beesknees

Kind of freaking out about money, in the sense we've been spending it on the things we've been saving it up for all year or more. But we're still spending it. Eep!

One of them was plane tickets to N Ireland in August (cross fingers Covid rates stay the same or continue to drop), stay in R's brother's old place and see his dad. Let the kids run nuts on their grandfather's farm, like I used to as a kid. Different farm, tho. Different country. If timings are kind, I might be able to have my UK driving license then...we'll see. We'd hoped to coordinate with R's sister, back when we were planning this in 2019, but she's due to have her second boy in late July...happy reason to miss out on seeing them.

This break in carpeting coverage has kicked us to get in place some messy flat changes, figure out ways to get rid of our old industrial shelves that we just pile stuff on to get dusty. We've bought a long clothes-hanging bar to put up along one wall, and bracketed shelves above it already installed. Brackets to hang our bikes from the wall, too, in the space we used to have a clunky old chest of drawers, half of them stuck or broken. Put a lot of things out in the estate "Free Stuff!" spot, including all the yarn I can't picture using up in the next year. In fact, I've already finished a blanket from some of the remaining stash:
(I was mentally calling this the "pillowfort blanket", since a photo of the initial row was the first thing I couldn't post upon finding the site was closed for renovations. Wondered how long the blanket would be when the site was back up. Sigh.)

I've also gone old-school and ordered a large pegboard, and pegboard-related accessories, to get my sewing stuff out of cluttered boxes and up on the wall next to my desk.

It's nice to see the place change in good ways.

Hit a snag in the lease-renewal process. We've been trying to keep this totally separate from the ongoing pipes disaster, but it came up in discussing with the solicitor a weirdness in the lease's blueprint. He pointed out that our lease (from 1999) notes on the first page that a major works improvement to pipes was recently carried out, and said he had to raise this with LH if in fact this work was not done to adequate standard and had led to flooding, have that addressed before we consider signing the updated lease without challenging it.

So, okay...turns out he's a good solicitor. Not shying away from a real tangle we didn't ask him to take on, out of sheer professionalism.

But still. I am so tired of this whole mess. Ignoring it certainly won't make it go away. But ugh. Could we not tick one thing off without its neb in the way?