Jan is in London, John is in Italy, continues...
Well my cold is not gone, the title is wishful thinking.
But I did get another brand of cold medication at the drug store. It's hilarious that in the U.K. the cold medications are behind the counter and you have to ask for them. I was not familiar with the brands here (except Sudafed, which did not work for me) so the girl behind the counter gave me what she said is the strongest they have without a prescription. It works, yay, but I'm in one of those fuzzy antihistamine stupors. It's worth it just to be able to breath through my nose.
It's not helping that it has rained every day, sometimes heavily, for the last week. Sometimes is clears up a little bit at the end of the day but then it comes back.
But the flowers that Mary gave me on Tuesday are cheering me up and look lovely on the dining table.
And I may have solved a bureaucratic dilemna we've been having. We got a second notice from the streets department that businesses are not allowed to put their trash on the street in front of the building. Well, we're not a business. I responded to the first notice by fax and mail that we are a residence, not a business, and that The Council told us to leave our trash on the sidewalk. Then yesterday we received another notice. The fines are huge (thousands of pounds) and I've actually been very upset about it.
The streets department does not answer their phone. Ever. So I called The Council to try to get some kind of letter that says we are a residence and are allowed to put our trash out on the street. I learned two important things today:
1. If a man anwers the phone at The Council then just hang up. He will misdirect you, give you bad information and will generally not be at all helpful. Unless he's gay. In that case he'll be incredibly helpful and you'll end up wanting to take him to lunch. Otherwise, the women who answer the phones at The Council are usually very helpful and appear to genuinely want to resolve problems.
2. We are allowed to put our trash out on the sidewalk but only during the designated hours. Ah ha! This is a brand new piece of information. We had been putting it out the night before thinking it was being picked up overnight which is what The Council told us two years ago when we moved in. It may have been true then but it apparently isn't true now and so the streets department is threatening us. It would have been nice if they had told us that our timing was wrong, not that we're a business.
So now hopefully we'll put our trash out at the designated time which is 9 a.m. and it will actually get picked up on schedule (not likely) and the warnings from the streets department will stop (fingers crossed).
OMG, the sun just came out.
