The Travel Diva

Pee-proof plasma

Whenever I go off on a press trip I return home to find my husband has acquired another electrical appliance. A designer coffee peculator, new desktop, DVD… this time it was a plasma wide screen television with a surround sound system thing (and bloody wires everywhere!).

So now we need to find a suitable table to stand the TV on (no holes in the walls please) with shelves for the SKY satellite box and the two DVD machines; but the table needs to be covered on the sides and back, preferably with glass doors.

It’s not that we don’t have a nice TV cabinet - we do - it’s just not pee-proof. You see we have nine cats one of which has taken to pee’ing on new electrical items. We’ve lost three toasters, two kettles, an iron, two SKY satellite boxes – one was two-days old – my laptop, my husband’s desktop, my daughter’s desktop, my son’s printer… you get the picture. The problem is, we never get to catch the fathom piddler at it in order to administer suitable discipline. So you may understand why I’m so anxious to find a water-proof cabinet.

After traipsing around several furniture stores in Brussels we found two viable options but could find no sales assistant and was told that the sales staff don’t work on Saturday’s (shops are closed on Sunday’s here). This Belgian logic makes sense – after all, life in this country is so hugely expensive that both husband and wife need to work and as such, only have Saturday mornings to do their shopping, so why not run the whole show on skeleton staff. After waiting around for about 15 minutes (the manager was outside having a smoke break) I took him to the items we wanted, but neither product was in stock and if ordered, would take a week or two for delivery. We went off to another store on the other side of town and guess what, they didn’t have stock either! The stress of trying to find a business that actually wants our money is just too high, so we returned to the first store and placed an order. I just hope it gets here in time.

And if you’re going to suggest I get rid of my cats, think again. They’re all rescue cats and are like my children. In fact they’re more like children than my own children are, although my kids don’t go around pee’ing on things. Well, okay, there was that one time when Penny-Lane did a bag of potatoes in the kitchen, but she was still a toddler so that doesn’t count.

Perhaps I should investigate the disposable nappy option.

posted by Cindy-Lou Dale @ Friday, August 03, 2007