“My inspiration has run dry”

Venice: Unlike me, not dry.

What better title for a post than a Natalie Imbruglia lyric? That's right, folks, nothing is right, I am, y'know, torn and shit. Yup, I’m as dry as a nun's cunt, as we used to say back in my old hometown.

The reason for this desert-like state of bloggy being is, as it always is with me, a valanga of work. (That's your Italian lesson of the day. Valanga [literally "avalanche"] is used to mean "shitload".)

Saturday morning I started working at 6am and I finished at 8pm. In between, any breaks I had were used to eat lunch, go food shopping and to the post office, and start clearing out the kitchen.

Sunday I started work at about 8:30am, having had a bit of lie-in, and I finished at 6pm so that I could do some more work clearing the kitchen and have my dinner. I then went back to work at 11:25pm for an hour.

What's with all the kitchen clearing? Well, this week is the week we are having our new kitchen fitted. Everything is changing (except the cooker and washing machine, and I think we are beginning to regret that we didn't decide on new ones of those, too).

So for most of this week we will be without a cooker, oven, and hob, and we also won't have a kitchen sink. Red spent much of her "free time" at the weekend preparing some delicious Italian dishes that we can throw in the microwave, rather than resorting to takeaways every night.

Yes, a fun weekend was had by all. We're into equal-opportunity misery in this household. Even Cat gets a piece of the action. He has been put in a cattery for the week (we call it a spa retreat when he's nearby). This is because the last time we had workmen in (for the bathroom a couple of years ago), he got so freaked out that he legged it out through the back door and we never saw him for hours. When he finally returned he was very quiet. And at about 11pm we realized that he had cut open almost the entire length of the lower part of one of his back legs. Midnight trip to the vet. Severed the ligaments. Hit or miss whether he'd ever be able to use it again. But Doctor Jim was a fucking total genius and you'd never know now from pictures like this the extent of the original wound. We don't want to go through that shit again.

Right, it's 9am. I'd best get to work. I hope to get round to some of my blogpals and check out what y'all have been writing in recent days. Toodle-oo.