Our home

We live on the top floor here. There are three seperate dwellings. Some dude called Clarence the Beatnik* (*not his real name) lives in the flat below us, and there is supposedly a girl renting the basement flat, but she is from Georgia and is visiting there at the moment (Georgia in the states or the country Georgia I am not sure).


This is the view from our lounge/bedroom. In the background you can see Victoria park. The stepped buildings are very typical of where we live. I must have taken this photo in the middle of a weekday as there are not many parked cars, the street is usually full of cars seeing as nobody has a garage.


This is another view from our lounge/bedroom. I think this is particularly interesting because of the 'spider web' power pole feeding power to all the flats around us (or maybe telephone lines, I wouldn't recognise the difference). Please note the purple house up the road, there is always one isn't there?

The view from our back room is of the local mosque. We don't really use the back room for much, at the moment it looks like an enormous wardrobe with clothes strewn everywhere. Although it will be the guest room when we have visitors.

We bought this table and chairs second hand for £15, and picked up the cushions for a fiver at sainsburys. The table was a very welcome addition to the flat after a week or so of sitting on the floor, it was killing my back.


This here is our bedroom/lounge. We bought a mattress not long after moving in, before this we were sleeping on an air mattress, which was killing my back. As you can imagine we tidied up considerably for this photo, there is usually crap all over the place.

I hope you enjoyed some photos of our place. Soon I hope to get some pictures of Bristol up here, or perhaps on my flickr account.

Laundry

A few people were curious about how we did laundry here in the Harder-Preston Household, so yesterday as I was washing, I took an inordinate number of pictures, Cockeyed.com style.






This is my washing machine. I fill it in the shower.









I love this laundry soap. It is 100% natural and biodegradable. It smells great, and I can refill it from at the organic store up the road. Yay for less waste!















This is how it looks as I do laundry. The water is cloudy from the soap and the dirt that I am washing out!










After agitating for a few minutes and scrubbing the dirty spots, clothes get the soapy water squeezed out and put into another bucket for rinsing.









We rinse in the shower. Typically things get rinsed 2 or 3 times.















Since we hang all our clothes to dry, fabric softener is essential. This is also from the same line of environmentally friendly products.
















Here is the salad spinner that helps dry our clothes.












It's not very big inside!













Here is a shirt in the spinner.







Here are two pairs of socks. I rang these socks out as well as I could before putting them in the spinner.







And here is the water that I spun out of the socks! Look closely!






After all of that, the laundry is hung on various drying racks and chairs and curtain rods. And that is how we do laundry!

Especially for Tamara

So, Tamara has this incredible knack for finding great purses at Value Village. With that in mind, here is a picture of my new purchase. I got it at Scope, which supports people with Cerebral Palsy, for £1.50, or about $3. I was quite impressed. Although, it was not quite as good a deal as the Paul Frank purse for £2 that I did not buy last weekend, but should have.

Maybe I'd rather be bored

So, I worked last night at the pub. Sunday night. Man was it boring. When I got there at 6:00, there were two people in the pub. And it didn't get much better. I was complaining about how boring it was, wishing it would get more exciting. Be careful what you wish for . . .

Completely without provocation, a fight broke out. 6 people in the entire pub, one of them in his 70s, the other 5 in their 20s. One guy hits another and the other three pull them apart. The trouble maker gets thrown out, and the other 4 boys apologise to me for causing a disturbance. My boss had gone down the road with his fiancée for supper. He asked why I hadn't called him on hos cell phone, and I told him that the whole thing was over before it really started. I could have called him, but nothing would have changed.

If that was the excitement, I'll leave it, thanks.

Belly dance

I had told myself that I really could not afford to take dance lessons of any kind without a job. So good thing I got a job at the pub! I went to belly dance class on Wednesday. There were about 40 girls in the class, and I felt bad for about 30 of them. The teacher was really not very good. She would demonstrate a move one time, then say "it is good, ya?" and expect everyone to follow along. I didn't mind, since this is year 3 of belly dancing, and I knew what she was doing, but I would have gotten very frustrated if that had been the entire instruction. While we were doing a copying a move, with no instructions of how to do it other than "push!" the instructor would circulate, helping maybe one or two students. With 40 in the class, there is no way she could have seen everyone.

All in all, I had fun at the class, and got a good workout, but I learnt nothing new, and I don't think I will for the whole term. I need to decide if I am doing this class just f the workout, and if so, I think I will continue.

I has a job!

Somebody actually employed me! I have scored a job at an electronics retailer called Maplin. And thanks goodness for having done so, I was starting to wonder how the hell we were going to pay next month's rent. The pay is shit, but it is a job, and I will keep looking for a better job. I might even look at getting forklift certification, or construction site certification which will lead to higher paying jobs hopefully.

Things have been kind of slow around here in between looking for jobs. We have been trying to keep our spending to a minimum until we get a few paycheques under our belt. That's not to say we have been standing around staring at the wall. Our new library cards are being used frequently and we went to the Bristol Museum the other day. I still just get a kick out of going for a walk and stumbling across fantastic old buildings that have been standing here for centuries.

I have just remembered a story that you might find amusing. Back when we were staying at the hostel there was a particularly rowdy group of schoolboys also staying there as part of a football tour or something. Now I don't mind rowdy kids, just so long as they are more or less kept under control by an adult or two. But it seemed that the coaches really didn't give a rats arse what their kids were up to. The young lads made it their modus operandi to tear around the dormitory halls and up and down the stairwells screaming and swearing every fucking night, anywhere from about 10pm onwards into the wee hours of the morning! The first night this happened I was so damn tired that I managed to fall asleep regardless. The second night it kept me up well past midnight and woke me up only briefly at about 2am. The third night however, I could stand it no longer. At about 1:30am I snapped. I waited until the little fuckers sounded close to my dorm door and then launched myself out of bed and stormed towards the door. Swinging the door wide open I was immediately confronted by about 6 young boys staring at me from across the hallway, not 4 feet away (their room appeared to be directly opposite mine). I then proceeded to scream at them in the most terrifying voice I could muster, "It's two'o'clock in the fucking morning! You little cunts better learn how to shut the fuck up real quick or you'll all be sleeping on the fucking sidewalk tonight!!!" (actual transcript, by the way), all the while threateningly waving my finger at them like the angry old man that I was. They went dead silent until one of them managed to croak a feeble "sorry". I was left there for a brief moment staring at them, fuming. I realised what a sight it must have been, me standing there in nothing but my boxer shorts, face red with rage, spitting at them as I screamed. I hastily retreated to my dorm, realising that I must have woken up everyone that hadn't already been awake, most certainly anyone in my dorm anyway.