I don’t think I’ve mentioned our neighbours before. We only have one neighbour. It pretends to be a house, but it’s really a builder’s yard. There are lots of trucks and various building machinery. There are piles of building materials and man made hills of dirt. The dirt must come from building sites. It’s now growing grass on it. Next winter, if it snows again, the hills could easily serve as ski slopes.
There’s a permanent bright, white light turned on in order to, I assume, deter thieves. There is also, now, a small hut with a wall around it, for the workers. The girls are very interested in this hut.
The house has had scaffolding around it since we arrived and, occasionally, the builder works on it rather than going wherever he goes for other jobs. I find the house quite ugly but that’s not really relevant.
Yesterday, in the course of our conversation, Camilla asked us if we wanted to buy this place. Later, I said to Mirinda, that while I loved the spot and the woods and we could easily make the house more comfortable, I would not want to live next door to a builder. She agreed.
The reason I’m writing about this is because today, all day, the builder was working on the house. This meant long periods of the truck idling and a crane lifting things off it. Hammering, scraping, electric sawing, all manner of noisy power tools. I’m surprised there wasn’t any rock blasting.
The crane particularly annoyed Freya. As it mysteriously appeared going up and down at the window, she would give her gremlin growl at it. I have to say that it made me rather grumpy too. As we sat outside, and I threw a tennis ball for Emma, the normal quiet was anything but.
Fortunately (for her) Mirinda wasn’t home for a lot of the day. She’d gone to the café at Trollbäcken to work then, having returned home a few hours later suddenly realised she’d forgotten a hairdresser’s appointment. So she turned around and went back for another couple of hours.
Of course, she didn’t bother telling me any of that. She just vanished. I was upstairs and heard Max start. Next thing I knew, the girls and I were alone. I had overheard her telling Sarah something about the hairdresser so I figured that’s where she’d gone.
Mirinda really dislikes routine. So, most of the time, she doesn’t put things in the shared calendar. This means, I can’t remind her when she has something coming up. Like the hairdresser, or book group, or a guitar lesson. Still, she managed to avoid a lot of the noise next door.
As for me, I made walnut bread. The result was a testament to how I’ve conquered the cooker here. Long ago thoughts of the disastrous shortbread of Christmas are fading dimly into the long goodnight. Though, coincidentally, Mirinda went to the hairdresser that day as well.
