The day started as normal, waking the children around 7.30am with not a care in the world.
(Well, a few cares, but the central heating appeared to be working so at least I was warm and not caring.)
Back in my room I was slowly getting my brain in gear, and hoping that I’d have time to put a wash on before going to work. Then, whilst I was thinking how annoying it is that I can hear all the water coming down the pipes from my children’s bathroom past ours, I realised that actually the water wasn’t coming down the pipe any more. No, it was coming in through the light fitting.
A mad rush upstairs to halt my son’s shower (shame!) and stop the water flow. Given most of his shower was all over the floor I think I can guess what happened: the question now is how to prevent a recurrence.
This didn’t put me in a great mood. Curse the builders, yet again…
I shouted at my daughter, telling her that she’d have to get a move on because I wasn’t going to have time to help her with getting ready for school. Thankfully this worked, because the next problem was just a few minutes away.
It involved homework.
“Did Dad replace the ink in the printer?”
Well, no – of course he didn’t. He got home from work at 10.30pm and then did a couple more hours work and then fell asleep. Printer untouched.
And it was a packed lunch day… and I then discovered that we had no bread either.
And now there were only about 5 minutes until my son had to leave for school. Cue more anger, frustration, and a lot of turning the air blue.
I worked out changing the printer ink. [Helpful tip: press a lot of buttons. Hold them down for 2-3 seconds and see if ink drive thingy moves. Then notice instructions are ‘printed’ on the plastic. Mobile phone has a nifty torch thing, which proves invaluable if you actually want to read grey plastic print when under the stairs.]
Then I hooked up the laptop to the printer and it wouldn’t communicate at all. In fact, it had a healthy printer queue of items to be printed in the last month.
So I then unhooked it and put the homework document onto a pen-drive… only my husband’s aged computer didn’t recognise the format of the document from the (comparatively) new laptop.
At this point I was just about finished for the day (it was only 8.40am). I had to drive my son to school – which I loathe doing – and it was touch and go whether he arrived before the bell. I remembered just after I’d dropped him that Ofsted were visiting… Bet the school loves parents like me!
I dashed home with barely enough time to put the dog out before going to (paid) work. When I arrived I was asked how my father was doing. My father? Oh, yes, last week he had an angiogram and that was my concern. This week, it’s flooding and food and forgotten homework.
I love routine. It is so much quieter and predictable.
Though would I then have anything to blog about?
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