Dreams vs Reality
I just sat with a cup of coffee and opened my Instagram feed. I don’t post, but I follow and this morning, a lovely photograph was top of my page with a few words from Nigel Slater.
He’s right. It is the kind of day when settling down with lovely things would be a treat. But around here, the reality is somewhat different.
On Thursday evening, whilst sitting quietly watching the TV, a tooth fell out. Not so much a whole tooth, but possibly a crown…though on later inspection, it appeared to be more than that. So kicked off our weekend.
Rather than offer a photograph of my horrible tooth, enjoy a few bunches of daffs, given to my sweet friend and I by the publican when we met for lunch at Kelmscott on Friday lunchtime. The news re my tooth wasn’t good, for there’s not enough “real” material left to build on and an implant is scheduled. Oh well…
The thing is, my Hero had been up early that morning to go down three floors to switch on our heating first thing, so we’d have hot water for our showers. I can imagine your thoughts here: Do we live in some backwater where automatic controls aren’t available? Well, no - but feeling rather hot and sticky sometime last week, we realised our heating wasn’t switching off as it should and seemed to be stuck in the “full power” setting. Whilst we await the arrival of an engineer (drums fingers on desk - hopefully tomorrow) my Hero has to switch it on and off manually. I know. The obligations of a Hero are many and varied.
When he went downstairs on Friday morning however, he heard a “peep peep” and looking around, soon realised it was coming from the fridge freezer in the kitchen. Had we left the door open? Or not closed the drawer of the freezer part properly?
Everything wasn’t quite defrosted, but wasn’t as frozen as it should be.
He made sure it was all properly closed and when I came downstairs shortly afterwards, I set it to “Power Freeze” and hoped for the best.
Meanwhile, he was installing the replacement fourth hub for our wifi mesh network, in place of the one that had failed a couple of weeks ago. Since then, we’ve been “limping along” on three hubs, but that meant our wifi network didn’t really cover the whole house.
Ta Dah! The good news of the day is that we are back up to full strength and no longer get to watch that little scrolling wheel on a screen any more!
This morning, more photographic euphemisms are needed, unless you’d like to see evidence of a completely defrosted freezer, the contents piled into the kitchen sink? So enjoy the bulbs I bought at the greengrocer last week, just coming into flower, right on cue. Some of the freezer contents are now in Bettine’s freezer, some into the food recycling. Thankfully, the fridge section is still working (we think!) We have our next few meals sorted: defrosted summer fruits, a cake for tea, a half loaf of bread and a couple of other bits and pieces that we might use in the next day or so. But oh, aren’t the contents of a defrosted freezer horrible?
Fortunately, my lovely Mothers’ Day flowers need neither refrigeration nor wifi and in their vase by the kitchen window, are not suffering from the sauna like temperatures that occur from time to time. Such things have quite distracted me from my broken tooth and though I can’t claim the house is an oasis of calm and tranquillity like Nigel’s this morning, we are only dealing with a few relatively minor mechanical failures (tooth excepted). So I am now going to keep my fingers crossed as I turn on the oven to roast a chicken for lunch and hope to be able to uncross them to peel the potatoes and prep the veg. I’d planned rhubarb with cheescake for pudding, but I guess summer fruit compote will go just as well and the rhubarb will live till tomorrow.
Life, eh? It feels real right now.
