1630: Sunday Night

Unimaginative post title, I know, but it’s Sunday night (well, 00:30 on Monday morning, technically) and my brain has pretty much switched off. When I wake up tomorrow, it’s back to the doldrums of being unemployed and looking for work — not that that ever really went away over the weekend, but both Andie and I have kept ourselves busy enough that there wasn’t too much time to worry about stuff like that.

We painted the spare room this weekend — something we’ve been meaning to do for a while but haven’t really got around to. Andie’s going to wallpaper two of the walls since she discovered during the initial decorating process of this place that she’s actually quite good at hanging wallpaper. (I, on the other hand, can pretty much guarantee that I will not be any help whatsoever at hanging wallpaper, since I am a clumsy oaf who is not to be trusted with anything that required accuracy and careful placement.) The other two walls have been painted and just need another coat before they’re done and dusted.

We wanted to get the spare room done because we have visitors at the end of the month — my friends Mark and Lynette are coming over from Canada and are dropping in on us for a few days, which will be nice. It’ll be the first time I’ve been able to host visitors and actually offer them a proper spare bedroom in which to sleep, so we figured it would probably be best if we covered over the revolting yellow and dark blue walls the previous occupants left the room with — not to mention the big patch of bare wall where Andie had scraped off some paint having discovered it wasn’t clinging to the wall all that well. (A previous occupier had clearly been a heavy smoker, since the wall behind the paint stank of smoke; hopefully we’ve dealt with that effectively now and won’t have to worry about big chunks of paint falling off.)

Andie also remembered that the inside of the built-in wardrobe in the spare room needed painting, since it was covered in graffiti from what appeared to be a teenage girl. (I guess we know who the smoker was?) The owners before us had had a small child in the bedroom, so I don’t think it was their work — I don’t think they were really old enough to know what “shagadelic” meant, nor do I think that they had such fickle tastes in men as the writer of said graffiti clearly did.

Anyway, that’s been painted (well, primed) over now and should actually look reasonably nice by the time our visitors arrive. Once that’s all done, we just need to do another coat of paint in the toilet and the inside of the house will be pretty much done for the immediate future, though there are bits and pieces we may want to change in the long term, like the rather ’70s carpets in several of the rooms.

The garden is another matter. The previous owners clearly hadn’t had much to do with the garden, as it was rather overgrown when we arrived and has only continued to get worse since we’ve been here. I attempted to tackle the lawn with a lawnmower that my parents helpfully provided, but said lawnmower was regrettably not all that good, flattening the grass rather than actually cutting it, so we have replaced it with a brand new Flymo that should hopefully be a lot easier to manoeuvre as well as actually cutting the damn grass. I’ll have the joy of trying that out at some point in the near future. Excitement.

For now, though, it’s time to head to bed, and back to the job hunt tomorrow morning. I really hope this doesn’t take too much longer; while thankfully I have a bit of “rainy day” money in the bank — and right now certainly qualifies as the proverbial rainy day — I would rather, you know, save that up to spend on something useful and/or nice than just spend it on the boring necessity of, you know, living. Oh well. We shall see; this whole hideous jobhunting process is not something that, in my experience, you can rush, however much you emphasise the fact that you can start immediately and would really actually rather like to.

Fingers crossed that there won’t be too many of these posts before I can joyfully exclaim that I have a new job. And fingers crossed that said new job isn’t rubbish, though with every passing day the fear grows that I will, indeed, end up doing something rubbish.

We shall see, I guess.