The picture above is our boiler, hidden in a closet upstairs in our house. I have never lived in a house that uses a boiler and radiator heating system. The first week here, I kept pulling all the towels off the radiators and saying – why would they put towel racks right over them? Isn’t this a fire hazard? Then I found out that it was common to do that, to warm up the towels. In fact some of the new radiators actually have a towel bar built right into them. But let’s get back to the boiler –it is loud and noisy when you turn on the water to take a shower. And where is the boiler located? Well, that would be right outside the girls’ bedrooms. In fact, it literally sits one thin wall away from Gerbie’s bed. So at any time we take a shower and she is sleeping, she wakes up. We are hoping this will just become a background noise for her and she will start to ignore it. This morning, hubby had to get up at 5:00 a.m. to catch a train to London for a meeting, and as he popped in the shower, Gerbie popped up in her bed and thought it must be time to get up. So the boiler system has some challenges. We also don’t have air conditioning. The reason for this – we apparently don’t need one. Pure and simple, it does not get hot enough to warrant air conditioning. The cooling system on the approximately two weeks in the summer that get above 75 degrees is --opening the windows. Which by the way, do not have screens. I have been asking around – are bugs not a problem here, or are we just supposed to not care if we share living space with them? I have been assured, bugs are not a big problem here. I find that hard to believe, but I am going to go on the assumption that if they were a problem, then people would not want them crawling all over them at night while they sleep and would have invested in screens awhile ago. Here’s hoping.
This weekend we will be venturing out to the Chester Zoo – this is supposed to be the best zoo in the UK. We are hoping for a nice sunny day, but just in case, there is a “wet walk”. This is a map that takes you from indoor to indoor exhibit with the least amount of walking outside. Only in England would this be a feature listed prominently on the zoo’s website. But in any case – we all could use a day outside in sunny weather – so I am really keeping my fingers crossed.
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