Welcome to my perfumed garden

Is everybody happy?

I'm having a half-decent day for a change, I'm working on the kitchen floor which is nowhere near as nasty as I'd anticipated and actually rather pleasing.

We have a stone-flagged kitchen floor; York Stone - big, sandstone flags; they've got awfully mucky and dark (and sticky and thoroughly horrid) and dreadfully hard to clean, so we're doing the full-monty renovation job; I went over them with a strong sugar soap solution and a yard brush on Monday; now we're using this chemical stripper stuff (that scared me at first but is actually rather benign - you don’t even need gloves to use it); diluted over the whole floor, left on 20 mins. then scrubbed, left again, mopped off - it's already made an amazing difference; a once black and murky floor is now golden and lovely. I'm tackling stains now, with it neat, then I'll give it a second all-over scrub. Then we're going to seal it with a nasty-looking laminate solution (the bottle is covered in dire warnings and scull and crossbones.), so it can never get dirty again and will, hopefully, be easier to clean in future.

Of course, while the bottles of jollop work their chemistry-magic, I have lots of waiting time which I'm using constructively to write another bit of my Academy fic (though I'm wrestling a bit with Jim at the moment. Heh heh. I wish) and reading Jane Mailander's brilliant Jim of the Jungle, which is laugh-out-loud funny - I'm only a third of the way through and I'm loving every word.

And while I'm here, I want to rec Californication. I've been watching it on download, but it starts on Five in the UK on October 11th. It's just so funny - it has something of the feel of 'Action'; not as broad or extreme, but defo in that vein. it's full of throwaway one liners and Duchovny does them so well, but tbh, any show that begins a scene with a man and woman having cocktails together and the line; " 'Honey, never put your finger up a grown man's ass without telling him first." is going to be on my 'must see' list.