Waiting in for a parcel

"It's must be so much easier once you're retired - you don't have to have a day off work to wait for a delivery or an engineer." True, but in all other respects it's just as inconvenient and tiresome.

Still, lets look on the positive side. Your other half has been away with friends and, by staying in, you can get the house shipshape and also do some essential repairs (or, as I prefer, 'home improvements') before she get's back this evening.

Yodel left a note while you were out on Tuesday and your only options are to rearrange or drive to Alfreton or some other remote part of north Notts or Derbyshire to their depot. So you rearrange and the big day arrives with desperate hope that it will come early.

By mid-morning you've gone through your 'to do' list. (Apart from the shopping. That would mean leaving the house for 10 minutes and would guarantee the arrival of the Yodel van.) So you've finished your online Christmas shopping (not from Amazon, obviously), tidied the bookcase, taken out the recycling, cleaned the toilet, wiped down the hob, done the ironing, and vacuumed. The repair to the loose power socket in the hall you can't finished because the plastic box fell to bits when you took it off the wall so you need a new one.

In the search for de-scaler to clean the kettle you emptied the cupboard under the sink to find (behind the dishwasher tablets and Fairy detergent) 3 bags of dishwasher salt (2 opened), 2 Windolene spray bottles and one Asda own-brand window cleaner (all part-used), 2 bottles of bonsai fertiliser, 2 bottles of Flash, a Flash surface cleaner spray, and 4(!) dishwasher rinse aids (3 part-used). My bonsai tree died in 2009!

You add salt to the dishwasher salt compartment, but fail to empty even one of the bags, so everything has to go back into the cupboard. Curious to find out what "dishwasher rinse aid" is you rummage through your partner's documents box and in doing so throw out user manuals for the fridge you replaced 6 years ago, the sandwich toaster that was thrown out in 2012, and the BRITA water filter you used once, as well as receipts for repairs to the one-before-last washing machine and an old kettle and a 2010 guide to local NHS services. (They had money to print guides back then?!)

With some surprise you locate the dishwasher manual and, with even more surprise, learn that the rinse aid compartment must be kept topped up with fluid. So that's what the little compartment next to the place where the tablets go!

In the process succeed in emptying one of the rinse aid bottles. Result!

By now it's mid-afternoon and your chances of getting the morning paper requested by your other half are diminishing by the minute. And she is coming home not to a tidy, clean, electrically safer house but to piles of tools and a drill in the hallway, no Daily Mail, and live wires protruding from the wall in the living room and hall. The lamp in the hall has nowhere to plug in, and to use the TV we'll have to find an extension cable and run it across the living room.

Oh well. At least you can get on with the veggie lasagne for tea, ready for when she get's home.

Damn. The mushrooms are on the shopping list, not in the fridge.