Drilling holes

A man came to drill holes in the afternoon
And by the evening, most of the afternoon had gone

– Marillion, ‘Drilling Holes’

Dad came up today to look over my new house for the first time, and help me run network cables throughout it. We spent most of the afternoon drilling a lot of holes all the way through walls, which was somewhat nervous-making but also thoroughly satisfying in an ‘it's my own house and for the first time I am beholden to nobody in the matter of where I see fit to puncture it’ sort of way. Now there's CAT-5 strewn messily all over the place and I shall have to go back at some point and hide it all in trunking. And hoover; never drill holes in walls without having a hoover nearby.

I was a bit nervous about what Dad might think of the house, since he hadn't had a chance to give an opinion (or at least one informed by anything more than verbal descriptions) prior to me deciding to buy it; but although (as I expected) he produced an enormous list of things that could usefully be tweaked, repainted, fixed, grouted and generally meddled with at some point, he seemed to think it was basically a viable dwelling and certainly an order of magnitude better than my current place. Which was, after all, the plan.

Also I've now spent a day in the house in daylight and didn't get a repeat attack of the screaming abdabs at any point, so I can only assume it was indeed just post-completion nerves and nothing to do with the house itself. Phew.

Bibulography

I've recently discovered that I'm able to drink coffee again, which is very pleasant. For about six years now, as long-time readers may recall, I've been hypersensitive to caffeine to the extent that a cup of decaff has been able to give me something resembling a normal coffee buzz, whereas a cup of fully-caff has been known to send me into a gibbering panic attack or something close to it. However, recently I've been finding decaff isn't doing it for me any more, so one day when I was particularly sleepy I risked a cup of proper coffee in a spirit of experimentation, and it did its job and didn't have any ill effects. I still have to be a bit careful if I'm already in a jittery mood for other reasons, and I still wouldn't drink coffee late in the day for fear of trouble sleeping, but a nice cup of coffee of a morning now appears to be an option which is once again open to me. This is a good thing.

(Another option I thought of today, if I'm feeling cautious, is to mix decaff and caff half-and-half. This only works sensibly with instant, of course, but since my jars of decaff and caff instant at home are both the same brand, it works particularly well there.)

Less good is that I've been drinking quite a lot of alcohol (well, by my standards at least) as a means of coping with the stressful process of house-buying, and it's been starting to faintly worry me; so now that the seriously scary stuff is out of the way and it's mostly just hard work from now on I think I'm going to call a halt and stop drinking for a couple of weeks. When I actually manage to move in, an alcoholic celebration of some sort will probably be in order, but until then I'm taking the precautionary measure of staying off the booze.

Accordingly, in the pub this evening I drank non-alcoholic stuff. My usual non-alcoholic pub drink is orange juice and lemonade, but in a spirit of experimentation (yes, another one) I had a go at lime and soda today, which seemed to work rather well in that it had the refreshing citrus nature but unlike OJ+L it wasn't obviously chock full of sugar. If anyone can suggest other nice and not-excessively-sugary pub soft drinks to me, I may experiment further.