Monthly Archives: June 2013

Jun 19 2013

The traumas of moving house

Moving house is always difficult. Packing, labelling, loading, driving, unloading, unpacking, working out where to put everything, finding the missing screws for the bed, hunting for the power cables, trying to stop the cat escaping back to the old house the list goes on and on. Throw in 38 degree temperatures and a HUGE batman/comic collection and you’ve got a recipe for a very stressed Scifi hubby.

He barely lets me into his ‘office’ and the cat is banned completely so imagine his face as five removal men descended on Monday and “manhandled” all of his preciouses into boxes. To be fair to the removal men they were very careful, used several trees of tissue paper and enough bubble wrap to keep the whole of the city of London in ‘stress bubble paper’ for several years. All the boxes have ‘fragile’ and ‘this way up’ stickers and there was no nasty crashing noises. I guess the proof will be in the unwrapping…

20130619-101324.jpgWe have 381 packages of stuff. Yes really. At a rough estimate over half of this is his collection which partly says he has a lot of stuff and partly shows how the removal men have wrapped each Batman so well that you only get six into each box. The removal guys have two wagons; a small one which seemed to have all our household furniture and boxes in and a huge shipping container on wheels which seems to mostly contain Batmen.

20130619-101208.jpgWe had planned on putting most of his office into the basement of the new house but we opened the doors last night to discover it the cellar was damp. He’s now trying to work out how to get all of his stuff into one of the bedrooms. The floor space is actually slightly bigger than he had before but the ceiling slopes so he’s lost of lot of storage space up two walls. I think it will all fit but its a bit like a giant Tetris puzzle at the moment.

We still need to go back to the old house to do some final cleaning and give the keys back to the landlord. Just as well really as I’ve realised that we left the Wampa and Luke in the fridge!

Jun 4 2013

Maybe I should retreat into my shell and hide

I had decided not to post any more about Scifi hubby and the snails (see here) as I thought it was just encouraging him. However he hasn’t actually stopped painting them. If a snail is stupid enough to come near our house it will be spotted, gently captured and sent away with a fresh paint job. We are a snail paint shop. He then sends me a photo expecting me to pat him on the head and tell him how clever he is, hence no more blogging about snails.

That was until today. Yesterday a particularly large and brave stupid snail actually came right up to our front door and I duly received a photo of Iron Man snail.

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I didn’t think much of it until I was walking home from work today and passed a group of children in the playground near our house, they were walking across the grass carefully cupping their hands – which were full of snails! Except for one child who only had one snail in his hands and the other kids were all looking at it and laughing. You guessed it. It was Iron Man snail!

I always wondered where the snails went after they were released, how embarrassed they are and whether the other snails laugh at them? Now I’m wondering if Scifi hubby has accidentally started the latest children’s craze and how far it will spread? Maybe moving house soon is a good thing…

    Explanatory note: You may have worked out that we don’t live in the UK or USA. The country we live in is a bit like I imagine the UK was like in the 1950s – in particular kids walk to school on their own from a very young age, they play outside after school, they don’t live on computer games, they still draw chalk pictures on the pavements, every residential area has a well used playground (and not used by drunks and druggies) and most of the kids don’t have TVs in their bedrooms. This probably explains a lot…