Domestic rambling

I hate getting up early in the morning so I tend to be cranky when young women ring up and want to Make Appointments for me. These always seem to require an early start. I’m even curt with the people from my doctor’s surgery (“You want to drag me all the way up to Cressex? Can’t you book me into the surgery five minutes walk from my front door? It’s why I registered with you!”) and they are presumed to be trying to do me good. So the young lady who called up last week from the water company (I nearly wrote ‘the Water Board’ which is showing my age) got the full Grumpy Old Git treatment. I let myself be persuaded partly out of awareness that I was being needlessly disagreeable and partly because she was wanting to send someone round to check for leaks and ways of saving water. I found my hypochondria extended to water related matters and if I didn’t have the check done I’d worry.

A Nice Young Man came round this morning and asked me a lot of questions before fitting a device to my ball-cock that would retrofit the loo to do either a full flush or a short one just like more modern toilets. He took out the bag of water absorbing gel that was the last New Fashionable Gadget to try to reduce consumption. I wonder what will replace this one and whether I will be around to see it.

He also left me an hourglass/egg timer thing which was supposed to encourage me to take less time in the shower. (See picture.) I balked at this and told him loudly that I was Retired, Dammit! I wasn’t watching any sort of timing device any longer and certainly not a four minute one.

And then I asked him (we’re getting to the point of this story now: be patient) whether he ever got those recurring dreams in which he found himself back in school, having to do it all over again. I was leading up to my explaining that when I retired my recurring dreams shifted from going back to school to having to go back to work.

And to my astonishment he said no, he’d never had dreams like that! All his dreams were focused on the future not the past! I was that astonished. I nearly lost it entirely, the smug young bugger! How dare he go around being all positive and focused! A little angst and worry would do him good!

(Seriously, I’ve never encountered someone who didn’t get that dream before. Well apart from Hartley Patterson whose dreamscape is seriously weird and deserves an investigation by someone who is in need of a PhD topic.)

I’m up early again tomorrow too to go up to the surgery in the Cressex to have a twenty-four hour blood pressure monitor fitted. I hope that it will show that the daily gym sessions I’ve been doing for the past week are helping. They certainly aren’t having any effect on my weight yet but I’m feeling a lot less seedy than I did before taking up raising my heart rate under controlled circumstances every day.

I find that playing the Grenadier Guards Band’s version of Sousa marches works best to keep me going on the rowing machine and the exercise bike. THE THUNDERER, LIBERTY BELL and EL CAPITAN make you really want to push on up that simulated hill.

And I received today something I’d been looking forward to a lot: my copies of the print version of the web comic NARBONIC which I Kickstarted some considerable time ago. Already re-reading the stories of Mad Science and True Love is keeping me from doing things I really ought to be doing.