Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know!

I received a call from my wife as she was leaving the hospital. She attempted to describe exactly, and in great detail, exactly how the consultant extracted a sample from her wrist to biopsy. All the time I was yelling at her, “Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know!”, but she pressed on with great glee. I guess she decided that if I couldn’t share the pain, then I was at least going to experience it mentally.

I’m not going to attempt to describe what is actually wrong with her wrist but it does sometimes swell to a disturbing size and cause great discomfort to her, so she has got it looked at and it looks like it will require painful and debilitating surgery.  She will likely lose the use of her right hand for a number of days which will make things a little awkward for all of us.

My part in this to do more housework, apparently. She always says I need to do more housework, which I never feel is fair as I do a fair bit of tidying and cleaning, loading and unloading the dishwasher, making the beds and dealing with the rubbish and recycling, and I am the one with the full time job. However, this time she means I need to do nearly all of the housework, which is understandable really.

It’s a bit worrying really, as should my wife be unable to do much with her right hand, she is going to find looking after out kids difficult, which means I may need to take time off work to help out. Unfortunately, we live in a small maisonette and cannot afford short term child care on only one salary. My wife works part time with variable hours.

Anyway, it did mean I had to take today off, so I was able to watch Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire with my daughter who has just finished the book, my wife insists she reads the books before the movies, and then I was able to attack the kitchen.

We have lived in this house for about seven and a half years and have put up with a small and messy kitchen for all of that time. My wife  complains that it is messy because it is small, but I suspected that it is messy because she doesn’t throw anything away. Three bin bags full of out of date food from the cupboards have proved me vindicated in that assertion. It is still a mess but at least we have more space in the cupboard to hide it in.

A miserable New Years Day

We were supposed to be going for a walk in Richmond Park this afternoon but just as we were about to leave, my wife mentioned it was raining. Now, being the eternal optimist, I assumed it was that dreary kind of drizzle you usually get so when  my daughter said she wanted to go anyway, I said I would take while my wife would stay with my son, who absolutely hates rain.

When I say walk, what I meant was that we were walking but my daughter wanted to ride her bike. I am a bad father because I still have not gone out with her enough on her bike for her to remove her stabilizers. She’s eight. So I went out the back door to get the bike and found it tipping down. Cue apologies and sobbing.

So now we are all dressed up with nowhere to go. Brilliant start to the New Year.

Mice, teeth and telephones

I had a dentist appointment today. My previous appointment had been cancelled due to it being booked under the “wrong dentist”, which was discovered at the time of the appointment. It wasn’t a totally wasted trip as I had been booked with a dental hygienist beforehand anyway, but it would have been a little awkward to admit to my boss that I had taken a couple of hours out of the working day to have my teeth cleaned. I had to pay £45 for the privilege of having my gums bled and being taught to use dental floss.

Today was the day they were going to remove a large part of tooth and replace it with something that looks vaguely similar, but before that there was a mouse to dispose of. It wasn’t dead. We don’t believe in killing cute little creatures just because they inadvertently started sharing our living space. Well, we didn’t until my wife found a huge hole nibbled into a new pack of bagels. Now it’s war. Yessiree, that is probably the last mouse to be chauffeur driven to a patch a green area well away from our house and released where, I’m sure, it made a beeline to the nearest occupied building before dying a hideous death in a snap trap, or eaten by owl. Good luck to the owl who wants to eat this one though, what emerged from the trap was rather wet and bedraggled. My normal method of checking if the trap has an occupant is to shake it gently, but I think this mouse was of a rather nervous disposition and consequently, had urinated and defecated liberally inside. After I looked inside the trap, I just threw it into the nearest bin; I would not be needing it again anyway.

After the dentist visit, which turned out rather a straight forward affair, after the tribulations of the previous visit, I returned home to wait for the cable guy to come and fix our telephone line. It had been crackly ever since it was first installed and then we discovered almost two weeks ago the dial tone had disappeared. The first email was responded to after five days with a message that it looked OK to them. After buying a cheap phone to verify to was not our current cordless phone (which is wasn’t) and the realisation that we still got a dial tone from the unused BT socket (thus rendering the need for a second phone redundant as a test), I emailed them back saying, no, it’s definitely you. And now we have a working phone with no cracking. So that was a result.

An odd day for turning 41

Yesterday was my birthday. I am now 41. Odd that birthdays have become such non events nowadays; I think my kids were more excited about it than I was.

It was an early start as my daughter was going to Littlehampton and had to be at the school at 8:15am. As that is the time I usually leave for work, it made sense for me to take her. However, not much time for opening cards and presents, so that would have to wait.

After work, I came home to pizza and potato wedges and a shop bought cake, in the shape of the TARDIS. I was pleased to note that it had Matt Smith as the Doctor and was a Victoria sponge, my favourite type of cake.

For my presents I received a cushion with a Dalek and R2D2 embroidered with a heart  between them, which was a little bizarre, and a Wii game called Family Trainer which included a dance mate although none of the games appeared to be dance games. I also received a box of chocolate brazils, which are my second favourite chocolate only beaten by Ferrero Rocher. The Ferrero Rocher are a guilty pleasure as I am certain they are not really marketed towards someone like me, i.e. male.

My daughter was apparently felt sorry for my pitiful pile of presents and decided to make me another from a couple of pieces of paper: a cushion and a paper Doctor.

The evening was rounded off with a rather pedestrian episode of Smallville.

I gave up an iPhone to give my kids bicycles

I made a decision. I will stop buying things I can’t afford. It sounds so patently obvious but we all do it, stick it on the credit card and pay it off later, only how many of us do? I know I’ve used my credit card telling myself that I will pay it back after I get paid, but then something else catches my eye and so my credit bill increase almost imperceptibly until suddenly I am paying two hundred pounds to pay off the minimum payment. Well, no more. If I want something I will now do the very old-fashioned thing called saving.

So, there’s this new iPhone coming out (you might have heard of it) and as I am near the end of my current phone contract I thought, I would like that very much indeed. My wife has a (quite frankly old-fashioned) iPhone 3GS which I have been rather impressed with so, with my new resolve, I started saving figuring that I could afford to buy one within a few months.

In the meantime, my daughter’s bike situation was coming to a head. She is six and a half and has yet to have a bike. My wife bought a wreck for a fiver over a year ago which then lay neglected outside out back door. When eventually we tried to get the thing roadworthy, we found we could not get any stabilisers to fit. So we turned to Freecycle , which is a noble endeavour, and found someone willing to give us their old bike, which turned out too big and also difficult to put stabilisers on. (Still she will grow into it.)

Out of desperation, as she really needs to learn how to ride a bike sooner rather than later, I bought them two new bikes. A 16″ purple girls bike for her and a 12″ red and blue balance bike for our four and a half year old son.

I think I will be waiting a little longer for my new iPhone.