Confirmation, calendars and recycling junk

The Boys will be arriving on Wednesday (make triumphant trumpeting sound through your fist), and will start work on my bathroom on Friday. What isn't being delivered on Tuesday will arrive on Friday. At some point between those days I have to get myself and a following convoy of willing friends to Ikea to buy my cupboards - I need at least 12 doors plus cabinets (or carcasses as they are unattractively called) - and bring them home to store heaven knows where. Then there's handles, and hinges, and shelves....I just know something vital will be forgotten, and that I will have to visit Ikea yet again, which has to be worse than going to tea with the Dementors.

Besides which, that's a lot of stuff for the feeble-minded to remember. This was the one year in which I didn't receive a proper wall calendar as part of my Christmas presents, although a friend did give me a small desk one of a local artist's work, which was so hideously garish that I had to hide it (permanently, as in charity bag), as her paintings looked unsettlingly like roadkill of the bloodiest, freshest sort. So I'm left with the most inadequate little whiteboard in the kitchen to remind myself of important dates. Somehow that doesn't present as efficient project management, especially as it also holds reminders of Harry's twice-weekly antibiotics and when that fussy chap says he might come to pick up some freecycled stuff if he can be bothered, even though the kettle isn't quite what he wanted. He even put "hmmm" in his email.....

Freecyclers fall into two main groups, I find: the pernickety who want photos of everything as though they were paying in gold for the stuff and might sue if it doesn't meet their expectations, evidently comparing one's meagre offerings to John Lewis online, and the astonishingly grateful, like the mother of five who, after receiving my mother's huge bulky televideo, emailed me three times to tell me how thrilled all the children were to have a decent-sized telly at last.

And the team? The cats will happily stay in the sitting room while all the work is carried out; they don't do much during the day except sleep and eat, in preparation for the night, when they just sleep, and the dog will be thrilled to have builders around; she knows from experience that builders think she's cute, and that they always have biscuits with their tea.