Very early this morning Irina’s parents returned from their holiday in Turkey. We had been checking in on their house to make sure the cats had food, water and a clean litter tray, as well as ensuring no one had broken in and that all the flowers, fruit and vegetables in their garden were well watered. (So yes, to any other Astana residents reading this, you can blame us for yesterday’s downpour – if we had not watered the garden, the rain would not have come down, and the plants would have died. Look at it this way, your wet clothes mean homegrown food on the plate here at the in-laws 🙂
While they were away, I had intended to do a few things around their house, for example their staircases, on a few steps, have a screw sticking out of the wood. I wanted to try and screw them down tighter, so the head would be flush with the wood. Completely forgot to do that, and I don’t like attacking their house when they are around, as if anything goes wrong, it is just another embarrassing incident for me to try and wipe from my mind. (Many years ago I ignored the perils of static electricity; I was wandering around in slippers, probably shuffling around and generating a few KV up as I moved around the carpet in our bedroom. I plugged in a card reader to a USB socket on their PC. I noticed a slight shock as I connected it, and when I tried to turn the PC on, we got nowhere. After checking several components, I confirmed that everything was fine, except the motherboard which had been fried.) Anyway, I remember I did try and stop a few of the screws on stair steps from catching on socks and skin a while back, but the screw seemed to be as far down as it would go. I wonder whether carefully (in other words, convince someone else to carry out this DIY act) applying wood filler around the screw, then sanding it down to a smooth and shallow dome would result in a long lasting screw head hiding? I also forgot to get a new key cut for one of the security locks here in Chubary – my current copy only opens the lock at random times – otherwise it just swivels, but doesn’t seem to catch the pins in the cylinder. I had planned to find a spare padlock, lock up the house and take the original lock with us to a key cutter, to ensure the new copy actually worked properly. Forgot to do this in time, and trying to sort this whilst Irina’s parents are here would mean getting spare keys for the temporary padlock. Just another thing to add to the To Do list.