Shower sharing

I ALWAYS said I'd feel like a fully-fledged Aussie after the completion of three things... continuous barbecues, being bitten by something and sharing showers.

Now, as liberated as the latter sounds, it's not so big a deal. I frequently share my showers these days. Not with a handsome stranger or anything like that, but a mop bucket. A lowly mop bucket. A piece of plastic that is systematically saving the planet. Or so I'd like to think.

Every morning, we greet eachother and purely by waiting for the warm water to filter through to the showerhead, it's upto the halfway level and rising.

Seeing as though, being an even-numbered house, we are restricted to watering the garden between the hours of 6am and 8am on a Wednesday and a Saturday, I do my bit in all things environmental by chucking the daily regime remnants over the natives. Plants that is, not the neighbours.

But as summer is now a long distant memory, winter watering of all things green can take a back seat. June marks the official start of winter - which I continue to struggle to get my Welsh head around - and I'm told that there's "worse wintry weather to come in July and August."
Worse wintry weather? In July and August?? That's an outrage. I'm simply not yet adjusted to having bad weather in what is usually so pleasant in UK weather terms.
But that said, I suppose when the locals expect "worse wintry weather", they actually get about 12C. So armed with that information, we've spent the day hot-footing it around the homemaker centres to pick up a tumble dryer. I've lasted until now before investing in the luxury, but I'd simply had a bellyful of hanging three loads of wet washing over a cheap and flimsy clothes horse, situated strategically over one of the tiny ducted heating vents in the floor.

Going back to the being bitten bit, I spent a couple of hours weeding the garden the other day that resulted in me itching the living daylights out of what I thought was a midgy bit on my foot. 24-hours later, the scratchy site had swelled up into a very attractive sort of blister. Ever the optimist, I continued to splatter antiseptic cream on it in the hope it would go away, although it didn't help my mental state with husband came home from work telling me he'd been told it was probably a nibble from a bull-ant or a white tailed spider. A spider bite?
If I'd been in UK, where life-threatening and killer spiders were regular visitors to my bushes, I would've been down the doctors' like a dose of salts but here, the £65 fee you have to cough up for an appointment kept me firmly at home. Being an optimist.

I was told by friends to keep an eye on the swelling and to get to the medical centre should it get worse. But, as I sit here, tapping this piece out, I remain alive and kicking and still enjoying the Queen's birthday bank holiday. Now, why don't they have one of these in the land of her residence?

Happy birthday Ma'am... fancy a tinny?