House reno photos!

We went off, I think much more successfully this time, to look at house reno stuff.  I think I have found what I would like.  Details must of course be finalised.  Thought I'd give a peak of what we have in mind:

This will be for our bathroom floor.

This will be our bathroom sink...it is one of those sit on top jobs, that I for one, really like.

This will be the shower floor.  We will have a curtain not a glass door.  Hate those.  We will have to build a bit of a step to keep the water in  The walls will be white tile with a dark green trim, the step will probably be the same green.

This will be the floor in the girl's bathroom.  You have to work with me here a bit and ignore the plain tiles, only the blue ones will be down.  They are a good size, 9 by 9 inches or so...

and this will be their sink.  It too is a sit-on-top-like-a-bowl number, and I sincerely hope it will hide the toothpaste spit marks.  Their bathroom will have a tub with a shower in and a curtain.  The walls will be tiled white with a blue trim the same as the floor.  They want blue paint.  No problemo.  The sink looks nicer in real life than in the photos.

The downstairs bathroom and the rest of the house will have the tile on the right which is the one that most closely mimics what we have already....The one on the left is machine made, the one on the right, hand made.  The price difference isn't that big and we don't need many.

The sink in the downstairs bathroom:

We also have a problem in the main passageway which you can see from the street and, well, everywhere.  We have to tear up a strip through the whole length as the drain runs under there.  The drain, which drains the toilet as well, is a brick runway.  Bricks are porous.  Pause for a moment and consider the smell.

Yes.

We have to tear it up.  the problem is that the old tiles are old and we are not going to be able to colour match, so instead we are going to use tile work to make it look like it was always there.  A kind of tiled carpet.  Imagine my delight when I found these:

We'll make a pattern with those and it will look like a carpet.

In the dining room at the back, we'll have these on the floor:

Same pattern, deeper tone.  Blue grey colour that I love.

In the kitchen for the doors, we'll probably use these:

and for the back splash I want to see if we can find something that will match the tiles that are in there already.

I didn't have a chance to eat breakfast before we went off, so I was a little hungry when we got back.  We stopped at the corner store and picked up lunch.  I had chicken stuffed with dates and bacon (OMG),  espinacs catalanes, which is spinach with raisins and pine nuts plus veggies that looked pretty average but tasted amazing.  I am not sure what they did.  I'll have to ask.

Then I had a nap.

OMGoodness, life is shaping up pretty nicely today.

and most welcome too.

A remarkably calm rant about the state of our local health care.

Spent most of the day running in slow germy circles getting Eldest checked out at a hospital.  She's had a stomach ache for days, and the anti-biotic she was given wasn't doing anything.  She is doing much better now just so ya know.

There is something inherently dreary about wandering about in hospitals.  You come out feeling so...contaminated.

It was interesting the sheer number of grandmas and grandpas who were at the hospital.  Couples too.  I don't remember having gone to the hospital together on a working day when the kids were young, though maybe memory fails. It is probably a function of driving with a sick baby.  Simply easier if done in tandem.

There were a whole lot of grandmas and grandpas though.  Mom seems to bring a certain amount of moral support with her.  Especially those with young babies.  Never thought of getting my folks to come with me, I must say.

Though now that I think about it, both my Dad and the Man did end up coming with us one time...Youngest was sick, and they returned home with Eldest, who threw the MOST unholy hissy fit when it was time for them to leave.  Went on the entire way home and a good portion of the time once they got there.

Interestingly, at the hospital, a very prominent and excellent one here,  EVERYONE could speak to me in Catalan.  Not like the doctor/quack/dipsh*t I had the misfortune of seeing the other day with eldest.  When I asked if he could please speak Catalan, he said he couldn't and just continued on in Spanish.  Cabron.  (Not polite at all in Catalan).  He did NOT go and get someone to translate, he did not even try.  The women at the front desk did the same.  The village where we live is very very Catalan.  Barcelona is clearly less so.  The hospital is obviously able to pick and chose it's staff much more closely and hospital policy is obviously quite pro-Catalan as most if not all of the signs were in Catalan, and many only in Catalan.

The only person we got who couldn't speak Catalan to us automatically and instantly asked for someone to translate (unlike our local *ssh*le), and judging by his name and look (never a good idea, but work with me here) he probably spoke Arabic.  A much needed language within the hospital, so if he can successfully communicate with those patients, I can forgive him his Catalan.  Especially as he immediately got someone who could talk to us.

THAT my friends, is the rudiments of good health care.  Along with soap in the bathrooms, which - I kid you not - my local health center didn't have.  There was a sign outside the room about the importance of hand washing in preventing the spread of H1N1/ GripA; no soap inside.  The bathroom had been just cleaned.

I kid you not.

Found some pics.

Pretty, no?  Saw it last weekend I think, or the one before, it's been languishing in the camera what with all the illness I have been meandering through.

The tile below we are probably going to get for the two upstairs bathroom floors.  They are very small bathrooms, think maybe two square meters of open floor space.  I think I like it, though I'm not totally convinced yet.

This tile, which I really like, is a ridiculously expensive hand made tile.  Debating it for the kids bathroom, remember please that we are looking at MAYBE 2 square meters of floor....

What is really holding me back is that it is slippery, and I just don't want that.

Pretty though.

I find it totally freaky that the mac can lift images off of my phone without the phone's permission.  Weird, no?

Chuck that for a waste of time.

I have spent a fair amount of today at a low boil, some of today boiling right over and my trigger has been a little touchy for a while.  I think this has been a part of getting sick -gradually - being sick, and now recovering from being sick.  Either that or the world has just not been set right and it is p*ssing me right d*mn off.

Seems time to check back in on the good stuff.

Good stuff; sometimes hard to remind ourselves.  Right now I have about 5 rants stewing around in my head, but Beth over at Blind as a Bat has a list up of of things she's loving right now.  This will be a useful discipline.  At the moment it is tough to come up with much.  She's got 12 things up, let's see what I manage.

.......truita de patates

........my boss and co-workers

........my family (so predictable it doesn't count)

........swear words so I can use them (in three languages)

........the mountains, sea and sunshine.

........teenage students (some might question that one, but sometimes they are fantastic)

........my bed.  So comfy....

.........Chuck the whining dependent dog.

OH!   This is making me sick.

I just am not feeling like doing this.

Onwards and upwards...I was in the bar across the street yesterday and noticed a man come it, at 5pm.  He bought a pack of smokes, then he ordered an espresso with anise...that would be the alcohol.  He knocked that back...50/50 espresso/liquor...topped off with a smoke.  The perfect recipe for the drive home.

When I asked about this I was told this is actually more normally drunk at breakfast.

Silly me, I thought Wheaties was the breakfast of champions!

Tiles and tiles and tiles and tiles.

Went to a household supply place, a very very fancy pants one....

Went with the architect.

My head is a-spinning....

Found some stuff I like a lot, found some that is OK...

The kitchen stuff...

Meh.....

We'll see.

Flat

Bagged, worn out, flattened, dead, dying, ground down, exhausted, wiped out, tired, bone tired, worn down to the bone, destroyed, pulverised...

but not short of synonyms.

More tomorrow.

ps.  I am basically well, but the batteries are extremely low on juice.

Cheers,

O

gag.

I got sick last night, nasty gastro-intestinal stuff.  Poor Chuck, we have an unspoken agreement that he can get up on the furniture to sleep when we aren't there, which includes at night time. If we get up however, he knows he has to get off.

I don't normally get up to pee in the night so he is not used to the sounds I make in the night including my appearance so he was a little disconcerted by my rather precipitous appearance at 2am.  He looked a combination of indignant, surprised and horrified.....

I too was rather horrified, but not by Chuck.

Today has been a wee bit long but I am on the mend, thank goodness.

Nothing like a long hot bath for making the world a better place.

Biiiiiggg hair, big shoulders, racoon eyed make-up.

Just watched Ghostbusters on Youtube with the kids.

OMG the eighties!

Lord help us, glad THAT style went out.

Mac! Hear me? My toes are cold.

On the purely news front:

• Went to BCN today on that course. It was deeply interesting.  I spent two hours writing up my notes to bring into work. I had to write so fast, if I didn't do it tonight, I wouldn't understand it tomorrow.
• Ended up a little late so I had to catch a cab to the place...that was cool
• Ended up eating breakfast in BCN which was SUPER yummy...warm crusty baguette with a warm truita de patates and tomatoes smeared on the bread with olive oil.  Warm and crunchy and smooth and filling.  Oh my.  That and a coffee with milk....life was SWEET!
• The architect is continuing to be good-so-far, we now have a meeting for next Tue for - get this - 4 hours!!!  We will go over contracts, systems, organisation of the project, and we will take a little road trip to a store in his car to look at and select the installations.  Homework required this weekend.

On to the real blog post.  Well, what constitutes the real post anyway and why is it that I think the news of my day is less important than the inanity below?  Weird blog world values.

Onwards.

It has gotten chillier here.  I am not calling for sympathy or anything because it is a very long way from cold and I will get NO sympathy at all.  That said, at night it is cool in the apartment, and all those lovely cooling giant easily opening windows coupled with the tiled floor (so lovely in summer) make for cold feet when sitting with the lap top at night.

Here is where the mac falls down in relation to the old PC.

You see, the PC runs a little, ah, hot.

We normally keep it on a book so we don't get so sweaty (I dread to think that it may be radiating all over us, I assume not).  It is really just the fan running (I hope), but on a cool - or cold - night my feet stayed warm.  All the blood flowing down there got a little heat treatment for part of the trip and it worked a treat. It isn't even really cold yet and my tootsies are down right chilly.

I wonder if I should contact Mac about the problem.

What do you think?

Termites!!!

NOT in my house, thank GOODNESS!

I was at work yesterday and the classroom stank of teenager and running shoes...we opened a window.  When the teens themselves comment you know it's bad.

One kid in particular was hot and went to sit under the window.

The windows in this room are wood framed and swing inwards.  He made the mistake of brushing his shoulder against the bottom of the frame.  A few minutes later he noticed that he was dirty and there was wood all over him...there was more though...there were bugs all over him.  I brushed some of them off and sent him down to the bathroom to sort himself out....check his hair and all, and spent the rest of the evening going over periodically to squash bewildered termites wandering around on the floor....


EEEeeeeewwwwww.

At least they aren't in our house.

*shudder*