Excuse the Mammoth Blog.

I’ve finally, finally moved house! Watching the removal men unloading my worldly goods, which I’ve had in storage for 6 weeks, I was amazed at just how much stuff I actually have. ‘Where do you want the bureau?’ they shouted. ‘It’s NOT a bureau, it’s a 1950s cocktail cabinet!’. So needless to say, almost 2 weeks after my stuff was shipped in, I’m still unpacking, aghhh. Fortunately I’d over prepared and booked 4 weeks off work.

I still have a mass of stuff still sitting below the stairs and my spare room/craft room looks like a grizzly bear’s been in and rifled through everything. My progress in the spare room has been majorly hampered by the fact that I have, for the second time in a year, lost the screws to the spare bed. Hmm, as I told the woman at Ikea when I went to order more parts, ‘I’ve put them in a Tupperware container with a green lid, somewhere so safe I can’t find them’.

When my spare room does start to take some sort of shape I have the most amazingly amazing 1950s kitchen utility cabinet that I got from a lovely lady on Freecycle who was clearing out her late Uncle’s house. When the usual 40 per day emails from Freecycle popped into my Inbox I huffed and puffed and cursed the moderators for not removing me from the mailing list like I’d asked... and then, oh dear god, a 50s utility kitchen cabinet. I replied to the email right away hoping that I would be the first to reply, and was devastated when the lady kindly replied that I was the second person to respond and that since then she’d been inundated with people wanting to take it off her hands. I was even more devastated when she managed to upload a picture of the cabinet to the site and it was beautiful. Anyway, knowing how Freecycle works and knowing that the cabinet could only be collected at certain times on certain days, I told the lady how keen I was on the cabinet and being the second in line for the cabinet, not to hesitate in contacting me if it somehow became available. Anyway, to cut a long story short, the first emailer couldn’t collect, the lady liked my email address (retrodollybird) and knew that the cabinet would be cherished by me, I sent my mum and cousin to collect the cabinet as I had to be at the new house for the removal men and assumed the cabinet would be light like the majority of their kind. The cabinet turned out to be very tall and very heavy, and my excellent stepdad and his brother had to finish work early and rush over to put it on their roof rack, while being told by my mum and I, ‘It was too good to miss!’. Despite my cousin being very anti-vintage, he actually loves the cabinet and keeps checking on it like it’s a new baby every time he visits.

Talking of new babies, I would like to announce the arrival of Lily Young, a 2 year old black Scottie dog weighting 15.9 lbs. She may be 2, but she’s my new baby and although bought rather than rescued, she is as the vet put it, basically a rescue dog. She’s a bit like my Mum’s Scottie Jack. Totally unsocialised except for dogs, scared yet interested in everything, only part toilet trained, not lead trained and not used to regular meal times or dog food. The vet seemed to think she was probably kept by a breeder for breeding and for whatever reason, sold onto her next owner, and then to me; the woman I bought her from being unable to cope with training a 2 year old who you’d expect to be trained. Luckily, suspicious of her low price, I bought lily with open eyes and expected her to need as much work as Jack. Fortunately she doesn’t, just the basics that a new puppy would, and in return she is the most loving, faithful and sweetest baby girl ever. She’s also very stubborn and insists that since I can open the drawers under my bed, she will find a way to do it too.