Well, yesterday was the end of an era. As the snortlepig looked on in silent outrage a slightly creepy vanful of homeschoolers loaded up Bridget and Saffron into cardboard boxes and drove them away. Farewell, useless chickens. I miss you very, very slightly.
Yesterday was also the day we got the key to the new house. We walked a box of sewing fabric over in the pram and inspected the house, rather nervously as we’d only seen the place once. The paint was a little bit skungier than we remembered and the bedrooms a somewhat more awkward shape, but we also discovered a couple of arty features we hadn’t noticed - namely a sloped ceiling in the spare bedroom and storage under the window seats. So it was OK. The snortlepig loved it, mostly because there was plenty of room for playing dead frogs on the floor.
Inspired by this I planned to spend today trundling back and forth with the pram, unpacking things. Unfortunately today was also the heaviest rainstorm since the deluge. Fortunately the Internet conked out, so I was forced to be productive and ended up packing half a dozen more boxes. Can anyone explain how we had 7 ice cream containers in storage but 15 lids, when we hardly ever buy ice cream in any case? Very odd. Anyway my dear friend Eva is coming around this evening to help me take a carload of boxes to the new place… a somewhat mixed blessing, as Eva has formidable housekeeping skills which force me into de-smegging the house before she gets here. I hate it when people are tidier than me. Thing is, they usually are…
During a break in the rain showers the pig and I went outside to scrape weeds out from the cracks of the path. I ended up amazing myself by emptying out two metal buckets, making drain holes in the bott0ms with a hammer and nail, and planting capsicums. Somehow picking up a hammer still seems immensely empowered and transgressive - pathetic really, as I sprang from the loins of a woman for whom knocking down walls and upholstering furniture is all in a day’s work. But my usefulness has traditionally been strictly limited to the kitchen, so there you go.