A Change of Plans

This week my fiancee has been away on a conference, and I was looking forward last night to getting home, cooking up some left overs, and then picking her up from the train station and having a quiet night at home, catching up on the television shows that we like to watch etc.

But it wasn't to be...

I got home, got changed, put away the pots and pans that I had left to drain in the kitchen from the night before, except those that I needed to prepare my meal, and then powered on the laptop to check my emails etc.

It hadn't been ten minutes before the phone rang. If was my fiancee's eldest daughter, they had been kicked out of their house, could they come over. Of course I said YES, since they had nowhere else that they could go.

So I went back to the kitchen, put away the pots and pans and implements I had left ready for cooking, since there wasn't enough for more than me, and I could hardly be cooking and eating in front of them. I then had to try and contact my fiancee to let her know, and to have a quick tidy around.

They had been living with my fiancee's ex-husband, and are both unemployed, as is her ex-husband. They also have my fiancee's only grandchild who is six months old, as well as two small dogs. Her ex-husband has a German shepherd, which is territorial, and through the seven months that they have been staying with him, one of their dogs has been attacked regularly, to the extent that it has affected his behavior, which is sad because they are good dogs. They have also been afraid in case he attacks the baby.

Well the problem we are faced with is that although we have two bedrooms, the spare one is practically full of my fiancee's things, and everything that I had shipped back from Florida when I moved back here six months ago. We had planned to move everything into the loft, but that needs a loft ladder installing, as well as flooring putting down, and with my having been unemployed for three months when I moved back, and our wedding coming up in six weeks, we decided to put off doing this until after we returned from honeymoon.

Since we don't know how long our visitors will be staying, it could be weeks or even months, my fiancee and I decided that it's best to try and get the loft floored this weekend, so that we can begin moving things up there, and give them a bedroom to use. Of course we don't have any spare furniture, and they gave away their old bed when they moved in with their Dad. We planned to move our bed into the spare room after the wedding, and decided that with the wedding presents we would buy ourselves a decent bed, so that means that they won't have a bed until after the wedding, which is no good. We also don't have enough money right now to afford the one that we want, so it's a bit of a catch 22 situation as you can probably see. Whether we buy an air mattress or what we don't know yet.

With my fiancee away for part of the week, we let the food run low, and as we have a dinner appointment for tonight, planned to do our big monthly shop tomorrow. Now we have to try and fit that in with getting the loft floored. I suppose my fiancee can always do that with her daughter while her husband and I work on the loft though.

There are other complications too, such as having a back garden that is not fenced in all the way around. If the dogs are let out off the leash, they will run away, so one of them has to be taken out at a time on the leash (it's much harder with two), and since we have had a lot of rain lately, it's very muddy outside.

Living in a house in England also has it's problems, like the size of the fridges and freezers. Our fridge/freezer is not even big enough for the two of us, so how we are going to cope with four adults and a baby I don't know. I really miss the larger fridges in the USA! Half of our fruit and vegetables have to be kept in a larder, and it's not cool enough, so they go off after only three days. There aren't a lot of larger grocery stores like in the USA either, so you either have to do a weekly big shop, or pay extra and have less choice at the local stores that are not much better than a 7-Eleven.

Then we come to the bathroom, one of the biggest problems. Most older English houses only have one bathroom, even if they have three or four bedrooms. Ours is not only tiny, barely enough space for a bath, toilet and a washbasin, it's also downstairs in the hallway as you come in the front door. This makes it awkward if more than one person needs to get in there, let alone if you have to get up in the middle of the night, but it's also embarrassing if you have to go... You know what I mean - HAVE TO GO! We always try to do that when we are alone, but with four people in the house - forget it! Now there is also no extractor fan in there (something we might try to remedy if only for the damp/condensation), so you are faced with a dilemma if you leave a bit of a "pen and ink" in there. You can either leave the door closed, in which case the next person to use the bathroom will be treated a an unpleasant surprise, or you can leave the door open and let the noxious fumes escape, which will of course prompt a visitor to come to the front door, and you have just allowed the hallway to become filled with fumes. I guess I don't need to go any further, I am sure you have the picture, and I can see more than one of you exclaim to yourselves "been there"...

As a result of last night's situation, our plans for shopping and a quiet weekend working on wedding plans have now changed, and the timetable for flooring the loft has been brought forward, which is not a bad thing of course. I didn't get to read any new published articles last night, written by those that I follow, nor to publish anything of my own unfortunately. With our visitors sleeping on the floor in the living room, I also didn't get to read anything this morning, and so even before the weekend starts, I have at least fifty articles to try and read. By the end of the weekend this could be two hundred, so please forgive me if I have to not leave comments on everything that you write.

Oh yes, my fiancee... I thought you would be wanting to know what happened to her. I picked her up from the train station as planned, leaving the visitors at home. She is now back home safe and sound.

Now I suppose you can also see why I otherwise titled this "I only wanted a simple life".

Does your life often end up far more complicated than you planned, for no reason?

Mine certainly does, and I think it has to be worse than most.

The good thing is though - it gives me things to write about, which will hopefully help to put food on the table for our growing family.