How to irritate your housemates (without really trying)

Date: Tue, 24 Oct 2000
From: Ceels
Subject: How to irritate your housemates (without really trying)

Today I was upgraded at the coffeeshop to heating milk. Consequently, I smell like warm milk, which is no bad thing compared to calamari intestines, but I might have to resort to two showers a day. One so that I am awake enough to serve customers and one so that I don't smell like sour milk for the rest of the day.

I am getting up every day at five or six am, which is something (you may be surprised) I am quite used to. I had forgotten though, that you still wake at five or six on the weekends too. and I have developed several techniques (inherited from my mum) to encourage my housemates to get up, too, and play with me.

My favourite is to open the door to upstairs and cook bacon and eggs. If I do that at nine, I am guaranteed to get someone out of bed by ten. The smell of freshly brewed coffee is actually more effective for Lex, but I won't drink it, so it would be a waste to make it. I have not stooped to mum's most-used ploy, which is to open the door at the end of our corridor, then open our bedroom doors and incite the budgie into impressions of a train going through a tunnel or plastic bags rustling in the cupboard.

This is largely because we don't have a budgie.

Nor am I allowed to get a budgie.

And I have been told quite firmly I will be kicked out of the house to live in the gutter if I bring home any ducklings from the market. Pip and Lex are being quite unreasonable on this point. They have some theory about the ducks getting bigger and pooing all over the courtyard.

Our washing machine is all over. it was struggling valiantly with my jeans until suddenly it made a peculiar noise and started smoking. I think that is not good, but I will have a fossick around underneath and see if I can't fix it.

ceels