A flush beats a full house

It's a trap!

It was Eid Al-Fitr, and a long weekend. The Goat had agreed with Beloved Wife that, because of the ridiculous costs associated with going away anywhere nice, the Goat would come home to the Crumbling Villa. The plan involved a quiet long weekend away from work, but turned out to be a fairly busy and productive one.

The Goat actually couldn't get a sensible flight to Dubai and had to fly at 0100 on Friday. He eventually fell into bed at 0400, but not before being upgraded to First Class, which was very pleasant indeed, so full marks to Qatar Airways for that.

Beloved Wife had honestly not assigned the Goat a list of tasks, other than to help M to move house. Fundamentally this consisted of taking away some old shelf units that M had no space for. The Goat had use for them, though. Old IKEA stuff is better quality than the more modern; these shelves were made of actual blockboard and not chipboard or, O horror, MDF. Fun and games getting all this into Rio, but it did all fit despite the uprights each being 2.5m long, or is that high?

Beloved Wife had paid someone to tidy the shed. Dive Central was indeed tidy and fully devoid of sand, dust, and dead rodents, but was by no stretch of the imagination a workspace, workshop, shed, or Goat Cave. Hence the interest in the shelves. Several hours later, and the Goat had put everything away, eventually found some of his ingeniously-concealed tools (why were the spanners all in a tent bag with some tent pegs?), and the Goat Cave was clean, tidy, and a usable space. Huzzah!

There was obviously a need to go out to dinner, so Beloved Wife and the Goat treated themselves to a slap-up steak dinner or three over at Hunters Room in the Westin Hotel. The Beef Wellington was allegedly for two. As this turned out to be two anorexic sparrows, a very hungry Goat had both.

Further tasks included getting the Goat's car into the shop to fix where some incompetent parallel parker had evidently backed one of those unfeasibly long towbars into Rio's front bumper. The Goat was going to get this fixed back in April, but as he feared possible offroad damage at the Desert Challenge, he'd deferred the task.

Next problem: Beloved Wife's car wouldn't start until Dial-A-Battery showed up with some monstrous jump leads. Now with a new battery and thus a working VW, Beloved Wife could put Rio into Terios Hospital until Thursday.

Getting the battery took longer than expected, and so while the Goat tinkered in his Cave, Beloved Wife made lasagne. Plans for a Game of Thrones marathon went all horribly wrong when the sink refused to drain.

It seems clear that the problem has been building, with reports of a 'sluggish' dishwasher. The Goat attacked the sink with various caustic substances, boiling water, and a sink plunger, but the archaic plumbing in the Crumbling Villa really didn't want to play. The Goat did manage to cause a fetid dribble of brown liquid to creep from beneath the dishwasher. Investigation revealed that because the dishwasher waste pipe was lower than the sink, plunging the former was pushing wastewater out of the latter. So, dear reader, imagine the scene: Beloved Wife with one hand blocking one plughole and furiously plunging the other, while the Goat had one hand over the dishwasher waste pipe and a thumb in the sink overflow pipe like some little Dutch boy.

Still nothing would shift, except all over the floor. The Goat now found himself sliding on his hind legs, burning his true knees with caustic soda, and using a garden hose to try to push the blockage upstream. Beloved Wife was all for shutting the door on it and calling a plumber, but Goats are very determined. Eventually, at about 11pm, it came free. Massive clods of 20-year-old chip fat dropped into the floor gully and blocked that, but as this was a four-inch pipe the Goat could reach in and retrieve the great globs of grease.

Now the cleanup, with antiseptic chemicals and furious mopping of the entire kitchen. What a team the Goat and Beloved Wife make! Incidentally, the Goat wonders for what possible reason anyone would willingly choose carpet for kitchen flooring. Tiles are surely the only way to go, especially where antiquated plumbing is involved.

After cleaning the kitchen, the Goat and Beloved Wife cleaned themselves and, in the Goat's case, applied antiseptic on some minor cuts and grazes. One cannot be too careful.

And the weekend was still not over. The following day, the Goat fitted a cat flap and tried to teach the cats how to use it, with around 50% success.

By the end of this long weekend, the Goat Cave was tidy and usable, the dishwasher was no longer sluggish but working properly (the Goat suspects if it can't empty, the machine simply refuses to fill), One car is fixed, the other is being repaired, the cats have access and egress, and the Goat's motorbike received a small farkle. M has had her shelving recycled, and the Goat is heading back to Doha for three days.

Then it's time for a proper holiday!

]}:-{>

Is this what living apartment?

Hircine high-rise

The Goat was recently reading all about pensioners who want to live in the Holiday Inn rather than a retirement home. One of Nanny Goat's elderly friends voiced the same opinion, noting that a hotel doesn’t constantly smell of boiled cabbage, the service is better, and residents don’t get treated like senile old fools.

Check out Snopes regarding permanent cruising. It seems that this might be a viable option provided that you don't mind living in a 10 sq.m space.

But it seems to work for some. What about the Goat? Not to retire, rather to try to justify the Goat’s current existence.

Home, or at least its closest approximation, is the Crumbling Villa in Dubai. It’s about 220sq.m of 20-year-old concrete and blockwork, and apart from a couple of new aircons a year or two ago to replace some of the antediluvian units, it receives almost zero maintenance from the landlord, who fails to pick up his phone, ignores fax messages, and has no functional email. But it is an actual house.

Last time the Goat was in Doha, working for crazy people, he rented a newly built two-bed apartment. The plan was to live there for a year, and then move into a proper residence when Beloved Wife joined him. In the traditional way, the Goat had to pay a deposit plus a full year’s rent up front, he paid a deposit with the telecoms company for his internet, and had to lash out for additional kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom equipment to make the place civilised enough actually to live in. The place was allegedly fully furnished, but of course with the cheapest and nastiest furniture that Najma Souq could provide.

After a year, the Goat left Doha. There was the traditional struggle to recover deposits from the landlord and the telecoms company, perhaps in the hope that the Goat would close his bank account and leave, and be unable to cash the cheques.

Now the Goat lives in Cloud City, on the top floor of a hotel. It’s a one-bed suite, and has usual hotel facilities such as cable TV, internet, 24-hour maintenance service, and someone comes in to dust and to change the towels and bed linen twice a week. Another bonus is that the rent is due monthly, and the security deposit is tiny and not a full month’s rent. But the place is also tiny; not as small as Beloved Wife’s apartment when she lived in Japan, but hardly anywhere (apart from t’shoebox in t’middle o’t’road) actually is.

Anyway, seeking to find some justification in living away in such a tiny concrete box, and to see if the pensioners living in the Holiday Inn had a point, the Goat got his spreadsheet out and did some sums.

First he looked at the raw costs of rent, internet, cable, municipality taxes, furniture and kitchen tools (amortised over an arbitrary five-year period) for each of the three residences listed above. Then he compared each by floor area. Finally, he thought up features such as 24-hour service; on-site gym and pool; walking distance to restaurants, work, and supermarket; the existence of a ‘yarden’ for a private outdoor space; that sort of thing. He evaluated these to provide relative perceived values and a weighted score for each. Adding these weighted scores for the features of each residence, and comparing them with the cost of each reveals:-

• The best value is Cloud City. Those pensioners are correct.
• The best value including floor area is the Crumbling Villa.
• The worst value of all is the two-bed place: expensive, small, and no features beyond basic shelter.

It’s well, then, that the Goat is essentially camping; living out of a suitcase in Cloud City until he can leave. The place would be completely untenable if he had all his tools and electronics (and motorbike, cat, dive kit, books, DVDs...) in Doha. And it’s far too small for two, except for the occasional weekend when Beloved Wife is extremely welcome to visit.

]}:-{>

Purged

What happens when you suddenly change location? Standard Imperial procedure is to dump garbage before going to lightspeed. In practice, it can be more difficult than that. What's the point of flogging or dumping all your stuff if there's even a slight risk that you'll hate the new place and need to revert to the old?

In my case it was the summer of 1996 when I suddenly relocated to Doha, Qatar from Redditch, UK. I pretty much packed a suitcase, turned out the lights, cancelled the milk and left.

Four years later I sold the house. This was mere nanoseconds before UK property prices rocketed after a decade of slump, but that's another story. The new owner packed up all my personal stuff and stacked it in the shed, and I rented a large white van on my subsequent visit to Blighty and took it all away. The motorbike was sold. I'd had plans to get the odometer right round the clock and then to sell it as 'low mileage but a bit tatty', but eight hundred quid for a sixteen year old Kawasaki (ZG1000-A1 if anyone's interested, and yes I do know the picture is of a later model) with about 90,000 miles and that hadn't run at all for several years was an offer I couldn't sensibly pass up.

My father agreed to store my stuff ad infinitum, but after he died in 2004 I was instructed by his widow to clear it away lest it have an unfortunate accident with some matches. So I turned up to the funeral in another white van and moved all my worldly goods to Plymouth.

Circumstances change. In six years I'd built up a second houseful of stuff in Qatar and then moved to the Emirates. Standard Imperial procedure again. Most of my possessions got sold for a pittance, thrown away or broken by the shipping contractor, and I stated to accumulate new stuff again. And then last summer Beloved became Beloved Wife, and we combined our two households into one. An exercise involving quarts and pint pots required yet another session of disposing of possessions. We kept both fridges, and still have far too many televisions and too much kitchen equipment.

It has become increasingly apparent that I'm becoming less likely to return to a life in England. Last March I spent a week there, sorting out my stored stuff. Air tickets cost nothing, thanks to Virgin Atlantic's compensation, and I took the opportunity to go through all my gear that had pretty much filled Nanny Goat's garage for some time. I had been putting off doing this for ages. Although it had virtually no monetary value, my stuff represented over three decades of my life. But I have a new life now, and it was time to bite the proverbial bullet and deal with it.

The experience is slightly surreal. It's rather like going through a deceased relative's effects. As the effects were all mine, it was something of an out-of-body experience. College notes went to the tip, along with old correspondence. I considered the possibility of identity theft, but concluded that bank statements with defunct addresses for accounts that no longer exist are probably useless except as firelighters. Books and magazines all went to the local charity shops, as did Lemmings and Populous on 5 1/4" floppy disks, curtains, bed linen, pots and pans, tools, and clothes that would now not encompass my middle-aged spread.

No-one wanted my electronics. Apparently British charity shops aren't allowed to sell electrical appliances, so the scrap-metal brigade at the local municipal dump recycling centre ended up with a couple of what used to be high-end video recorders and a set of HiFi separates. Lucky scrappies. I begrudge throwing away a broken printer because I lack the know-how to mend it and a better new one is Dh200. But this is as nothing compared with the gall of destroying something that's in perfect working order.

Dozens of trips in Nanny Goat's minuscule car to and from Chelston Meadow later, and the garage was finally empty.

Nanny Goat is as much of a hoarder as her offspring, and we inevitably couldn't bear to part with a few mementoes. One ancient suitcase of Stuff ended up in the attic, and a lead-crystal decanter full of Produce of Scotland found its way into the cocktail cabinet. My sword, eighteenth-century wig and other items from my previous life as a historical re-enactor went to friends who still do re-enacting. Some of it may appear on eBay in due course.

I gave my motorbike helmets to the local Fire Brigade. A nice shiny fibreglass helmet in a charity shop might look like a bargain, but it may be a potential death-trap. I don't want to be responsible for it falling to bits under impact because it's old. The chief paramedic instructor appreciated the opportunity to use a proper helmet for training or cutting-into-little-pieces practice. I don't know what became of my motorcycle leathers. They had been stored, but when it was time for their trip to the charity shop they'd vanished. Like an old oak table.

Meanwhile, my old oak table, chairs and a couple of particularly large furniture items never made it out of Redditch.

]}:-{>

Binary fission

This is the means whereby large cardboard boxes reproduce. It doesn't matter how many we empty, there are always some more cartons full of stuff that needs a home. The bookcases are full, the kitchen cabinets are replete, the DVDs are stored near the TV or on bookcases, and the front yard is bulging with collapsed empty cartons awaiting collection by the removal men.

And yet, as at the end of a weekend of unpacking and putting up shelves, there were still four more boxes to empty. The den, the maid's room and the other bedrooms currently resemble an explosion in Home Centre. The 'to do' list remains monstrous.

The main bedroom now looks fairly civilised, as do the kitchen and lounge/diner. The manuals for the TV and DVD player emerged during the move, so I was at last able to set up the home theatre with a DVI digital video connection and six-speaker surround sound, whose primary purpose actually is not to annoy the neighbours.

Still, the aquarium and fish seem to have come through the moving experience unscathed.

Money For Nothing

"We gotta install microwave ovens
Custom kitchen deliveries.
We gotta move those refrigerators;
We gotta move those colour TVs."

Thank you Dire Straits. All of the above was really easy compared with shifting an aquarium.

Microwave oven?
Small and light. A doddle to move.

Custom kitchen?
I had to customise the 89cm slot for my 90cm stove, and, much to the astonishment and probable disappointment of the removal men, the stove slid neatly into its allocated space. All the existing cupboards are much improved by new Ikea doors to replace the incumbent ghastly, rotten papier mâché items. The wall cupboards are to be delivered, assembled and installed by Ikea's own experts. Then there remains the small matter of fitting a cooker hood cum extract-o-matic.

Refrigerators?
Two upright fridge-freezers now stand side by side, pretending to be an oversized double-door unit. A third miniature fridge needs a home. Somewhere convenient for the beer. In the den, perhaps?

Colour TVs?
Despite the removers' concerns, the telly was surprisingly easy to move. Fortunately for everybody, when they moved part of the display unit and sent a shelf and ornaments crashing down it missed the TV and only dented a cabinet. The damaged unit is irreplaceable; it's a line discontinued by Ikea ever since I bought one. The removers knocked off some money in compensation, and I managed not to be too profane at the time.

Anyway, the aquarium. I previously blogged about how every time I mentioned my fish tank one of its occupants went belly up. I have decided to risk publishing again. Googling moving house aquarium yields a lot of scary stories and dire injunctions against attempting to shift it with water in. Yeah, like 515kg (water plus gravel plus glass) can be shifted by a couple of guys. "Moving house is one of the most stressful things you can do," I'm led to believe. And that's before a fish tank is included in the equation. To complicate the issue, the tank is 1.5m long and the floor of the lift was 1.4m square. So the tank had to be upended.

The first stage was to remove the ornaments from the tank and to put these along with about 60 litres of syphoned water into a clean plastic bin. While discarding most of the rest of the water with the syphon, I spent a happy half hour chasing some extremely rapid fish around their diminishing home. One at a time they ended up in the dustbin along with an immersed filter and a couple of airstones. So far so good. I only got bitten once. The smart money, according to t'internet, says to put each fish in its own ziplock bag with some water. I decided not to pursue this option because it would have made reconstructing the tank environment a huge rush to beat the fish running out of oxygen.

Having drained all but the last few teaspoons of water I shovelled up the gravel and put it into clean and available polystyrene boxes, which I loaded into the back of the Goatmobile. The fish came next. A dustbin two thirds full of water and fish is unwieldy, to say the least. It took several tries to get it into the car the right way up and secure for a journey. And getting the bin out of the car in Mirdif was even more awkward because there was no security guard to assist, and Beloved was busy elsewhere. Once inside the building I re-established filtration and air supply, and let the fish calm down.

The aquarium was delivered the following day by the removal men. As soon as I could I put the gravel and ornaments back in the tank and mostly filled it with tap water, treating for chlorine as I went. At one point the hosepipe obligingly fell out of the tank and poured several gallons of water all over the floor. Just as well, then, that it's tiles and not finest Axminster. I left the pumps and aeration running overnight to try to get the tank environment stable before introducing the fish to their new home.

In the Pink

I have noticed several Google searches ending at The Grumpy Goat that started as a desire to find Pinky's, (or Pinkys, or Pinky) emporium of Indian Furniture and Handicrafts in Sharjah. As a kind of public service announcement, here are some directions to Pinky's in Sharjah.

The warehouse is probably best approached either from Dubai or from the E311 Emirates Road.

From the Emirates Road, turn off at the Sharjah-Dubai border and follow Sharjah Ring Road. It's signposted 'Al Nahda' and 'Al Khan'. Turn right at the first interchange on to Third Industrial Street. The turn is about 2km from the Emirates Road, and Pinkys is in Industrial Area No.10 on your right.

From Dubai, drive through the airport tunnel and follow Beirut Road towards Sharjah. Go straight on through several sets of traffic lights. You enter Sharjah as you drive under the Ring Road bridge, and then look to turn right into Industrial Area No.10. By the way, this route is usually devoid of massive traffic jams, which is probably a good thing. I should point out that the map on www.dubaitourism.ae "Your one-stop information center" take ages and ages to download on Ye Olde Dial-Uppe, and the Java version doesn't want to work for me at all. And once downloaded, the map alleges that Beirut Road is called 'Al Rashidiya Road', a factoid not borne out by the street nameplates. There are so many inaccuracies in the PDF map that it ought to be entered for consideration in next year's Booker Prize for Creative Fiction.

LOCATION: North is in the top right-hand corner

If the directions were useful (or not!), please feel free to comment.

It wood be nice

For some time now I've been looking for a strong and well-built item of furniture for an aquarium. The basic problem is that the fish tank I've had my eye on for a while will weigh close to half a ton once the weight of water, gravel, glass and fish are all totted up. So it's not small. Ikea, emporium of budget furniture from Sweden, had nothing suitable on offer. Any wooden box of approximately the correct dimensions had the ominous 'maximum weight 100kg' on the label. Good for a TV perhaps, but not a fish tank. I encountered the same problem in Homes R Us, Home Centre, Marina and Pan Home Furnishings. Lots of stuff, all the wrong size, or too feeble, and in most cases both.

Chipboard is out, as is MDF. The problem with these is they're not strong enough. They bend under the weight of paperback books, so a few hundred kilos of aquarium is entirely unsuitable. The fish-tank shop offered a custom-built box for the tank to sit on. But at over Dh1000 for the cabinet this didn't strike me as particularly good value for a few square feet of the dreaded chipboard veneer. And despite the catalogue showing several colours, Petland was happy to impersonate Henry Ford. "Any color[sic] you like, as long as it's black."

I even drew up some dimensioned sketches and touted them around the carpentry souq. No-one I asked was willing (able?) to provide what I wanted; they all wanted to use MDF and most demonstrated an inability to read drawings in third angle projection.

At this point one of my friends - yes, actually I do have some of those - suggested Pinky's in Sharjah Industrial Area. Chunky furniture, made of real wood, I was told. The map on the Pinky's business card is not particularly helpful, and after an hour of Sharjah traffic and asking unsuccessfully for directions, I got through to the warehouse courtesy of Directory Enquiries. I arrived at the door just as the man was locking up for lunch.

"Hi. I see you're shut. Oh well. At least I know where you are now. See you some other time."

Not at all. He re-opened the warehouse and let me wander among the Indian reproduction antique-style furniture for the next half hour. Yes, in his lunch break. Although I couldn't find anything quite right I thanked the salesman and promised to be back.

I did go back a couple of days later. I'm pleased to report that I found a suitable sideboard that looks the business, which was polished and delivered exactly as requested. What a star! The extremely pleasant surprise of getting decent customer service has warranted these words.

And now I await the delivery of the aquarium itself. Even as I write, it has arrived, so the rest of my evening is going to involve reaching into a big glass box.

What a load of sheet

Home Centre is having a sale. I decided to get rid of my old bed and replace it with a decent over-size example, and as there's a special offer of effectively 25% discount, I went to the bed department and made my choice.

Now, a King Size bed is substantially larger than my existing one, so none of my bed linen will fit. Logically therefore, it would make sense to buy some new sheets. And at this point the problems started.

The Home Centre bed frame requires a mattress the same size - logically. And the mattress was indeed available. Made in the UAE, I might add. But I was naive enough to assume that sheets to fit the mattress would also be available. I was sort of right; there was one sheet in an acceptable colour. The other half-dozen or so fitted sheets were lurid pink and livid vermilion. I am not macho enough to own and sleep on pink bedding.

HC: "But this 2.0m sheet will fit, sir."

GG: "Prove it. Put it on the bed in the shop."

HC: "See. It fits!"

GG: "Only if you want me to sleep on a banana-shaped mattress. If I lie on that the sheet will rip. Thank you, but no."

In summary, Home Centre's stock of sheets to support the bed sizes they're selling is extremely limited.

A quick check on Wikipedia, and then I was off to the Mall of the Emirates, armed with the following piece of information:

Bed size 72" x 84" is 'California King' (also 'Western King' or 'West Coast King'), which is the standard size for a king-size bed on the Pacific coast of the United States.

Sadly, it is not a standard size in any of the myriad bed shops in the MotE. No-one had fitted sheets 2.1m long, and no flat sheets were big enough. Most shop assistants looked at me when I asked for 1.8m x 2.1m bed linen as if I'd grown an extra head. I eventually resorted to buying the biggest flat sheet I could find, and then taking it to the tailor.

I always use the same tailor, because he's reliable, accurate and cheap. His assistant was less helpful. After explaining with diagrams that I wanted corners and elastic putting into this flat piece of cloth, he decided fifteen minutes into my explanation that although he said he understood, in fact he didn't. Remember this is someone who's capable of turning flat cloth into the complicated shapes necessary to hug a human body and look good. But a rectangular mattress defeated him. Almost one of those, "Manuel, let me explain" moments.

I am relieved to report that I finally found a couple of sheets, and the tailor eventually got it right. This is just as well. The old bed was taken away yesterday and the new one arrived this afternoon. It's enormous!