liv | Good company (Reply)

pplfichi came to visit this weekend, and we had a brilliant time.

I'd had a long and busy week and hadn't done as much to get things organized as I'd like, but Bat and Zair were very unfussy about being hosted in a pretty informal way. They arrived late Friday evening after I came back from shul, and we had food and kept talking until we were shocked to find it was after midnight!

I had to get up early Saturday morning, because I was expecting delivery of Thuggish Poet's partner's sofa, which I had agreed to look after for them because it doesn't fit in their tiny flat. Unfortunately, the delivery man's idea of "first thing Saturday morning, probably around 8" actually meant more like quarter past 11. I chatted to

jack, who gave me some good advice about how to deal with late delivery workers when they are motivated to try to placate you rather than tell you precisely when they plan to show up.

Anyway, the sofa arrived, and it is a giant monster sofa. We had a really good go at getting it in to the living room, but even with the skill of the delivery man and the geometric ingenuity of

pplfichi we just could not get it through the door. It's too long to fit through upright, and too deep to fit through with the seats parallel to the floor, and the back is curvy so that its tallest point it's too high to fit through tipped on its side. Normally you would get round this by taking advantage of diagonals, which is what we tried, but the width of my hallway between wall and staircase is too narrow to have the turning room to do it.

In the end we gave up and put the sofa in the dining room, which we could enter through the French doors at the back of the house. I admitted that the designation of the room's purposes is purely arbitrary, so I could just as easily declare the back room, now dominated by the sofa, to be the living room and the front room the dining room, but I felt uncomfortable with this plan. So in the end we moved some furniture around so that the sofa and the dining table would both fit comfortably in the same room, and I'll live like that for a while and then decide how I feel.

By this point we were starving, as it was after midday and we hadn't really had time for breakfast. We had a snack and then headed to Noah's Ark for a substantial lunch. We spent the afternoon at the Potteries museum, admiring the gold and the really impressive ceramics gallery, as well as some other displays like the local history and the modern art gallery; for a small, provincial museum, the Potteries does these things rather well. We spent the evening at home having more conversations and remembering to eat at some point.

verazea performed an impressive feat of acrobatics to get up into my loft; the people who laid the insulation had managed to jam the access ladder, so he had to launch himself from the top of the step ladder. He also did some poking at my boiler which had lost pressure, but the manual wasn't sufficiently clear to show him how to repressurize it. (Luckily, the internet knows all, so I was able to sort that out today, which made me feel ever so competent!) Oh, and at some point we managed to remember to eat...

Today I had to spend the afternoon at work helping out with open days; I signed up ages ago saying I was willing to work 2 Sundays a year, which I was entirely happy to do, especially as I enjoy working with teenagers and doing public-facing stuff. It's a bit of a pain that my number came up this week, though, because it meant I had to throw Bat and Zair out this morning and didn't get as much time with them as I'd hoped. Oh well, they took several books with them, including Bechdel's wonderful comic strip autobiography, Fun Home. And the (hopefully) future students were good fun.

So all in all that was about the perfect weekend, even with the annoying furniture wrangling bits. More people should come and visit and spend hours and hours chatting to me and drinking tea (or other beverages if you don't like tea).