h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Buying a house in the USA is very different to buying a house in England.

I tried that once. I remember the feeling of elation as I was able to put an offer in for what might have been an ideal home. I remember the joy of my IFA telling me all was well. I remember feeling completely and utterly gutted when I got turned down after keeping the sellers waiting for weeks and weeks, having been assured that all was well many times.

Well, it's not like that here. Here, people seem intent on helping you buy a house. It makes a nice change.

But in order to buy a new house, we have to sell the old one and that's going to take some work.

Mrs Gradient is one of those people who will, with boundless and childlike enthusiasm, take on any project. Even ones that seem daunting or impossible. I am the person who ends up doing the bits that require heavy lifting, being tall, brute strength or duct tape.

Two weekends ago, we washed the exterior of the house.
We hired a power washer to do it with. Fascinating device. It came with a petrol engine and a variety of nozzles, one of which compressed the stream of water to such an extent that I could have used it to sign my name in concrete. We were warned not to use that one. We didn't.

We proceeded to have fun blasting dirt and grime off the walls of the house for about an hour. Then we washed the car. Then the concrete. Then parts of the street outside. This we did on Valentine's Day. I believe my wife understand that part of a man's soul that cries out to play with power tools, even if I don't know what they are for.

The following day, we painted the house. We went around very carefully taping over all of the windows, and anything else we didn't want painting. The cat refused to stay still, as did the Gradientlings, so we locked them in the house. Why?

A power-sprayer! Spraying the house with paint took slightly over an hour, burned through five gallons of paint and was an unseemly amount of fun. At the end of the day, the house was a pale, fresh looking green. Then, with the more traditional rollers and brushes, we set about the trim with a much darker green. By the end of the weekend, we were done!

The weekend after that, we attacked some plumbing (along with one of the nicest professional plumbers I have ever met) and last weekend we replaced some doors and measured everything else.

Now...this is all something of a surprise to me. I loathe DIY (or 'home improvement' as it's known here) because it usually ends up in failure and humiliation. But not so! Not so. Not only have we met with success, and had fun doing it, but it would appear that while all this work is going on I seem to be learning things.

Things like:
- there really isn't anything that duct tape can't help with.
- sometimes, small children do not understand what is meant by 'we have turned the water off'
- cats hate the smell of wet paint
- when you aren't looking, screwdrivers run away and emigrate.

"The cat refused to stay still, as did the Gradientlings, so we locked them in the house"
The old theatrical saying 'Never work with animals or small children' can be extrapolated to just about every walk of life. Whenever I had to do a removal job and there were kids or pets about, I insisted that they be well out of the way while stuff was being carried, especially expensive and precious stuff

"when you aren't looking, screwdrivers run away and emigrate"
Just like biros (see The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy - a book you may have heard of )
"There followed a long period of painstaking research during which he visited all the major centres of biro loss throughout the galaxy and eventually came up with a quaint little theory which quite caught the public imagination at the time. Somewhere in the cosmos, he said, along with all the planets inhabited by humanoids, reptiloids, fishoids, walking treeoids and superintelligent shades of the colour blue, there was also a planet entirely given over to biro life forms. And it was to this planet that unattended biros would make their way, slipping away quietly through wormholes in space to a world where they knew they could enjoy a uniquely biroid lifestyle, responding to highly biro-orientated stimuli, and generally leading the biro equivalent of the good life."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/books/club/hitchhikersguide/extract.shtml

I believe that small children can form temporary Einstien/Rosen bridges, akin to wormholes, that allow biros and screwdrivers to flee through the fabric of space/time. Most of the Useful Tool disappearances I have noticed have come about because of the proximity of small children.

Additionally, one of the wrenches made a bid for freedom. We found it hanging, clearly exhausted, on the fence.

It clearly wasn't as fit and as lean as the screwdrivers