Kates Journal

So, my good friend Nikki rang me up after the last post, concerned that I sounded very down and wanting to check I was okay. She’s kind and thoughtful like that.

So I thought I’d just say, I’m okay. It’s perhaps a healthy dose of realism time. I’ve been sticking solidly to the “the house will sell for enough and we’ll go to Canada” belief because of the options we’ve got it’s my favourite. To use the house metaphore, it’s the one I’ve built foundations for, I’d been looking at the plans and preparing to get contractors. It worked thusly:

Buy house
Fix house
Sell house, use funds thus obtained to enable us to
1) Go to Canada
2) Me to pay off *all* my debts
3) Have some savings to live off in Canada if it all goes pearshaped
And I’d added:
4) Hopefully have enough that some of those savings can be scooped off for our notional world trip in a few years time.

There wasn’t really a plan B. I knew that the housing market was going to plummet in just the way that bricks do, I just hoped it did it after I’d (now) we’d sold. Unfortunately, my hopes lacked the strong foundations of reality.

The new ‘plan’, for want of a better word, is to finish the house (because whether we’re living in it, or selling it, I’d rather like it not to niggle like a splinter. The unfinished floor in the lounge, the dirty old door* in our shiny new kitchen), get it valued and make the rest of the plan based on the outcome of that.

- Sell and get to Canada ASAP
- Sell and move somewhere else in the UK (I don’t need to clear my debts to do that**)
- Enjoy the lovely environs of Slough.

I’m rooting for A, hoping that at worst B comes off and trying to think about ways to make C more bearable. Ironically, the house is coming together to be a really lovely place. The garden should be beautiful this year, and even more so next; there should be fruit and fresh veg, herbs and gorgeous flowers…

If it weren’t for the builder’s yard right behind it would be glorious*** .

Anyway, so I’m okay. I’m just…. disappointed.

In other news, I just realised that I’ve owned Rebecca 17 years. That was quite a shock. And in another quirky thing I’ve never noticed before; she was first registered on my mum’s birthday. How bizzare is that? It’s funny how coincidence pops up on you.

Now, What shall I do with this last hour before I go to work? I’ve swept the bedroom (and put clothes away), and looked depressingly at my Student Loan deferment thing (I think I may finally have to actually start paying back the loans****). Hrm, maybe I’ll watch some Holmes on Holmes.

Tomorrow is another day, and I’m hoping a day when bits of DAF might turn up.

* Needs the 1960s hardboard overcoat taking off, then it needs stripping and painting.
** I don’t, I suppose, technically need to clear my debts to move to Canada, but it really makes everything a lot more complicated if I don’t. And it makes living much harder to do. It’s bad enough here where I can go and chat and shuffle my lack of money around. There… well…
*** It *was*, when I moved in, a wild untended lot. It was pretty.
**** Confusingly my loans are owned by two separate companies. I’m not sure if I’ll get two separate student-loan-deferment letters, and need to make payments to two separate companies. That would be distressing. But only one of them has been flagged as ‘needing payment’ in this letter. It appears I won’t make my dream of never paying them back by remaining a poorly paid wage-slave.

So, Lauren and Chrissy are coming down today, we’ve given the place a little bit of a once over (bathroom needs doing, and that’ll do us); bizzarely this has prompted me to finally (finally’s a bit extreme really, it’s only been a week or two); get around to replacing the light switch in the kitchen. Not that there was anything wrong with it, apart from being manky. And the 1970s decision to replace screws with plastic? Not so hot.

We’d taken it off the wall while we painted and for the last couple of weeks it’s been held loosely in place by one of the plastic screws which, while I attempted to undo it, snapped in half.

Still, a pair of pliers and some patience had it out of the wall, and the kitchen light switch replaced with a more modern looking one. I then wandered upstairs and did the two bedrooms, but, annoyingly can’t do the stair-one (which really needs replacing because the rocker’s awful on it) because while I stood in B&Q and thought about the number of lightswitches that need replacing (7) and therefore opted to buy a multipack (5) I didn’t think that the stair ones (2, but one’s a double and was going to wait anyway) are two-way. Well, one of ‘em is.

Still, it’s handy that I didn’t get all 6 because I actually have enough places to use the lights up, it’s just annoying I couldn’t do that one at the top of the stairs while the power was off.

I also spent 5 minutes throwing the plastic ducting onto the wall (ducting? pipe-things, y’know, for wire) by the extractor fan – thus making it look marginally neater than the wire trailing across the wall. This is, one presumes, one of the few benefits of waking up at 6:30 every day.

In other news: this is making me want to live in Vancouver (community market! zines! cool bookstores!). It’s funny, because the house is finally getting to the stage where it’s honestly just a pleasant place to spend time. It’s light and airy, and warm (most of the time) and clean, (much of it). And if it were in Canada I’d actually really like it. I do really like the house. Just it’s in the wrong place. And we need a garage.

In a virtual sense. More contemplation on Canada*.

One of the noteable things about nights and, indeed, the days after nights is that I’m tired and I spend more time than normal in a slightly less than positive mood contemplating things. Not out-right negative, but tired and slightly low. The tiredness takes the edge off happiness, somehow.

I tend to counter this with lots of loud music and smiling (‘cos your brain can’t tell the difference and feels happier).

Anyway, one of the interesting things that occurs to me is the distance between me and my past. Most people have links to their past. Often close links. For long and complex reasons I’m not likely to go into here, an event in my past made a lot of what happened to me seem in my childhood seem like it happened to a different person.

And I suppose it did, in many ways. The person I was then and the person I am now have very little in common. It’s not like a whole separate person distinction, there’s a connection there, but it’s tenuous and weak; like melting strands of cheese, between me now and my memories of me then.

And each step I take in my life takes me further from me then. But the things that have happened to me, then, now, they very much make up the person I am. Experience made me who I am, so however far distant I may feel to a somewhat unhappy past, the pain of my dad’s death, and however happy I am now, when I’m tired the strands of the past sometimes wrap around me and I find myself looking back.

What interests me is how impossibly hard I seem to be to link to my old life. I’ve changed so much, and so far separated myself from me then, that with the exception of the links I’ve deliberately maintained (one friend, one person who found me) there’s almost nothing that links me to that childhood past. And I’m slowly moving on from my dad. I know I’ll never be free of the sadness of him dying, because he meant so much to me, and he’ll never see how happy I am now – because when I came out he supported me – and talked to my mum to help her come to terms with it all.

It seems strange to consider that in a year’s time I’ll be living in a new country, with many new people around me, a new job, a new life. But there won’t be a new me there. There’ll be the me with those fragile, insubstantial links to a life lived in another place and time.

* Interruption to thought process: It’s amazing how bad the acoustics of a Morris Minor at 70mph are. There’s entire instruments on The Ting Ting’s album I’d not noticed were there.

Said my body at 4:45am. I’m not quite sure why, I think I was woken by my throat, and then my brain started listing all the things I need to do today. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) Kathryn said I wasn’t to do anything that might upset my throat further – so my cunning plan to strip the paint on the door frames, and uh, paint them is off*.

I’ve still got a fair bit to get on with. When the frost’s melted a bit I need to take jejy round to the tyre place, having found that the ’slow’ puncture’s got quicker, and that it’s leaking from the valve. Now I can point and go “look, it’s leaking from the valve; that’s definately your fault, please fix it”. I also am debating getting an external enclosure for my now spare SATA hard drive (what? why?!)…

Let me explain. I want to sell the G5 Mac. The G5 Mac currently sports 2 largish harddrives, a lot of memory, a 20″ monitor, a 14″ LCD monitor and so on. To sell it, I have two options:

1) Dump all my data onto and remove the second HDD.
2) Copy all my data onto the 500Gb ex-entertainment-Hackintosh drive in an external drive case and then nuke the two drives.

I think the latter is probably the better solution. Whilst it will cost 20 quid, it will probably add more than 20 quid to the value of the Mac, selling it with two big hard drives in. Mind you, if one of them is bigger than 500Gig it’ll be being swapped around.

At any rate, I’ve been travelling in the DAF a lot recently, and it’s come to my attention that the Radiomobile radio doesn’t work…

It did work when we got the car, it stopped working a while ago, and has not spontaneously reanimated itself. But I rather like the look of it. Ratty and tatty though it is, it’s part of the car’s 1970s charm. The plasti-chrome is peeling and the volume knob turns on it’s spindle. But I have a solution. Rip out its guts and throw them away.

I’ve finally found a cheapie company making (almost certainly lousy quality) automotive amplifiers (but you’re in a car with no soundproofing to speak of). In fact, the one I’ve bid 75p for (but £9.99 shipping) also sports 2 inputs (but no means of switching between them, switches, presumably, are extra). But since I intend to gut the poor wee beastie, that’s fine. I’m also hopefully going to get my grubby little hands on one of the Matsui DAB tuners. Back before I planned to move to Canada I debated buying one of these for the Minor. But they were 30 quid at the time.

Now, at a few quid second hand, they’re tempting to again be the subject of my soldering iron. The plan is simple; gut the DAB tuner, gut the amplifier, make Radiomobile into DAB tuner. Leave socket for MP3/CD player. And lo, we’ll have the perfect modern stereo in a 70s box.

Mind you, that’s how it is in my head. How it’ll work in practice is another question. The other thing I quite fancy, having driven the car a while now, is a small amount of illumination around the air vent controls and the hot/cold air selector sliders.

I usually end up waving my arms around under the dashboard to find them (when driving in the dark) so a little glowy white LED illuminating the up/down arrows seems quite tempting to me. And a little red/blue illumination on the hot air and cold air sliders also seems like quite a nice idea (potentially mounting them in a small piece of sanded perspex to diffuse the light). I’m slightly concerned she might look a little boy-racer though with the blue/red glow eminating from the dash, but at least I’d be able to control the temperature while driving without too much concentration. I’m also slightly concerned that I might get overly attached to Jejy. But hey.

This all comes about because I need to prepare Jejy to be Rebecca’s temporary replacement while I fit the diff (when it arrives), the gearbox (when it’s ready), the new swivel pins (when they’re manufactured; if ever), trunions, poly-bush the front suspension, and repaint the damaged paint areas of the engine bay. Oh, and strip out the dash, find all the things that are rattling, stop them from doing so, clean out the heater, fit a new inline heater control valve (from a golf, apparently), and potentially convert her to Left Hand Drive (which involves moving the brake master cylinder and associated plumbing, remanufacturing the dash I made (otherwise the worry gauges will all be in front of the passenger), fitting the other gearbox front plate and somehow working out how to lock and unlock the passenger door from the outside), oh and ideally fitting a heated rear window that works, and in a perfect world sending off the speedo to be recalibrated, the revcounter to be reinternalised and the clock to be made to work (a car with a working clock! that’d be a novelty).

Just a short list of jobs…

So Jejy may have to do service for the minor for a while. Which is why I fancy a radio and a CD input.

Anyway, today I need to get my act together and sell the Mac, and possibly the Dell (although I doubt the dell is going to sell). And in aid of getting started, I shall now have my breakfast.

* Yes, yes, I know she’s right, but it seemed like a good idea in my head :)

So, I’ve been looking on in joy watching the new Obama led government put a stop to torture in their name, signing orders to close Guantanamo, and generally being shiny in all the ways I’d hoped they’d be. Happily reading good things in the papers. It’s been a bit, well, different.

Feeling quite positive about the world.

And my MP wrote back to my previous ‘please vote against this’ with a ‘already was, but thanks’; which I rather liked. And then I came across this: who needs privacy?

So, today I crafted another e-mail to my MP – I’m hoping she’ll be on-side with this one as well. I never really thought of myself as being a political creature, but as I’ve got older and realised that I disagree with a lot of things that are going on, and I am really unhappy with where the country’s going (in general terms) I find myself being more and more politically motivated. Even though I don’t intend to be here much longer I don’t think that anyone should have to put up with the level of invasion of privacy that they’re suggesting.

The irony is I’m one of these weird people who’s pro the NHS having a massive database of health records; or at least basic information shared across the country. Why? Because I stand there and have patients who are dying in front of me who might have hideous allergies to the drugs we’re about to give them, who’ve been in accidents and can’t tell me that they’ve got some medical condition or other and I think, well, it’d make sense to have that information available. However, I disagree with the way they’ve done it. I disagree with virtually everything about computers in the NHS that I’ve encountered. Ironically the best (and most reliable) systems I’ve encountered are the early 80s ones with the text interfaces running on Unix based systems. Although ours has a really dumb-ass bug where if you press any of the arrow keys (except the up/down ones) it instantly crashes your instance of the software, which can be dreadfully annoying when you’re hurridly discharging the patient walking out the door at 3hours 59mins (4 hours is a breach, and a great sin).

But having the government having access to that information? Makes me want to go back to storing all information on paper cards and in little folders, just to make life as difficult for them as possible.

In other news, the TV appears to be soldiering on, I’m suspecting it was just a loose connector (bad me, should have checked) – it seems happy enough though. I’ve had to give in and order a new HDD for the Hackintosh though, it still freaks me out, that once a 20Meg HDD was ‘huge’ and now I’m about to stick a 1Tb drive into this computer.

I’m actually tempted to keep the 500Gig one as a ‘backup’ and just decruft it a bit and stick it in a box. I’ve no way to back up stuff otherwise.

In other (other) news, it has come to my attention that I’m not being as good about ‘doing things’ as I should be. I’ve got a pile of paperwork building up, again, which needs sorting. I need to get off my ass and do something about my (non-new-year’s but) resolution (all the same) to put in at least an hour a day into my development as a nurse. I need to get the cars sorted. I need to assemble the MZ. I need to finish decorating this house so we can escape this damn country and get (me) somewhere I can get paid a reasonable amount for my skills without pimping myself out to any trust that’ll pay me – no job security there. And to a place where Kathryn can truly start the process of getting the job she wants.

I want to only work one job, not 3. I want to be able to see Kathryn. I don’t want to stand staring at my off duty and looking at the request I do two sets of nights in a month and think ‘well, shit, I could do with the money’ and end up saying yes.

The wonderful nature of the people around me has kept me going thus far, and I shall miss my friends greatly when I leave this little island, but this little island has no respect for public servants. And working 3 jobs means I have no time or energy to express my creativity. I want to be off urbexing, I want to create the animation that runs through my head whenever I listen to Rock ‘n’ Roll or Trains (in fact, quite a few of the tracks on Today Is.. inspire me and I’m wondering if I could animate the entire album).

A lot of this is down to me. I sit down of a morning and browse the internet until I’m bored and then sit and watch Blackadder, or BSG, or House, or Hustle instead of doing things that would actually make me feel a creative and interesting person. I am disappointed in my lack of activity. I’m disappointed that I’ve not written the book that lurks in my head. Even if it’s crap, I should have written it.

I sound down on myself, and sad. I’m not, I’m feeling positive. I have the power to change these things. I have the power to give myself the time to do these things. Not necessarily creative time right now (with 2 cars sick and needing input of time and energy, and a bike that needs assembling, and a house in need of decorating). But I’ve remembered that I can do this. I used to come home after an early and work. I used to make progress on the house. That will start to happen again.

I’m going to finish the kitchen over the next couple of weeks. The walls and the ceiling need washing down (Kathryn’s started). The cars are going to get sorted too. So; so we all know what the plan is:

Late days: Paperwork and Development on Nursing.
Earlys: Work on house or cars
Days off: Spending time with Kathryn, doing creative stuff or seeing friends or family

Uh, and cleaning the bathroom :)

Which I’m off to do now.

Time to decruft :)