Alert! Alert! Monday Incoming!

What a strange weekend it's been.

I found out on Thursday at signing that we had a signing workshop on Saturday. This was not good on two counts. Firstly, we'd already made arrangements that Alison's parents were coming up for the weekend and I was meant to be working on the kitchen with her Dad on Saturday. Secondly, having to get up early on a Saturday morning is never a good thing.

The workshop was fun though. We were doing activities in small groups in a round-robin kinda arrangement, and I was in a group of three with the two gay guys in the group. Make comments on that as you see fit, the guestbook link is at the side, *yawn*. The most amusing part of the day was when we were doing the fingerspelling - ie, spelling words out rather than just signing them. There was a computer program which would sign words at you and then you typed in your guess at what it was.

About halfway through the fingerspelling session, one of the other guys says "I'm all fingered out". As I'm sure you can imagine, this caused much amusement. And when you got bored of spelling the words in the computer's vocabulary, you could type in your own phrases which it would then spell out for the other people to guess. I went off to make a drink and came back to be told (by the same guy) "I just put one in for you". I suggested he might want to rephrase that, LOL.

I left early since I'd wangled it so that the last activity for my group was the video about the examination (which I'd already seen a couple of years ago) and went back to help with the kitchen stuff. The last two units, which had been assembled since before Christmas but never actually fixed in place, were duly mounted on the wall.

While Alison's Dad fitted the worktop to the base unit and edged it, I carried on with revamping the bird-table, continuing the work I began last weekend. I'd even bought some wood-preserver-stainy-varnish-creosote type stuff. Mahogany if you must know - which is similar to the colour of the previous table. This is important since I'm using the deck from the old table. The revamping is pretty much a case of replacing the central pole of the structure, since the original one is all split at the top and stuff from repeatedly pulling it out of the ground and then hammering it back in with reckless abandon. The design has been modified now to make this less of a problem. Fascinating, huh?

Somewhere along the line Alison and her Mum returned from an extended shopping trip which they had taken in order to "leave the men to it".

Then we had today's task to prepare for. We'd decided that we were finally going to fit an extractor in the bathroom today, and so last night we went out to buy one. I never figured on things like that being quite so complicated. The options are just phenomenal. There's a basic fan that you wire into the light and it comes on whenever the light does. There's another basic fan which has its own pull cord. Then there's one which you wire into the light and which stays on for a certain amount of time after you switch the light off. Then there's one which switches itself on and off using a humidity detector. And that's not starting on all the different options for wall and ceiling mounted units. We opted for one that goes on the wall and had a timer on it.

Alison cooked her scrummy Thai Beef meal, then we played her parents at Cranium. That was, as usual, great fun. It seems to be becoming a compulsory activity whenever there are 4 or more people in the house (since 4 is the minimum). At the end of the game, the anti-sugar-rush that came from eating raspberry and vanilla brul�e hit me, and it became vitally important that I got to bed as soon as possible.

So today Alison's Dad and I knocked a bloody great hole in the bathroom wall. I also had to wire fuses into the circuit which was fun, since that meant locating the wires under a) loft boards and b) glass-fibre. And then I broke one of the mountings, which meant I said a bad word. Yeah, I know, me swearing, big deal, but when Alison's Mum is potentially within earshot I need to be more careful.

We met Alison at Ryton Organic Gardens for lunch (she'd been rehearsing this morning) and all had what was undeniably a very scrummy meal. Me and her Dad left the women to pay (yeah, I know that sounds bad but - Hello? Joint Accounts?) and went back (via Focus to buy a replacement mounting) and got everything finished just before the women arrived home. At this point I sat down and shut my eyes. The prospect of sleep was delayed a little by the arrival of a cup of tea, but as Alison and her parents chatted I flaked out. Alison woke me up to say they were going to walk into Warwick and did I want to go with them. I declined, and promptly flaked out for a little longer.

And then, for the rest of the day, I chilled and read comics and sat online.

And I still haven't done any more work on my CV. But I have created a "War On Fuckwittage" diaryring. Go me.