frustration and bed-swopping

[freckles_and_doubt]

I-Burst is living up to its name. Bursts of actual connectivity, interposed with long periods of sulking during which the signal needle drops down to the bottom of the dial and quivers despairingly, and pages either refuse to load entirely, or refuse to load any pictures. Go Fug Yourself with no pictures is strangely pointless to the point of being Zen. However! the Evil Landlord has contracted one of the I-Burst guys to come and sort out an actual aerial, so my remaining fragments of hair may be rescued from being torn out completely, and Gmail may stop booting me randomly out of chats. Personally, I think we need a weather balloon and about 100m of cable, so we can suspend the I-Burst box in the air above the house. The Evil Landlord, for some reason, is unkeen about this idea, but I think it'll add a certain je ne sais quoi to the house.

In other news, my possible departure from these shores looks all the more likely in cosmic terms, as (a) I have just secured a new bed, or rather one that used to belong to the Friendly Psychologist, but which is much newer, back-friendly, more aesthetically pleasing and less creaky than mine*, and (b) the Evil Landlord has just discovered a nice builder gentleman who will, sometime in the new year, unleash Bride of the Army of Reconstruction in order to reduce my bedroom to rubble and rebuild it from the ground up. Well, not entirely, but they'll dig up the floor and damp-course it properly, remodel the bathroom, raise the roof and fix the cracks in the walls. This will, inevitably, be the signal not only for the Evil Landlord's bankruptcy, but for five overseas universities to offer me ideal, lucrative contracts I can't possibly turn down, at which point my head will explode.

Actual essays marked this weekend: 2.5. Number of Ankh Morpork City Watch novels re-read: 3.5. Number of possible but non-functional configurations tried out in re-assembling the new bed: 6. Outlook for rest of day: nose to grindstone, at least until this evening, at which point we get Thai Take-Out (i.e. jo&stv invade our kitchen and cook incredible Thai food while being fed cocktails courtesy of the Evil Landlord's new obsession with such after acquiring a cocktail recipe book). We'd be drinking Cosmopolitans if first_fallen and her evil partner hadn't raided the 'fridge and flattened all the cranberry juice on Thursday night. *miff*

* taking suggestions on creative things to do with an elderly pine queen-sized bed and dodgy mattress. Should probably not involve catapults and the nasty next-door-neighbour, as the EL has already suggested that and been turned down flat.

Comments

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

You can't make Cosmopolitans with flat cranberry juice...?

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Certainly not, sir! Pshaw!

O rly?

[first-fallen.livejournal.com]

I had one (1) glass of cranberry juice, thankyouverymuch. I can't speak for the Phleep, he is a well-known marauder.

Heh, heh, heh...

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

Must've been the elephants, then. Sneaaaky elephants.

(Don't disregard the possibility. We have an albatross in our kitchen.)

Re: Heh, heh, heh...

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

aaargh! you mentioned the elephants!

Actually, I can see a herd of health-conscious stealth mini-elephants really getting into the cranberry juice. Spraying it around with their trunks. Horribly cute.

But don't mention them anyway.

Hmmm, I need a cute elephant icon for moments like these...

Re: O rly?

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Actually, I have to apologise for that, I malign you both horribly. You didn't flatten the cranberry juice, you simply hid it in a bit of the fridge above eye level, where I didn't look for it. (That's a collective You, but I darkly suspect Phlp, who has that tall thing going). We found it last night, after we'd made Moscow Mules instead. So apologies and, in fact, thanks, as the Moscow Mules were dashed good. (Vodka and ginger beer and lemon. Yum).

Re: O rly?

[wolverine-nun.livejournal.com]

ooh, that does sound nice

Bed

[confluence.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

You could put it in the Cape Ads. Otherwise, if you just want someone to come take it awayyyy ASAP and don't care about money, you could advertise it on the Cape Town Freecycle list. It's a mailing list where people give stuff away for free. I think you need to be subscribed to post: freecyclecapetown hyphen subscribe at yahoogroups dot com.

But that's not very creative. You could dismember the frame and reassemble it into a bookshelf. Then you could dismember the mattress and turn it into a wobbly, padded wire-frame model of Great Cthulhu.

Re: Bed

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Bookshelves good. Giant Great Cthulhu, not so much. Not that I have anything against His Tentacular Monstrosity (Ia! Ia!), but I'm trying to get rid of clutter. Also, it's a very old mattress with springs going sproing in all direction. I suspect dismembering it might simply result in a free-form model of Shub Niggurath. Also, bookshelves good in the abstract, but in the concrete I'm not entirely sure where we'd put another one.

Thanks for the Freecycle tip. I was going to spend the morning phoning up all the homeless shelters I can find in the phone book and seeing if any of them want to come and take it away, but if they don't I'll try that.

Re: Bed

[egadfly.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, if the mattress just fell apart, you'd probably have a horde of cute little murderous shoggies.

They might not be the most competent of household servants, but perhaps you could train them to locate missing cranberry juice. Or even keep the el*p**n*s at bay.