an aunty!

dear readers, young dave and i have found ourselves an aunty! we haven't asked her yet but i hope she will take us on. she is already an experienced aunty to a couple of young chaps who sound like human versions of lurchers so we are hopeful that she will add us to her portfolio of nephews.

our new aunty came to visit at the weekend. she is called jos and is a friend of herself's. she lives a bit of a way away so she stayed the night. my boy offered to sleep on the sofa with young dave so aunty jos could have his bed. or more accurately his sofa - he has a bed and a sofa in his room, but the bed is full of things like guitars and boots so he sleeps on his sofa.

this bed-lending arrangement was necessary because of a certain fear of dogs on the part of aunty jos. young dave tends to make himself comfortable snuggled up on the pillows of guests who sleep on the sofa, and if possible inserts his long and woolly body under their duvet. this is all very well if you are a lover of hairy grey beasts but not so great if they make you nervous. as you can see from the photo, by the second day of her visit, aunty jos had been charmed by young dave to the point where she read him a story about clouds and let him lie in her lap.

as well as being a perfect aunty, aunty jos is also an engineer! we could not have chosen a more useful guest on this particular weekend as the dishwasher had decided to give up heating the water. young dave and i offered to take over dishwashing duties but we were rudely spurned. a brief discussion with our clever guest identified the problem as the element. as himself fried the eggs for breakfast herself and aunty jos got online and found a place that sells elements. herself ordered one, which should arrive in a few days.

however, obtaining an element and getting it into the dishwasher are two very different things. it appears that the element lives somewhere deep in the floor of the dishwasher. aunty jos was of course rather blase about how easy it might be to fit such a thing, being an engineer. herself, somewhat uncharacteristically, was a little concerned about making sure the dishwasher did not become live and dangerous. aunty jos offered to talk herself through the operation on the phone, once the element had arrived, but this still left room for human error.

"how will i know which wire you mean?" she squeaked, "it might all go zap when we switch it back on!"

but a solution presented itself in the form of skype. skype is a sort of webcam telephone thing. herself is going to rig up a web cam pointing into the innards of the dishwasher and aunty jos is going to tell her which bit to do what with. there is an added complication just now in that herself has laryngitis and has very little volume. my boy may have to be roped in to provide audio from our end.

if this proves a success there are plans to post the recording of the whole operation on my blog. watch this space...