Thursday - cleaning curry explosion

Thursday
Sunny day – and they say sunny thru all the weekend – hooray!!
Got our TV yesterday so I woke up on time to watch morning TV – something very weird about when shows begin and end - it’s not on the hour! Maybe bec there’s no commercials, which is great, but they have lot of odd starting times. When there are regular programs on, JD and I think we understand about 1/3 of all the sentences … that they should have subtitles for us even in English.

Spent the day dedicated to cleaning! Cleaning the kitchen mostly; there was mostly clean cupboards, but not on the outsides – everything had lots of grime around the pulls. The whole cupboard set is not wood, so it all cleans easily but needed a lot of elbow grease. Every few inches there were little spots of yellow, so I think there must have been a curry “explosion” at some point. There was also a sort of scum on all the tiles – as if they hadn’t been really cleaned so they shone. It’s funny bec there’s tons of cleaning supplies in the grocery stores and the pound (dollar) stores – which are on every corner.

Today I got all matching plastic things like tubs, broom and ??, trash cans, etc. Spending a pound ($2 US) doesn’t seem like a lot; but some people seem to be trying to make their money go pretty far at the little store – and you can’t believe people could keep needing all the plastic tubs and bins, etc that are stored outside each shop. Now the kitchen is clean for the delivery of the appliances tomorrow – and it feels really good to do something other than shopping or buying things : focusing on what we have (this place) rather than what we’re missing (everything in it)

JD did a great job on getting up all the carpet tack strips on the stairs. We’ll clean up the hardwood, maybe sand and paint it an even color. JD also got the gas and electric changed over to our names. We also had a visit from the electric company who sent a man to change out the meter – both the electric and gas meters are located in a little cabinet in the front hallway and at some points you call in our own meter readings to get the bill accurately accounted.

Our new transportation adventure : getting off the Picadilly-bound bus at Brunswick Street and walking the 2 or so-blocks to the University. It was just about 6 minutes; much faster than last night when we tried to get there a long block early. Then we walked Oxford Road instead of waiting for the bus to our other “favorite” restaurant for Curry in Rusholme. We continue to get around pretty well!

More bus adventures – we decided to take home from the city centre the 205 bus which stops directly in front of our house! Not bad except by the time we were looking to come home after dinner it was almost an hour wait at Picadilly Square: about 10 other buses for 192 (wherever that is, it’s pretty popular) and many 200’s for Hyde Road also coming.