There's a hole in my house

Is a big hole. Is a door-shaped hole.

I had a weekend of not working, being passed like a bucket from one set of friends to another, and filled like a bucket with a succession of good things: wine and oysters and paella (in honour of the late Keith Floyd) and more wine, and that was Saturday; and then coffee and Bloody Mary and beer and curry and more beer, and that was Sunday.

And this morning I was oddly still in bed when the door was knocked upon, by burly men who wished to take it away and replace it. I had been promised a week's notice of this, but no. So I am having an unexpected extra day of not working, while workiepersons do their workieperson thing of alternating work with not-work, of which there are various varieties: the chatting, and the smoking, and the drinking tea, and the disappearing entirely for unpredictable periods. And meantime the cats are shut up (I hope, unless they've tunnelled out), and there is a hole in my house, and I am reading Steven Brust and drinking coffee and not working. And at the end of it all I shall have a new door, which will be black and hopefully better than the old one. There may not even be a half-inch gap underneath it through which the winds can whistle and the cats can sniff the world.

Don't wanna

Ach. The door is in, the men are gone, my house is all my own again. The boys are fed, Mac is purring on my knee (a double win, for it means he isn't tormenting Baz elsewhere). My own dinner is in process; there is a large dish of steak and kidney stewing gently with mushrooms and onions and fennel and tomatoes and red wine and beef stock. Another day I may toss pastry together and make a pie of it, but today the thing itself will be sufficient.

The rest of that bottle of wine is available, and so is the rest of the day. I am poised and ready to work - and I don't wanna. I feel tired, after a long day of doing nothing. I had planned by now to be watching The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, which is one of my shan't-be-guilty secret pleasures, but there was a confusion in my head over what channels I currently have available, and this turns out not to be one of them. I might of course watch a DVD instead; but a window of time opened, and I thought "I could get some work done after all!" - and I don't wanna. Excuses have I none, I just don't wanna.

This is unusual these days, and I do not like it, Gunga Din.

Two nice things

Still don't wanna, but I am at least still here (unlike Mac, who has abandoned me on pursuits of his own).

Here are two nice things, as I am fed up with the other kind:

* trotting downstairs to find myself confronted by New Door, which is black and imposing and secure-looking; and realising as I do so that I am not in fact bent double as I drive into a headwind, because there is in fact no howling draught coming under the door any more

and

* tasting the steak-and-kidney in the oven and going om-nom-nom. When I was a child, kidney was something that I did not like; and my mother would cook it sometimes anyway, because offal and cheap cuts were very much our thing, and so I would have to eat it anyway. And I have not cooked steak and kidney ever, because that memory lingers, despite the knowing that in my adult life I have actually learned to like kidney very much. So today I bought steak and kidney, and am cooking same. And it tastes gorgeous.

Tell me two nice things. Just two. It ain't hard.