Thursday 28 June 2012

Global warming

You know your day's set to go badly when it starts off with a yawn so big you pull a muscle in your jaw. Honestly, I felt like a snake trying to swallow an egg! We had some crazy weather today too; it started off cloudy and muggy and then the sky went a peculiar shade of greeny/grey - like something out of 'the wizard of Oz', shortly before it absolutely scythed it down with the worst thunderstorms we've seen it ages. The contents of our garage (including all 150 of the kids vehicles and my new mower - more about that in a minute) are spread out all over the back lawn drying, thanks to the garage flooding. I love a good thunderstorm me, always have. Although peering out the window squeaking "Did you hear that?! Look at that rain!" is entirely different to going out in it to do the school run. I set out this afternoon to fetch The Daughter in just a t-shirt (because I figured the less I wore, the less I'd need to get dry when it rained) armed with a brolly, and wouldn't you just know it? Glorious chuffing sunshine. All of those people who had come out wearing anoraks and expecting rain were now sweating into their polyester sauna-coats. And we had a moment of mirth when the boy from round the corner was riding his bike around the street, fell off and was practically submerged in about 2ft of standing water on the road!

Ooh, yes! My new lawnmower! You may remember that I mowed over the wire of the old one, thanks to "Oooh-Ooooh!" the neighbour distacting me. Well, despite setting the guinea pigs to work daily and having begged, stolen and borrowed mowers from family and neighbours for the past few months, my parents bought us a new one! To be fair my dad probably got cheesed off with having to bring his mower round here on a weekly basis. But it's not just one of those cheapy plastic things that  would have been perfectly happy with. Oh no. It's an actual proper grown-ups mower - a Bosch no less! I eagerly set about mowing my front lawn, proudly taking my time (which wasn't hard because the bloody thing weighs a ton) so everyone saw, and hoping "Oooh-Ooooh!" didn't come out and throw me into a panic. In the back garden I quietly marvelled at how close I could get to the edge of the lawn without the blades hitting the paving slabs like an angle grinder, and the capacity of the grass collecting box. Cor, I really do need to get out more. Speaking of "Oooh-Ooooh!"... she recently fell and had a spell in a nursing home which nobody really expected her to come home from. But she did, and has gone from having hardly any visitors (and knocking on our door at 10pm because her kitchen light's gone off) to having crowds of people turning up daily. Now, the nice bit of me would think 'Ah, how lovely! They've realised how much she means to them and are turning up, en masse, to show her their devotion in her final days!'. Except the massive, loudmouthed cynic in me cancels out the voice of the nice bit by shouting "You know that they've spent the last ten years doing their best to avoid her constant bleating and pretending she's losing her marbles, and are now forcing themselves to spend half an hour listening to her talking about her sciatica whilst simultaneously casting their eyes about the house and earmarking what they want when she's dead!" And quite honestly, who am I to argue with a massive, loudmouthed cynic? Especially when it's right!

No comments:

Post a Comment