The calm before the storm

As you may have guessed, it's been a relatively sensible few weeks; Lisa hasn't written to her grandma in about a month because there's only so much space on a page that Mister Donut can take up. The social winds dropped away to nothing this weekend, heralding a 2 month-long gale that's about to blow us all the way to August. It seems that weird things start happening in these kinds of conditions.

We had most of our new stuff delivered on Saturday morning and what started as clearing the room for a dining table quickly escalated into a full-blown summer cleaning. By the time the deliverymen showed up, we had space-bagged or chucked three huge bags of clothes, put away all our scarves and coats, cleared out two cupboards and thrown out a futon. Japan's delivery system continues to impress - everything was humped up the stairs, assembled and cleared away within half an hour and we're now the proud owners of both a dining room and some bench space in the kitchen. The only problem was that the "dustbox" counter we had ordered didn't actually contain any "dustboxes", which made it fairly useless as a bin cupboard for the time being. We farted about a bit more, vacuuming and tidying until I threw up my hands and declared I'd had enough chores for one day. The house, for the moment, was spick and span enough.

This wasn't going to last very long, however - few things spur us into action faster than bins. We decided that a stroll would do us good and walked half an hour or so all the way to the furniture shop we'd bought the counter from. They had every kind of bin imaginable, other than the ones we needed - for a moment I wondered if I could just pinch the display ones, put them on my head and outrun security like a Dalek sprinter. By this stage we wanted a result, so we continued our trudge to another shop and found what we needed. On the way to the checkout we stumbled across the gas stoves and water heaters, momentarily joked about just buying them... and then just bought them. On an unrelated note, I'm becoming an expert at filling out delivery forms.

By 11 o'clock the next morning we were unboxed and set up with our new stove and when the water heater man comes to install that, we will officially have everything our apartment could ever want. We went out a bit later to take one last agonising look at the stoves in our proper electronics shop, fully expecting to see them marked down to half the price we paid; fortunately we had jagged bargains on both. I would probably stop being so impulsive if I didn't keep being rewarded for it.

The upshot of all this is that we can now heat more than 1 pot at a time, we can do the washing up without tipping the kettle into the sink, we don't have to sit on the floor to eat and we actually have things to put our bin bags in. It all seems like a grotesque luxury until you actually have it, then you wonder how you did without. Whether or not we'll be around to enjoy our new "command centre" is a question for another day - we kick off with a beer garden on Friday and then things for several calendar pages. After that, I'm just going to write "dinner party" and then ditto marks for the rest of the year.