One woman and her bath tub

I was on ‘day release’ today and allowed to go to Ikea . . . on . . . my . . . own. Now obviously I don’t drive, so that ruled that out, so I caught the train to Wimbledon and then headed to the Croydon Ikea on the tram.  The Croydon Ikea is our ‘local’ one and we normally go there by car and it takes ages to get there, so I was expecting it to take ages on public transport to, so I was rather shocked that it took only 40 minutes to get from my front door to entrance of said consumer paradise and a lot of that involved my walk to the local train station and waiting for the train! Goes to show you something I’ve always believed in, you live in a big enough city and you do not need to drive!

Anyway the ‘official’ reason for going today was to see if on the very small off chance whether Ikea might do bunk bed safety kits, the answer being no, not that I could see. I was also after some cheap fabric and some plant pots.

It was slightly odd being in Ikea without having to shephard around two small children who treat the whole place like a playground and consquently it wasn’t quite as fun. I also was limited in budget and by how much I could carry back (see, I suppose cars have some uses, but there’s always the delivery service). So I was quite a good girl, I was tempted quite a few times but I held fast.

Anyway I ended up getting some small food containers (needed), a couple of cheap cushion fillers, two sets of finger puppets (for Christmas stockings, I’m Christmas shopping already – yes I’m sickening), three cheap and colourful ceramic plant pots (which Mr. Lacer pointed out when we got home didn’t have drainage holes),  a small shelf for Girl Lacer, fabric and a giant metal ‘bath tub’.

I’d been excited about going fabric shopping in Ikea, they’ve got a great selection on their website but in reality it’s not so great. They did have a large selection but it was almost impossible to work out the different prices and although I knew most of the fabric in Ikea is cheap, some of it isn’t and I was too worried about picking something expensive. Actually that could be levelled as a general critiscism about Ikea Croydon (at least during my visit), there were quite a few things missing prices. Anyway back to the fabrics, also seeing the fabrics in the flesh as opposed to on the computer I could see that some of the prints were a bit on the large side, so in the end I ended up getting just come plain denim blue and some plain off white fabric plus two rolls of kids fabrics.

As for the bath tub? It’s actually a plant tub, brought in preparation for my baby vegetables hopefully coming very soon (I suspect this awful weather is delaying things). Now that was a challenge getting back on the tram and train and then walking back, it was rather heavy! However not the first time I’ve done something like that and probably not the last, when me and Mr. Lacer were setting up home together, I was working in east London and living in south-east London and commuting by tube and bus, east London proved to be a good source of cheap furniture, so I used to regularly finish work, buy something (like a garden chair set) and regularly struggle home with it in rush hour, I must have been popular.

Mice like cheese – it’s official

At least in this house they do. It’s meant to be an urban myth that mice like cheese, so when we’ve laid humane mouse traps in the past (we have quite a mouse problem, which is not good for my poor nose), we’ve baited the traps with peanut butter, which they are meant to like. In fact we buy the peanut butter specifically for the mouse, as no one else in the house actually likes it, although come to think of it I don’t think the mouse likes it either, as it never works. Posh chocolate buttons from Montezuma’s works sometimes, but generally they just scitter all over my wooden floors as bold as they like, knowing full well that why should they go and have a look in that little plastic box when the kids like scattering rice krispies to the four corners of the flat for the mouse’s later delectation.

But like I say, we have never baited the trap with cheese. That was until last night, we were watching TV and a rustling noise was coming from the kitchen, so Mr. Lacer went to investigate and the darn mouse had somehow managed to get hold of an almost empty packet of parmesan and all Mr. Lacer could see was the (unseen) mouse trying desperately to pull the packet under the kitchen cupboards with him. So when we baited the trap last night we used cheddar (we were out of parmesan) instead and low and behold Mr. Lacer was woken at 5am this morning by the sound of the trapped mouse rocking the trap backwards and forwards, I am blessed with the inability to be woken by the mouse when it is does that, so it was Mr. Lacer as usual having to go and release the mouse in the nearby woods in the middle of the night and it was meant to be his turn for a lay in!