Well, England may be famously described as “a nation of shopkeepers”, but judging by the responses I've had lately it seems that Australia takes the title of “A nation of Plumbers” !
Thanks to all the useful suggestions of how to solve my washing up dilemma – next time the opportunity arises to do the dishes, I shall employ one or two of these measures and let you know how they went. I'm not sure that Playdoh is going to get a serious lookin, nor is fresh pineapple… but yes, we'll see.
The house has been a bit of a scene of plumbing-related havoc since I moved in really – initially there was the hot water problem, and then while I was away on the weekend apparently the central heating stopped working. Thankfully that's fixed now though. But this morning there seemed to be an alarming amount of water dripping out of the kitchen ceiling !! I'm quite sure our house is circled in big black texta in the A-Z's of every plumbing company in the Willesden area, and marked with the words “Here be Dragons !”.
Apart from that, nothing new. Still no sign of a paycheque yet, which is starting to seriously jeopardise the chances of catching up with Sharon and Paul (aka Doner and Kebap) in Latvia in a few weeks…
Apparently the others at my house are meeting the incumbent housemate tonight (I'm still at work, working), which si all a bit exciting. Hopefully we can get broadband organised at home soon too, and I can therefore get my laptop connected back up to Teh Interweb, and finally download this massive stash of emails I've got sitting on a server (I think it's pushing 500 messages at this point !). Yee ha.