Painting, aggravation and a DVD

Still painting, patching, spraying, scrubbing, rubbing, brushing, and coating the bloomin' flat. Yesterday, Saturday, was an all out exhausting day, with no let up. We'd planned to get started really early, but the weather was very patchy, and we didn't get off the ground till about nine. Then the weather packed up again and drizzled, and put paid to another stretch of time; then we started again, and Doug and Stef arrived with the famous granddaughter, who managed to get paint and goo and mud and various other elements on her body at different times during the day. Had to pack up again because of the weather so we went and got the paint, and I listened to a very unuseful conversation between a polite customer and an apparently polite retailer: the customer had been waiting to have a bathroom cupboard stripped of its varnish by the firm's stripping dept which was located in Stafford St. The customer had been put off more than one with the excuse that the stripping wasn't finished, and was finally told that it would be ready by Friday - definitely. The customer went there at 4.35 on Friday and found the place closed at 4.30. He came into the main shop of the firm, where we were, on the Saturday morning, hoping he'd be able to get someone to open up the other dept and collect his cabinet. The retail assistant behind the counter seemed to come to conclusion very early in the piece that the customer was being difficult and really had no case. Whatever his reasoning was, he argued quietly and politely back and forth with an increasingingly irritable customer and was plainly not prepared to do anything; furthermore he claimed that because it was the weekend he (they - the shop) had no jurisdiction over the other dept. This went on until it almost reached interminability - at which point the assistant (who wasn't one of your young know-it-alls, but a middle-aged man who should have known better than to handle a customer the way he did) went off and got the other bloke, who cheerily agreed to meet the customer round at the other dept and open up for him! How to make a customer mad for no good reason...!

Celia and I did have one night off this week - when we babysat the granddaughter - and watched a DVD of Miss Congeniality, with Sandra Bullock and Benjamin Bratt - and Michael Caine. Bullock plainly has the time of her life in this movie - the promos that were also on the DVD showed her barely different in reality to her character on screen, at times. More amazing, to Celia, was the fact that whole scenes had been excluded from the end product: three of them that we saw, and all of them involving quite a heap of people and the equivalent of several minutes screen time.