Monday, July 20

What a stressful week...

and it's not over yet!

It's been quite stressful for me this week with one thing and another.

The list of stressful events (although on their own, each one is not that stressful, but throw them all together and it stressed me out!)

1. Isabelle's birthday - presents to buy, party for 20 kids to organise and buy food for. Prepare the party etc.
2. My birthday - turning 41 - no major stress really, but I'm 'over' 40 LOL
3. Mark found fleas on the sofa. Covered the house in flea spray and powder... but this tale goes on.

Mark became obsessed about these fleas. They're not from the cat. I de-flea her once a month every month. I checked her over, not one flea. They've come from Mark's garage. It seems to be a meeting place for all the local moggies. So I bought flea spray and flea powder and went through the entire house. This was on Wednesday. Mark had Thursday off work with it being Isabelle's birthday. He saw another flea. He turned into a raving madman. He powdered everything again and was in such a bad temper. I was trying to make sandwiches for Isabelle's party and sausages were cooking. The rest of her party food was in bags by the front door ready to go in the car. He ended up going mental at me.. like it was my fault there were fleas in the house. Everything was pulled out from every corner, swept out, flea powdered and his temper rose. He ended up having a right go at me for not helping him. I'd already done it all the day before and I was getting the party stuff ready.

We ended up having a huge argument about what I should be doing. In his very male chauvenisting, pig headded attitude, he told me that everything to do with the house is my job, and I should do it.

He went on and on and on in his bad mood and ended up saying some really hurtful things to me that just weren't called for. I ended up in floods of tears and he still went on. I walked out the house, and waited for Isabelle to come out of nursery and my poor friend at school asked the wrong question. She asked if I was ok. Out came the tears again. I ended up going to her house for coffee, poured everything out but felt much better afterwards. I got home an hour or so later. Mark didn't ask where I'd been or anything. He did however, apologise. (wonders never cease) he also said he was out of order and he was in the wrong. (now this is a miracle!)

To cut a VERY long story short, he was still putting flea powder down yesterday (Sunday) as he said he saw another flea. I have 5 bin bags full of washing because apparently EVERYTHING has to be washed, I have to hoover the bedroom once again to get the powder up, this makes it 6 times since Thursday. I've also got the sofa's too hoover out again.. etc, etc.

He is so obsessed by it that every tiny mark on him is inspected incase it's a flea. I did laugh last night though as he was trying to kill a crumb of chocolate cake thinking it was a flea LOL.

One of the biggest annoyances though is that he hasn't treated the garage. He has washed it out with Jeyes fluid, but no flea treatment. So he's bringing them in with him every time he goes to the garage.

OK, that's off my chest... and the next two on the list are:

4. No one can ring in to my house. We can phone out, but if anyone tries to ring in, it just says there's a fault. I've done a line check with BT and it says the line is ok. It's probably equipment and we can call an engineer out to the tune of £100 + any consumables needed, and then £85 per hour after or part there of. Great! just what I need. I've tried a different phone in a different phone socket, but still can't ring in. It rings once and cuts off. So I have to get on to BT today and speak to a real person rather than an automated system.

and finally 5. On Thursday my internet connection became very intermittent. It loaded slower than a snail crossing a beach, if it loaded at all. Then Friday morning it went completely. Our connection was set up via a router so that we could all share the connection. I said to Mark, the router has decided not to work anymore. Once again, Mr Knowitall went into overdrive. I'd gone through all the checks I knew.. pinged, traced routes etc.. everything pointed to the router despite all the lights being on. I dug out the original modem that I got when I first started having broadband and voila it connected. So I told Mark once again that it was the router. He decided that he knew better. spent hours trying to get my pc to recognise his pc and mine to his. No go. He got more and more stressed, temper rose and started getting shitty with me .. once again. He even ended up standing behind me while I went through everything I'd already tried, including re-installing the router software only to get the same error message that I'd had before. He even tried installing it on his pc.. getting the same message. Why doesn't he trust me? Why doesn't he think that I know what I'm doing? Grrrrr. it's really frustrating!! I know that he knows the insides of a computer, but I've always done software installing and internet based stuff as he doesn't know how to do it. (or doesn't want to know?)

I managed to keep my temper and frustrations and annoyance to myself, but inside I was boiling. It was like being back at school having done some work and then the teacher standing behind me making me do it again because I couldn't have possibly got the right answer.

So my self esteem (which isn't great at the best of times) has taken a bit of a dive this week.

On the up side, I got some studio lighting (flash and softbox and umbrella's) for my birthday which is great. It's probably the best birthday present I've had as an adult. I'm sooo pleased. I did manage to get Isabelle to pose (sort of LOL)

Then on Saturday we went to Cholmondeley Pageant of Power. All things speedy! Cars and bikes through the ages, powerboats, aeroplanes, helicopters and jet ski stunts. We had a great day and we didn't get any rain right up until we were walking to the fair for Isabelle to have a ride, as promised, before we went home. The heavens opened and the clouds emptied very fast! But we'd had a great day including seeing the dancing JCB diggers! woohoo. . they were awesome. I'm going to upload some photographs from the day to my website later when I get a spare 5 minutes from all the jobs I have to do today!