Super king!

Ian has never managed to fit on our bed without his feet sticking off the bottom, so after Christmas we decided to be extravagent and invest in a super king size bed.

This shows the king sized mattress on top of the super king.



William enjoyed the temporary double mattress experience immensely.

Quite an event

Today we decided to take a trip to Bristol to go to Ikea for the first time and look at their kitchens. We also went to asda at Bristol as their food is much cheaper than Sainsburys. It appears we picked the wrong day - it took us 3 and a half hours to get home due to a burning lorry on the M5. The lorry caught fire in the early afternoon and the motorway is still closed now at 8 pm. How is it that in Australia they can deal with fires covering thousands of acres, but in Somerset they can't handle a single lorry. According to the news on the radio "what you have to understand here is that we have burning paper and cardboard...". All good fun!

Chirruping

No, this is not a blog entry about birds. Two days ago I was downstairs and heard a strange sound from above - very brief, less than a second, but shrill. My instinct was that it was a bird on the roof, but then I realised that it wasn't quite natural. My next thought was that it must be someone next door - they're often making drilling / sawing sounds as they've been doing some rennovations to their house. I came to the conclusion that they were sawing metal pipes (they did have their gas heaters removed the week after we had our central heating put in). Only when the sound began to repeat at regular intervals of about 3 minutes or so did I realise that it was coming from our house.

It turns out that when the battery is low our smoke alarm 'chirrups' (it actually uses that word on the alarm). The smoke alarm was here when we moved in and to my knowledge it's not happened before. I think every house I've lived in has had a smoke alarm, but this is the first I've ever heard chirrup.

Picture tag

I have been tagged by my father on Rambles From My Chair with a picture tag.

The rules are:
Go to the 4th folder in your computer where you store your pictures
Pick the 4th picture in that folder
Explain the picture
Tag 4 people to do the same.

I chose the insects folder on my computer, and the 4th folder was the butterfly folder. The 4th butterfly was Argynnis paphia, the silver washed fritillary.



This photo was taken at one of my favourite nature reserves in Devon - Bystock Pools. In addition to a large lake, some smaller pools and lots of heathy ground Bystock has a beautiful meadow that's host to a wonderful array of insects.

I'm afraid I'm going to fail at tagging people to do the same. Whilst I do read a couple of other blogs, other than family (and all but one have been tagged), the writers of those blogs have no idea who I am.

The lowest ever score

Today I'm quite glad that although I worked for the University of Exeter for 3 years I don't actually hold a degree from there...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7852553.stm

Home

Some photos of our new warm home...

It's over

It has been a difficult week. The plumbers were quite friendly, at least much more so than the last two we had in, but both were ill and though not our fault we both felt guilty to the point of almost feeling sick at one point. They were supposed to arrive on Monday, but because John Elliott (they have the same name as Ian, which is why we chose them) had a bad back they didn't arrive until Tuesday when they had an additional helper. On Tuesday afternoon Alan Elliott (John's step-Dad) told us he'd come to our house that morning instead of going to the hospital to confirm that he had lung cancer. His words were 'he couldn't let us down' and now he has to wait til next Friday to find out. Given that they had already arrived a day late he decided he couldn't go to his appointment. Sadly his step-son didn't seem to have tried to convince him to go.

I had hoped that the plumbers would proceed room by room so that I could put some furniture back, but they didn't put all the floorboards back until Friday afternoon. We spent yesterday moving furniture around and I'm pleased to say that we are nearly there. Of course little is where it used to be due to the presence of radiators, but we're very pleased.

William behaved very well on the whole and very few of the tools upset him (although at times he was frustrated at not being able to leave the lounge, there being floorboards up in the dining room). The one thing that did scare him was when they filled the system with water and Alan let the air out of the lounge radiator. If there's one thing that William really fears it's hissing sounds. Ian once hissed like a snake after watching the film Anaconda and William fled the house.

I shall blog some photos of the house this afternoon after we've finished the kitchen.