Brace yourself, Shirley*

*this post gets coarser & coarser as it goes along

Well, the toilet fish went well! (Good start eh.) No-one pooped on the fish, which is what I was secretly hoping would happen, but it was a good prank nonetheless. I bought a whole fish from the supermarket last night, which is something I have never done before. I was also buying wine, and the checkout person was all "Can I see some ID?" and I said "For the fish!?" and laughed out of all proportion to the humour of the situation. I wonder what she thought I was going to do with my evening? What would you think, if someone bought a bottle of wine and a whole fish at 10pm?

I got up Very Early and snuck the fish into the toilet. There it was, peering up fishily from the bowl. Ha ha ha.

Then Mum got up and went into the bathroom (this was the bit where I hoped she wouldn't see the fish until it was too late, but oh well). "Girls! There a terakihi in the toilet!" I was pretty impressed that she knew what kind of fish it was given that most of its bottom half was poked round the U-bend, but I guess that some people just know these things.

My, how we roared!

To wrap up the story, the fish has now been thrown out, although we did leave it swimming in the bowl for most of the morning and go in from time to time and laugh at it.

I spent the entire afternoon cleaning my aunt's house. This took four hours because not only is their house enormous, it is full of crap objects d'art, all of which need to be moved and dusted under (apparently.) My general philosophy about cleaning is 'but it's only going to get dirty again,' especially when it comes to things like The Toilet (which is actually not so bad to clean once you've gotten past the whole other-people's-butts-go-here thing (many mentions of toilets in my blog today)), but then my aunt was paying me.

It was actually not so bad, apart from the vacuum cleaner, which was called TELLUS (as in, 'tell us about the vacuuming, Ally') and pure straight hated me. There's not much more to it except that at one point I was trying to cut corners be efficient and the vacuum cleaner fell down the stairs and the lid came off and its insides went everywhere. In hindsight it was probably my fault but at the time I blamed TELLUS and called it a 'dirt-suckin' motherfucker' and then cracked myself up because I accidentally rapped.

Unsurprisingly, the bathrooms are the worst things to clean (apart from stairs that are covered in vacuum vomit). Toilet Duck is a wonderful product, but I was slightly disappointed that a little duck in a racing car didn't actually come out of the nozzle of the bottle (I love that word, nozzle) and screech round the bowl making awful puns about skidmarks like on the ads. He just sat on the rim and looked at me reproachfully, then bummed a cigarette and left.

It is also not fun when you forget to sweep before you mop (because your head is full of raps about appliances (the genre is called Troncore and I will pioneer it, right after I'm done with Communist Pop)) and the floor becomes covered in wet dirt.

Also, buffing taps is, in my expert opinion, a lot like giving somebody a hand-job. (Expert at buffing taps, obviously, not the other thing.) The hand action is pretty much exactly the same (I am adding 'tap buffing experience' to my FindSomeone profile as we speak), and they're both entertaining for about the first 10 seconds as you note the impact your actions are having, but then you get bored and think, 'Why am I doing this ridiculous thing? Oh that's right, I am getting paid.'

<(")>

I also accidentally spilled stainless steel polish all over my arm, which is now BUFFED TO A LUSTROUS SHINE.

I'm sorry, that whole post would've been better off staying inside my head but oh well, that's what blogs are for.