Take It Easy With A Cadbury's Creme Caramel

Simple things do have a habit of becoming complicated.

I ordered some jeans from an online shop in Poland. Dodgy or what? But in fact the English company handled the credit card transaction without problems, the Polish firm sent the jeans, the German carriers got them to Spain but the Spanish carrier couldn't find our house. I was able to check this relatively easily on a mixture of Polish, English and Spanish websites. When I say relatively easily we're probably talking an hour from start to finish.

All I need to do is to ring the Spanish delivery firm and sort out the pickup but none of the various websites involved in the order tell me which local office is handling the delivery. I took the coward's way out of writing an email to the carriers national office with the various reference codes and the like to ask which office I should contact. That saved the difficulty of a telephone conversation. With spell and grammar checking add another 20 minutes. Then there's just the phone call and the waiting in for the delivery van.

During the process of changing the roof, the already chipped bath enamel received fresh wounds in several places. As Maggie gleefully pointed out it won't be long before a stroke or whatever has one or both of us leaning on a zimmer or riding in a chair (I think she's betting on it being me rather than her.) She thought, and I agree, that changing the bath for a walk in shower was a good idea. We've also been having some problems with the flow and temperature of the water and a couple of other minor plumbing problems so we thought a plumber could sort the lot without too much difficulty. We even talked about installing solar powered hot water but blanched at the price and complexity. Anyway the plumber said he could do most of the jobs but that we'd need a builder for some of the work.

Does 2,500€ sound expensive to you for ripping out an existing bath and replacing it with a shower? It sounds more than we have whether the price is reasonable or not. So dealing with a plumber turned into dealing with a plumber and a builder and now we're going to have to find another builder to give us another quote as well as having to put off the first builder. All simple, all everyday but as well as the usual hassle there's always the language hurdle too. Smashing