was a TV show he saw about Inuits living in an area so cold that if you took a wet shirt and twirled it around your head six times outside it would snap in half because of the cold.  Brilliant story.  Now see this echoing bathroom, devoid of all porcelain accoutrements?   When will it be finished you motherf*cker?  I said this of course in my head while I nodded to his Inuit story.

One of our cars has started stalling for no reason too so I took it into the garage.  They told me that they plugged the computer into it and the car couldn’t tell them why it was stalling.  I suggested waterboarding the car until it talked but instead they suggested resetting this computer so it starts “learning” how I drive again.  It’s a Honda Odyssey, not bloody Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2.  I don’t need it to “learn” how I drive.  What’s it going to do, give me a score when I finish a journey?  The computer needs to “learn” not to switch the engine off when I’m doing a right hand turn at low speed.  Simple.

Other than that we’ve only heard one rat in the loft since I killed the other one last week and even that one has stopped nosing around up there.  I reckon it was looking for it’s pal and came across the tiny rat head on a spike I set up there as a warning.  Underneath I’d written the words “I’m behind you! Stab! Stab! Stab!”  I like to give rats nightmares.  Of course I didn’t do anything of the sort because cutting a rat’s head off and putting it on a spike is entirely too icky and as a rule I don’t like to anthropomorphize anything.  Anyway, the rat that’s left is probably the wife of the rat I killed and now she’s gone off with a broken heart.

Continue to take care of yourself, give some serious thoughts about visiting us here down under when your winter sets in and our summer kicks off because by then we’ll definitely have a bathroom.  Probably.

Love,

Mark xxx

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As always Mark......