lethargic_man | The weekend...

I've had a hectic weekend; my parents have been here to help me out with my flat (despite my mother being ill and not really up to it). The results have been mixed. My father attempted to repair my leaky cistern, but the repair failed. On Sunday he tried again (after wasting half an hour of precious time driving around looking for a hardware store we had bad directions to), and succeeded... only for the cistern to develop a new leak, in a different place. Oh well, at least this new one I can put the toilet brush bucket underneath; it doesn't drip outside the building onto people's heads.

Then we went to Ikea and got a bookshelf, and chairs and cushions, but they'd sold out of the table I wanted in both the Bret Park Ikea and the one in Edmonton. Very annoying, as this was half the reason my father drove half the length of the country in the first place. So no throwing Shabbos meals any time soon, and no housewarming party, and regular small Shabbos lunches for me,

snjstar and

curious_reader and will continue having to involve shlepping to

curious_reader's place in Hendon.

But my father did manage to replace the dodgy power point, and swap the heaters around so the powerful one is in the lounge, not the corridor; and I used their carpet shampooer to shampoo the carpet (not that it looked particularly cleaner afterwards), and we got wooden slats to nail over the juliet balcony door to try and reduce heat loss (albeit that it took me about two hours to do a half an hour job); and my father fixed the sticking front door and did a pro tem repair on the lounge door (and we got parts and tools for me to put more hinges on in my own time).

Meanwhile, I've got my bike back from being repaired in Newcastle.

In other news, I'm feeling down too much at present, and have decided the time has come to overcome my lethargy and switch back to getting up at the crack of dawn so I can cycle to work in daylight. Hmm.. sunrise on Wednesday is at 7:57; I reckon that means half-dark at 7:46, so getting up at 7, hence bedtime on Tuesday will have to be 10:30. And sunset at 4:25 means half-dark at 4:38, so I shall leave work at 4 o'clock and make up the missing quarter of an hour's work on Tuesday. This looks doable, though I may not end up staying for the meal after Tuesday's Borders meet. Though I may not have done that anyway...