Kates Journal

So, yesterday was a good day (apart from the transient death of a laptop. It seems the power connector’s gone now (in addition to the cable and the case, the screen’s occasionally flickering too. I think it might be time to take it apart); tiring but everything went remarkably well. Despite the 6 miles travelled in the last year, Rebecca aquitted herself beautifully; carrying me the 120 miles (with the brief stop at my mum’s to collect new wings) without any untoward experiences (apart from a petrol leak, which I was faintly aware of, but only actually checked up on once I’d got up there).

It was a gorgeous day, and oddly, for someone who’s lived in the UK all their lives, the sunny-but-cold air reminded me very strongly of Canada. I guess, doing Rebecca is largely a step towards Canadification, and having thought about it getting Canada out of my head was hard. Poor old Rebecca though, her engine sounded so sick by the time we got there – running essentially on 3 cylinders except at higher revs…

Anyhow, Jonathon of JLH is very friendly – and we chatted for a while and looked around at the Zetec engine’d minors, and the minors undergoing major structural rehabilitation, and chatted of rebuilds topping £50,000… And I looked at my poor tired Rebecca, her subsistence motoring existence having taken it’s toll; rusty wings, rusty doors, knackered engine and such, she won’t be getting one tenth of that; but she her reliability is something which has left me with no small measure of respect for the engineering behind her.

Anyhow, at the end of the day we headed to Leamington Spa; unfortunately getting stuck behind a learner driver – my train ticket was for 1800, and as he suggested 2 sets of (red) traffic lights from the station, I sprinted from the car and made it to the station at 1803, fortunately, my train was delayed and came in at 1806, just as I scrabbled up the stairs to the platform. I probably had about a minute to spare – and y’know what, I felt sick as a dog as I sat on that train. I sat there reading Scott Pilgrim (vol 1, I needed to start again at the beginning); and drifted off to Canada in my head again.

I was back, sitting on the GO heading back to Mississauga, new copies of Scott Pilgrim in hand, from a day in Toronto. As the train pulled into Oxford (where I changed) I was thoroughly in that headspace. Finally got back to home just after 8, stopping at the Kebab van for dinner…

Today, theoretically hasn’t gone badly. I’ve paid the council tax bill (after some argument with the home hub and the hub phone). Internet Exploiter didn’t want to start today, and Firefox is still doing it’s “i think I’ll stop and rest for a bit” at random moments. The laptop is however working after some wiggling of cables and connectors, so I guess reparing that is something I can look forward to. I may well switch it for a standard power connector, since then I can ditch my mini-adaptor. I just really don’t want *more* jobs to do. The fan heater in the lounge also needs stripping down and repairing, and this time I’m peeved with I&A car services.

They’re great, in-so-far as being a garage I actually trust. But they’re slow. Or at least, when I booked my car in before they had it for several days and didn’t do anything, none of the service was done. This time, they collected the car (although it was no longer booked in), have had it for 3 days, and now want it for another 3. 6 days is a hell of a long time to have a car.

Colour me unimpressed.

Come the spring it’ll be back to car servicing I fear. It’s cheaper and it’s quicker. I’m down a car for a few hours, rather than days. Le *sigh*.

I guess I should get on with the house, but I’m just somehow feeling really fed up. Poot.

Okay, so shoot me. I’m taking my morning more or less, no actually I’m taking a chunk of my morning off. I may go and prod at the paint in the bathroom, I may not, I may turn on the water to the cistern, I may not. We shall see.

I actually got up hugely early, but the thing is – the thing is I’ve got to drive to my mum’s to collect the wings for my mog, and the drive to the midlands to drop off Rebecca before waiting until 1800 for my train back. I’m hoping to have a big wait between heading up there and the train on the way back, but I can’t promise that’ll be the case. I was hoping she’d run better once she’d got some fresh petrol in her, but actually despite starting and running, she’s still rough as sin.

So, anyhow, I’ve spent my morning doing stuff all. I’ve downloaded some nipod management tools, I’ve downloaded something which claims it can remove all my dupilicate mp3 files (ha, I’ve tried this before… but hey, it’s worth a shot). I’m still converting several gigs of Kathryn’s AAC (into mp3) files for placement on the nipod, although the application I’ve got in my sweaty little paws says it can do that on the fly while copying and integrating sorta with iTunes. Which is cool beans.

‘ve spent some time trying to find a prezzie for one of my friends; frustratingly I dreamt the perfect present for this friend last night; sadly however it doesn’t *actually* exist. I had my doubts, and searching the net has confirmed them, distressingly.

But you have to look, don’t you?

Yesterday I stripped an awful lot of paint from the radiator. It’s about 2/3rds done. I’m thinking I might mark out the channels to cut in the kitchen and then tomorrow I could do that, to give me a break from paint stripping. Ha, we could knock up a faux kitchen in a day, don’t'cha think? Maybe? Heh. Anyhow, I should go shower, really.

But the car has gone to be fixed, the shower is entirely grouted (as are quite a few random bits outside), the sink no longer leaks and the toilet is, if not exactly complete all connected. I flushed it for the first time today and was astonished to find it worked. It also leaked in a manner that was quite sieve like; but hey. Having spent much of the evening swearing at my inability to bend pipes I decided to say stuff it and did the whole lot with 90 degree bends :-/

Welcome to the combined Kate’s Life 2007 update package. This package will update your Kate’s Life Information on the following issues:

- Thanksgiving
- XKCD is in my head again
- Stuff of a housey nature
- Random photographics
- Other sundry informatorial updates may be included. Click here to install this update

So, yes, I’m behind again, aren’t I? So, we’ll do things in kinda an order. First up, XKCD is in my head; I’m now at a state where I have no properly working computers. The laptop’s power cable is fubar, so I need to find the spare supply for it (which is probably in the attic, fortunately, and not in the ’spare room’ which is currently full. The G5 still needs a new power supply; I’m hoping to sort that out this week, if at some point before friday I have a working car. The PC downstairs still falls off the wifi, it is to be fair working in all other respects. And the hackintosh remains without network. There was no small degree of frustration after spending hours on it, I realise now that I need a USB WiFi dongle *anyway* (my brain kept saying, no you don’t; you won’t need one when you get the G5 working because you’ll just stick the homehub up there as a wired / wireless router – but it’d just be easier if everything can be wirelessed). So, yes. We’ll see what happens.

Anyway, so, Thanksgiving. We celebrated thanksgiving with friends (thank you for coming Jordax!), producing a not-quite traditional (but real) chicken (there were only 3 of us though, and we still had *loads of food*), stuffed with home made stuffing consisting of (veggie) sausage, raisins, celery, onion, and herbs; sweet potato and pecan casserole (that was delicious, if mostly sugar :) ), US style biscuits (very yummy), green beans, carrots, brussel sprouts, mashed potato and cranberry sauce, all washed down with some rather nice red wine. This was followed by an excellent Lemon Icebox Pie made with real proper Graham Crackers imported from the States… (and this is the best description I can imagine of a Graham Cracker: “…if a Digestive were ever to get a Ryvita into trouble, possibly at a wild party behind the cheese board, then the resulting progeny may well end growing up to look a lot like Graham Crackers“). Anyhow, proper thanksgiving tradition being followed we attempted to watch clips of the Macy’s day parade, but they were a bit short and required more attention than we wanted to give them (next year, can someone please post the whole damn thing to YouTube or GoogleVideo? That’d help. Ta), so we switched and watched the Peanuts / Charlie Brown Thanksgiving Special (1973) :)

And then we settled down to play Squabble for a bit (Kathryn won :) ), chatted, drank and whiled the hours away before heading to bed. Sunday was spend doing absolutely nothing useful whatsoever (apart from some laundry and all the washing up in the entire universe).

Anyway, I know it’s rather bleached from the flashgun, but here’s the thanksgiving dinner…

And here’s a bit of old news; I drew a person…

Raaaa!

So, stuff of a housey nature (Which I should, really, be doing now) – the bathroom has water. Water! The taps work and everything. Well, the cold ones. Jobs left for us to do are (in order, ish):

- Cut and prime wood for behind toilet cistern.
- The rest of the grouting, most importantly finishing the shower and polishing the area behind the radiator.
- Painting the woodwork behind the radiator.
- Continue to strip radiator.
- Seal sink drainer (because it’s leaking….le sigh).

Day 2
- Paint wood for behind toilet cistern.
- Silicone sealing around the shower.
- Continue to strip radiator.
- Sand radiator and paint… hopefully.
- Silicone seal around toilet

Day 3
- Switch over to chrome flush lever / chain / etc.
- Mount toilet cistern, connect up, pray it flushes okay.
- Connect radiator.

Other non-urgent jobs are to finish the rest of the grouting elsewhere, put a second coat of paint on some areas that missed out on the walls then mount shelves on those walls, and to – once the plumbing’s all connected up (hot water, specifically), fill in the last segment of tiles (over the currently removable panel work) and to grout everywhere that’s left.

It’s close, but this made me ridiculously happy:

And finally, for various reasons I’ve been trying to get some artsy shots of the Viva (well, one specific reason) – so, here’s one or two:

Uh, so there you go, closing with pictures. I’m going to end the update there, hopefully that’ll sort people’s complaints about lack of pictures ;)

 

 

So, for once I’m not talking about my girlfriend; although she does also verily rock.