Welcome home

The plane was early into Hong Kong last night; perhaps our captain had his foot on the loud pedal to get us home half an hour ahead of schedule so he could get back to Discovery Bay and 2.5 kids and a golden retriever. Feeling like we should carry on with this race home, we burned through 350 HKD taking a taxi home to chez Cushtie. And we were welcomed back to our apartment by ... the glorious sight of the out of order sign on the lift.

Not to worry, though. It wasn't like we were exhausted from twelve hours of flying and eight different time zones. I mean, if we'd been stuck on a plane for half a day, extremities gradually swelling, and had forty kilos of luggage to move up the stairs, then we might be a bit put out.

Oh.

Rather than yank bits of our spines and limbs out of action by dragging all the dirty clothes up two hundred steps, we climbed the stairs and went to bed, trusting that by the morning the elevator repairman would have done his job, and we could cheerfully ride up and down with our bags of dirty underwear. That's the stuff of which dreams are made, folks.

And it was nothing but a beautiful dream, because on waking this morning we were aghast to find ourselves still sans elevateuuur, as the French would say. Pardon my French, but there was enough of it spitting out of my mouth at seven this morning, when I realised we were going to have to walk all the way downstairs and then walk all the way upstairs again.

On the positive side of all this, it seems I've gained five-and-a-half pounds over the Christmas period, so I need all the exercise I can get. Still, it didn't put me in quite the right frame of mind for joyfully skipping to work this morning.

After a day at work thankfully unpunctuated by narcolepsy, I left work and rushed home, ready to be lifted up on the wings of desire ... and predictably enough, the lift is still bust, and our ever-cheerful security guard tells us it won't be done until the sixth. I understand why he's cheerful - he's the one sitting at the bottom of the building. Put his chair on the roof and see how long that happy demeanour lasts.

Maybe I should have mentioned this to our landlord when I paid the rent this morning.  However, they may not have a lift that works every week, but at least while we were away they spent a week putting up a new sign outside our apartment building, that proclaims we're now the House of Scaly Reptile, in addition to all the other random names the place has.  That was a good use of their time. The rotters.