Send My Conscience Home in a Taxi

Oh yeah, also on the flat cleaning front: my couch is now blue again, rather than a kind of cloudy blue-gray 'cause of the layer of cat hair. Marvin is now busy re-instating said layer *slaps head*

Note to self: never accept gardening advice from my Dad again.

For reasons which are not clear, my mother bought my Dad a lemon tree for his birthday last year (biographical note: my parents have been divorced since the late seventies.) Graeme (my dad) already had a lemon tree, so he gave it to me. Foolishly, I accepted - I don't even like lemons. I use about one a year.

Anyway, he also bought me a pot to put the lemon tree in. A big fucker of a pot. I don't even really have a balcony here, only the stairway, so it had to go in a corner of that.

And then - this is where it started to go really wrong - he brought me some compost to plant it in....

However... Said compost had not really been, er, composting for long enough, and was still both sinky and hand identifiable chunks in it. It had a little way to go before it became soil... Eeep. But I planted the thing anyway, then had to get some more top soil to cover up the stinky compost!!!!!

The (dwarf) lemon street sprang some buds. Then the leaves all fell off. Then the buds fell off. All that was left was a pathetic green twig... The lemon tree was clearly dead. It had ceased to be. It had squawked it's last squawked. If it hadn't been nailed to it's perch, it would have been pushing up the daisies.

Then I realised that in some of the heavy rain we've had lately, a vile black liquid had started leaking from the bottom of the pot...... A stinky vile black liquid... I'm thinking the compost in the thing was still decomposing and giving off a substance a bit like crude oil.

Great.

So today... I tried to get rid of it! I was going to simply chuck the whole thing into the bin and let it get collected tomorrow. But no... The pot was just to wide to fit into the bin *slaps head*

In an effort to move it, I managed to upend the tray under the pot, pouring smelly liquid all over the landing outside my flat! Yay. I managed to drag the pot down into the garden, where it still sits - still got no idea what to do with it. Anyone want a largish pot full of half decomposed compost???

Then I had to use an old towel to soak up the muck. Then I mopped the landing, threw out the tray, AND the towel... Did I mention this was gross??? Ah well, it's gone now...

Then to top it off, I emptied the cat's litter tray. Fun.