Thou shalt not …

Today we shall examine a few of the 10 Commandments and perhaps their lesser known applications in modern life:

Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vein.

Although to be honest, it wasn’t exclusively the Lord’s name I was taking, there was a fairly indiscriminate taking of anyone’s name in a 2 mile radius peppered with a robust dose of more general Anglo Saxon.

Our fire traumas continue. Having been outbid on the umpteenth fire, I decided to go for a buy-it-now-brand-new-deal instead. Money paid, I waited for a week in eager anticipation of the delivery. Unfortunately it seems I was under a false impression of what I was expecting to have delivered. I thought I had paid for a wood burning stove. Turns out I paid for a pile of mangled metal doing a rather jolly impression of a piece of modern sculpture.

After some furious messaging, we are currently waiting collection of the ex-logburner and I am back to that familiar old place I like to call Square 1.

Six days you shall labor and do all your work … unless you are on a flexible working initiative.

And so it came to pass that yesterday, after weeks of prevaricating, I finally got off my backside and decorated the landing. Well, most of it anyway, the thought of wielding a roller at the top of a ladder overhanging the stairwell was a little too much.

To make up for my attack of waftiness, I tackled another of my least favourite pastimes and changed the light switch instead; which I’m sure to you seems worthy of a shrug, but to me is enough to make my blood run cold. It comes from having woken up one morning in a previous, more haphazard existence, and flicked a half installed light switch, at which point the entire lighting loom went KAMBALM!! lovely scorch marks appeared around all the ceiling roses, and I danced round the flat, shaking my hand and cursing the day Faraday was born.

Anyway, I digress. The hall is now (mostly) the colour of the rest of the house, which has meant that I have now started to put up the pictures that I have been collecting for the last few months. There is still a lot of wall left to fill, largely due to a lack of frames, so if anyone is lost for gift ideas in the coming months, please, please, please can we have some frames. Preferably from a charity shop, preferably all different and any size smaller than A4. The plan for the opposite (and still unpainted) wall is even more grand, but I won’t tell you about that just yet.


And finally:
Thou shalt not covert thy neighbour’s teddy.

This is a little story I thought might cheer up those of you that are in need of a smile. Keith and I came home the other day expecting the usual barrage of over friendly dog to greet us and were a little surprised to see that the welcoming committee had been reduced by half. We assumed that Harry had managed to lock himself in the bathroom again, which is something that happens with regularity as he still, at the noble age of 3, hasn’t quite come to terms with his own body length. Keith wandered round the ground floor calling as he went, but nothing, no sign of Harry.

The next thing we heard was “f’dump” ….. “f’dump”, “f’dump”, “f’dump”, as Harry flumped his way down the staircase and sat on the wrong side of the locked baby gate, quite obviously having just woken up and now just as confused as we are as to how he has managed to spirit himself through a childproof gate.

Fearing for Colin’s life, we hustled the dog back through the gate and went to view the damage.
Everything still in place and Colin, although slightly grumpier than normal, was clearly still in one piece. On the way back downstairs however, something caught my eye.

Keith, did you move my teddy? No? Well why is it on our bed then?

To explain, I have an old fashioned, scruffy teddy that sits on a chair in our room. Except it wasn’t sitting on the chair, it was sitting in the middle of our bed, looking for all the world like it had decided to take a stroll.

The only clue was one slightly damp arm.

Harry, it would seem, having surveyed the upstairs, had decided that he would curl up on our bed for a snooze. Not wanting to be lonely without his usual partner in crime, he had picked up my ted by his arm, jumped up onto the bed and curled himself around it.
That hound never ceases to amaze me with his soppiness.