People, we are fighting in a WAR. Yes, it’s true, although by "we", of course, I mean "me". I am fighting in a war. My enemy? The garden. Yes, it is that time of year again: the time of year when I begin a relentless and monotonous cycle of fighting back the garden, only for it to grow like billy-o (Who IS Billy-O, by the way?), forcing me to fight it back AGAIN the very next week. * Deep sigh *
I hate our garden. I hate it with the kind of all-consuming hatred I generally reserve only for Crocs. It’s not a very big garden, but despite not being very big, it somehow manages to be extremely high maintenance – which I guess makes it a lot like its owner, now I come to think about it.
Anyway, this year I put off that first important grass-cutting for as long as I could. As anyone who hates gardening will tell you, once you’ve given the grass that first cut, that’s it, there’s no going back. You will have to keep re-cutting it every few days now for the rest of the summer, in a boring and occasionally dangerous procedure that will give you absolutely no pleasure at all. It goes a little bit like this:
1. It rains all week 2. On Saturday morning, just as you’re contemplating a long, leisurely lie in, the sky will clear for a few, brief hours, and the sun will come out. 3. While everyone else is enjoying this unexpected sunshine, you will have to rush to throw on your oldest clothes, and begin the backbreaking labour of GARDENING. 4. At some point during this hard labour you will burn your scalp. It will be painful to brush your hair for the next week. Despite this, you will forget to wear your hat again next week. Someone should slap you. 5. As you finish the aforementioned backbreaking labour, it will start to rain. 6. It will rain steadily for the next week, so you will not be able to actually use or appreciate the garden that you have so carefully tended. 7. Until the following Saturday, of course, at which point there will, once again, be a few precious hours of sunlight, all of which you will spend up to your knees in mud.
And the thing is, gardening is HARD WORK. On TV, they always make gardening look like a very genteel kind of activity, normally involving a pretty sun hat (gah) and one of those little pads which you kneel on while gently plucking some flowers, which you will later arrange tastefully around your beautiful home. Yes, Bree from Desperate Housewives, I am looking at you…
In real life, of course, gardening is nothing like that. NOTHING. Actually, gardening involves wearing your oldest clothes with a pair of wellies (mine have pink and orange flowers on them, but even so, people, EVEN SO!), and hauling a piece of machinery twice your weight over a piece of rain sodden ground until either it breaks or you do. Normally I am the one who breaks first. Then, this Sunday, as I roughened my hands and almost broke my back giving the garden that first tedious going over of the year, THIS happened:
Yes, that is my back: my battle scarred back, maimed by Public Enemy Number 1: the tree in our back garden. It reached out and maliciously scratched me as I bent down to work like a slave on the ground underneath it. It was the tree’s fatal mistake, for if you are a tree, you really, really don’t want to get on the wrong side of a woman who has an axe in her garden shed. I mean, I don’t think I actually DO have an axe in my garden shed, but I could get one. And trust me, if these hostilities are ever repeated, I totally will. The flora and fauna are not my friends. The garden is not a green and pleasant place: it is the scene of my torment every single weekend in summer. Still, at least I didn’t burn my head this time….
In slightly happier news after yesterday’s whine-fest, my car has passed its MOT today. Yay! Party for Amber’s car! Hooray for that lean, green machine, which would, quite frankly, have had a bit of a cheek to have expected me to spend any more money on it this year, especially mere weeks before I fly to Florida to buy up Sephora relax.
Now, with the money I thought I’d be spending on a new combobulator or flux capacitor or something, should I:
A. Buy this dress –
B. Buy this dress:
C: Buy this dress:
D: Order all three dresses, try them on in the privacy of own home and then send two back. Or, you know. one back. Maybe.
or
E: Not buy any dresses. Slap self with a wet fish instead, because, seriously, when will I realise that I DO NOT EVER WEAR DRESSES. Or, indeed, go anywhere that would require me to wear a dress. I wear skinny jeans and vest tops every day, and hell, that’s probably not going to change any time soon.
Buy I would really like to wear more dresses. Like, around the house or something.
Your assistance on this matter would be appreciated…
So, last night we did our usual "winding down from the weekend" thing: dinner, glass of wine, calling the police at midnight to complain about the EAR SPLITTING NOISE from people blasting out loud music from their houses… Just the usual, really.
This experience was slightly strange, though, for two reasons:
1. The music was coming from at least two streets away
2. It was Terry who finally flipped and and called the police about it, not me, Freaky Noise Hatin’ Girl.
Being the party animals we are (Look, you try living in the Little House of Renovation Horrors and see how tired you are of an evening…), we had gone to bed at about midnight. Terry was settling Rubin down for the night, so it was I who heard the noise first. In fact, I heard it the second I walked into the bedroom.
THUMP! said the noise. THUMPTHUMPTHUMP! Then THUMP! it said again. Then it did that thing where it shut the hell up for a few minutes, making me think that maybe it was just a car stereo or something, and then THUMP! it said again.
Instantly, my head exploded.
Regular readers will not need me to explain to them how totally incandescent with rage excessive noise makes me. For the benefit of new readers: excessive noise makes me incandescent with rage. Seriously.
Well, I threw open the bedroom window and glared around the street, trying to work out where the THUMP! THUMP! of the booming baseline was coming from. It was at this point that I made my shocking discovery: the noise wasn’t coming from our street at all. It was coming from some unspecified location far, far away – a distant galaxy perhaps – way the hell past our street and in the direction of the estate that lies beyond it.
Now, I know sound tends to carry at night, but in order to understand just how ear-splittingly loud this music would have to have been for us to have heard it from INSIDE OUR HOUSE you have to know that there are no other streets really close to us. There’s our house, then there’s a row of houses opposite us, then there’s a strip of freaking FORREST, which normally acts as a pretty good sound buffer, then there’s a footpath, then there’s the next door estate.
So, basically, this must have been one hell of a party is all I’m saying.
Anyway, I must have been even more tired than I realised, because rather than pacing the house hysterically for hours, ranting about how INCONSIDERATE and FREAKING STUPID other people are, I chose to rant hysterically for only about two minutes, before putting in my earplugs and trying to go to sleep. Which left Terry do deal with the onslaught of noise all by himself.
Now, Terry is a pretty placid person. Nothing really annoys him. Seriously, you could come and wash your car near our house any time with the stereo blaring, and Terry wouldn’t bat an eyelid. I know this because most people do wash their cars with the stereos blaring. But Terry had just spent an entire week destroying and then recreating a kitchen with his bare hands, which is why it came to pass that I woke with a jolt some time later to hear him calling the police.
Yes, people, Terry had finally Had Enough. It was no more Mr Nice Guy for him. Sadly it was "No More Mr Nice Guy" for the police, either. The woman who answered the phone, you see, wanted to send someone round to our house to "assess the noise level". This person would call us first, she said. Did I mention that it was now about ONE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING? Well, it was. And we were not at all down with the idea of getting out of bed and sitting down with "noise assessors" in the middle of the night. I mean, what happened to the old method of dealing with loud parties, whereby the police would drive into the street in question, identify the source of the noise (which, given that we could hear it from MORE THAN TWO STREETS AND A FORREST AWAY, shouldn’t have been the hardest job in the world, ya know?) and tell them to shut the hell up? Seriously, the type of noise that can be heard from that far away is not the kind of noise that needs "assessing". It’s the kind of noise that needs switching off. No?
Apparently not, though. We have no idea whether the police did go out to the noise makers, but the THUMP! THUMP! went on until about 1.30am in the morning. Which sucked. And this, my friends, is why everyone in the world should own ear plugs…
In slightly better news, I found my gym mojo – it was hiding underneath the kitchen sink. Latest crazy running time: 45 minutes. I am back in the game, people! (What is the game, though?)
I really thought the whole kitchen situation couldn’t get any worse. "It totally can’t get any worse," said Terry, cheerfully wrenching a cabinet off the wall with his bare hands. And I believed him. Then last night I went downstairs and found this:
Which, really? Is WORSE.
And then there’s this:
ALSO WORSE.
On the plus side, the whole no kitchen = no food thing means that a Chinese takeaway is on its way to us right now. Even so: WORSE.
Remember that whole, "Hey, I am totally not bothered by the renovation of the kitchen, and the fact that I haven’t been able to use the ground floor of my house for three weeks now AT ALL" thing? Well, this was my cooker and food preparation area yesterday:
It’s worse now. Oh, so much worse! And no, the empty wine bottle isn’t empty because we drunk it in a fit of kitchen-inspired rage. In fact, I have no idea what Terry was doing with the empty wine bottle. And I don’t want to know.
So, dinner at ours this week, anyone? ANYONE?
Luckily, that cooker is getting replaced soon, because I don’t think I’d really want to use it again now. In fact, it’s lucky that it’s ALL getting replaced, because to be perfectly honest with you, when a house gets THIS MESSY, I just want to sell it and start over somewhere else. Somewhere clean, with a working kitchen and no sink in the living room. Speaking of which…
Kitchen sink watch 2008! Kitchen sink in da house! It’s planning on crashing on that couch for a while longer, while it works through its issues and learns to accept that yes, it is a kitchen sink, and its role in life is to… do sinky things. In the kitchen. What really annoys me, meanwhile, is the fact that these pictures don’t even come CLOSE to illustrating what a total and utter wreck we’re living in right now. I mean, seriously, that picture just looks like we have a normal house, albeit one with a sink on the couch, doesn’t it? What you can’t see, of course, is the fact that the floor you can see here? Is the only clear area of floor in the entire room, the rest being taken up with mess. MESS.
Still, at least that whole wooden cutlery tray thing is working out pretty good for us:
Also pictured: Mr Potato Head. Hi, Mr Potato Head! It’s just a shame we can’t use you no more on account of no longer being able to, you know, EAT, thanks to the building site that is our kitchen. Hey, remember FOOD? Man, that stuff rocked. Oh, and yesterday? The toaster broke. Now we’re having to use the grill to make toast, the food of champions, and given that I didn’t even know we HAD a grill, that’s not been much fun at all.
About three more weeks of this to go. Send food parcels to the usual address… (And also: wine)
Well, the weekend = good, but every so slightly bizarre.
Saturday started out in in the usual way: with a chef throwing bits of egg at me and expecting me to catch them in my mouth. I really wish I was joking about this, but nope, I was a performing seal for the night, folks. My life’s ambition has been realised!
You see, when we were in Florida last year, Terry and I went to a teppanyaki restaurant with my parents. It was great, and there was no catching of eggs in mouths AT ALL, which I find is usually a good sign when choosing where to eat of an evening, so when we discovered that a similar restaurant had opened in Edinburgh, naturally we decided to go along, and to take four of our friends with us. What we DIDN’T realise, of course, was that two of those friends would be forced to don chef’s hats and spend part of their evening throwing uncooked eggs into the air and attempting to catch them ON THEIR HEADS, but hey, we’re sure those friends will start speaking to us again soon.
And it could have been worse. It could have been ME who was forced to try and catch the eggs on my head, and as these were RAW eggs, that could’ve been messy. Like, really messy. Messier than the mess I actually made, when the chef went round the table and threw bits of cooked egg at us all, expecting us to catch them IN OUR MOUTHS.
Terry went first with this and, having spent a good chunk of his childhood practicing for just such an eventuality (And to think some people said that time was wasted!), managed to catch the piece of egg in his mouth first time. I really hope no one’s eating while they’re reading this, by the way. Especially not egg.
Then it was my turn.
Now, I should preface this story with the fact that I cannot catch at all. AT ALL. Not even with my hands. I spent a large part of my childhood pretending to have forgotten my gym kit, so that I wouldn’t have to do sports at school, and when they DID force me to play basketball, I managed to perfect the fine art of running round the court looking like I was doing something, but actually keeping as far away from the ball as was humanly possible. Seriously, I was a MASTER at it. (Interestingly, you’d think this would make me really good at dodgeball, but nope, if I try to play dodgeball I will get hit every time. Every. Time.)
So, what I’m basically trying to say here is that I can’t catch. Or, indeed, throw. I was that kid that was always picked last for all the teams. If you try and throw something to me, nine times out of ten, I will totally miss it. The other time, I will be so surprised to have caught the thing, that I will instantly drop it in shock, often emitting a stupid, girlie squeak as I do it. So no, the "catching eggs in my mouth" thing was never going to work out. Nevertheless, I gave it a shot and managed to bat the first egg sideways with my head, sending it all over our friend Gillian’s coat. Sorry about that, Gillian, if you’re reading this.
The second egg burst spectacularly on my left eyeball, in a scene which still makes Terry laugh even now when he remembers it. Luckily for me, the egg was cooked. Unluckily for Gillian, the third one I tried to catch hit me square in the middle of the forehead, and only just missed falling into her open handbag. (A word to the wise: never sit next to Amber at dinner.)
After that, the chef gave up on trying to turn me into an egg-catching sensation, and moved onto his other victims, all of whom managed to acquit themselves much better than I did.
That was just the start of the night, though.
After dinner, we went for drinks, and then at some point during the drinks, Ewen and Gillian announced that they had been invited to a birthday party later that night, and were willing to risk social embarrassment by taking Terry and I along with them. And we were really glad they did, because as we pulled into the street where the party was being held, there was a HIGHLAND COW standing in the middle of it. A highland cow.
A Highland Cow, yesterday (Note: our cow didn’t have the massive scary horns. It was a lady cow.)
And do you know,that highland cow trotted before our car up the hill, leading the way (almost) to the party we were headed to, and making me wonder what the HELL was in that egg I had eaten that was making me hallucinate being guided through the night by a COW. Then the cow turned into a nearby field and trotted off, presumably to go and tuck itself into its Highland Cow Home, wherever that may be. I sometimes still think of it now.
So, that was our Saturday, cows, eggs and all. How was your weekend?
So, after last week’s video, some of yoos wrote to me to say yoos were all worried about me n’ my “loneliness”. Let me just say here and now, the Rubinman is NOT lonely. Not when he has his main man Almeida in the house, anyway…
(NOTE: Parental advisory! Some scenes may not be suitable for small chhildren!)
I’m exhausted. No, seriously: EXHAUSTED. So, remember I told you about how I’m going to Florida in June? And how that’s going to be lovely and relaxing and I can’t wait? Well, that all may be true, but as it turns out, I will REALLY NEED THAT HOLIDAY because when you work for yourself, and particularly when your work involves churning out a ridiculous number of blog posts ever weekday, the run-up to any break is not so relaxing, really.
I, you see, am currently less than a quarter of the way through writing advance posts to cover the period I will be away on holiday. IN JUNE. I started doing this at the start of this month (APRIL! I started preparing for my June holiday in APRIL!) and let me tell you, that writing-my-posts-in-advance thing is getting pretty old already. My hope is that by the next time I decide to take a holiday, I will be rich enough to be able to just pay someone else to cover for me, but in the meantime, it’s a case of all work and no play makes Forever Amber a pretty dull blog. Which is why today, my friends, you are getting a list. A list which is a follow up to my previous Five Things You Didn’t Want to Know About Me post. I call it ‘Five More Things You Didn’t Want to Know About Me’. Here it is:
Five More Totally Random Things You Didn’t Want to Know About Me
1. My fingernails grow freakishly quickly. Seriously, if I didn’t trim those bad boys every couple of days, I’d be like one of those old women with the long, gnarled nails that look like tree branches before a month was out:
This would be a good thing, obviously, if I was one of those women who enjoys carefully tending to her nails and looking after them like they were precious babies, but, er, I’m not one of those women. I am lazy. And I can’t stand the feel of long nails on the keyboard, so I’m currently working a "hands-that-could-easily-belong-to-a-man" look instead. And speaking of keyboards…
2. I can type very fast, but with no accuracy whatsoever. My most used key is the "back" button. Seriously, I used it about ten times in this bullet point alone. Gah.
3. I hardly ever watch TV. OK, that’s a lie: I watch Neighbours religiously, and I’d urge every last one of you to do the same, and I love me some Lost. The rest I can take or leave, and I will mostly leave. I have never been one of those people who is obsessed with TV shows, which sometimes makes social occasions difficult for me, because I just have to stand there dumbly while the people around me go, "Did you see Heroes? Did you see The Apprentice? Did you see Insert-TV-Show-of-Your-Choice*?" Me, I’d rather read a book. Speaking of which…
4. I read anything from 2 – 5 books every week. I’m a fast reader, and I’m also a compulsive reader: it’s pretty much my default activity, so if I’m at home and I’m not working or doing chores, I’ll be reading. When I go on holiday, my suitcase is weighed down with the number of books I have to take with me. Because of the volume of my reading, though, I tend to read a lot of rubbish: I can’t afford to buy a bunch of new books every single week, even at Amazon’s prices, so I’m forced to rely on the meager stock of our local library, which has pretty slim pickings indeed. This is why I sometimes end up with books I’m too embarrassed to be seen in public with…
5. If there was some kind of freaky disaster, and the only food left in the world was bread, I’d be OK with that. I could happily live on toast for the rest of my life if I absolutely had to. In fact, I could really fancy some now…
* Not an actual show. Although it wouldn’t surprise me if it was, to be honest.
Now, I realise I’ve probably just jinxed not only our current "redecorating the house/making our lives temporarily unbearable" project, but all of the future ones we embark upon too, with the use of the above headline, but seriously, we’re good. So far. I mean, I realise most of you probably expected Terry and I to drop through the floor, or blow the roof off or something like that in our continuing quest to own a House that Doesn’t Suck, but really, we’re totally blase about this now. It’s like, "Kitchen sink in the living room? What kitchen sink in the livingroom? Be careful you don’t trip over the cooker in the hall on your way out, now!"
That’s not to say that the kitchen sink ISN’T still in the livingroom, obviously, because, well, it is. And the cooker, actually. But the upper level of the house now has a complete set of new floors, and we didn’t even break anything to get them:
I’m now pretty much living upstairs full time, like some kind of mad old hermit lady, venturing downstairs only to watch Neighbours and go to the gym, and actually, not really to go to the gym because… meh. After that whole "running for 49 minutes and then almost dying" stunt, I kinda lost my mojo a bit. OK, a lot. There’s only so much time you can spend running on the spot before you suddenly realise that hey, this is actually pretty damn boring, and it would appear that, for me, that time was 49 minutes. And two seconds.
Anyway, Terry is downstairs banging at the kitchen ceiling with one of my old hairbrushes (I wish I was joking about that, but I’m not) so I must go and investigate. Wish me luck…
