So, the electrician has said he can’t start until a week late, and the plumber rang and left a request for us to call him (don’t know what that’s about yet), and the guttering bloke, he’s not starting until that Monday / Tuesday / Wednesday. And it’s currently hacking with rain, and I should be working on my course (I’ve had a little poke at it this morning).
Just thought I’d update you all on the progress in the house. So the builders come tomorrow (we hope) at 0800, as interestingly does the triple glazing person. Why we’re triple glazing one room is an odd question, the reason is fairly simple, we’re replacing PVC-U windows in one room, and we thought we’d get the triple glazing ball rolling. But we can’t afford to replace them all; hell, I’ve no idea if we can afford to do even this one in triple glazing. But we’ll try.
We’ve basically had to scrap all the not actually forced to change things modifications we’d like to have done. The house isn’t going to be massively insulated (although we’d like to), and this is our ‘see how much it costs’ attempt to still do the green thing.
That was a startling phone call though, because I e-mailed them about 3 weeks ago, just as a spur of the moment thing and had completely given up on them.
Yesterday was cool though. A while back I tried to grab a grate from Freecycle, I presumed I’d missed it, because he e-mailed me with the dimensions, but explained that there was someone coming to collect it, and unless anything exciting happened it’d gone already. I kinda ignored that e-mail because I’ve never got anything as ‘second person’. But yesterday he e-mailed me and said that several people had come-and-gone and said ‘oh, it’s not the right size’. So I whipped this away from the fireplace:
Yanked off the old metal gas-fire plate which was ducttaped over the front of the fireplace and measured it. Perfect, it seemed, so I rang him and was collecting it fifteen minutes later. I may, at some point, post some interesting thoughts about my experiences of the ism’s, because he was very sweet and explained that it was very heavy, and that he should lift it into the car for me. This provoked some interesting thoughts, which I shall at some point expand on… Anyhow, I got it home and lo, it fits:
We just need someone to come sweep the chimney, and we should be good to rock and roll (with smokeless compressed woodwaste logs) in this room. Oh, and a fire guard, I suppose, given that the room’s carpeted at the moment. Oh, and we need some grate black, because it’s a tad rusty.
Onto the garden, which started off looking like this:
Now looks vastly messier, like this:
Which is awesome. We’ve dug and (lasagne) mulched most of what we’ve done. The scrabby patch of ground separated by a thing strip of (once) grass is for potatoes, and so that’s traditionally mulched and the potatoes will go in as soon as it stops raining (with apologies to Alys Fowler, who said we needed to get them in). We’re, as usual, following our genuinely random approach to plant placement, which goes little beyond ‘Full sun’ / ‘Partial Shade’. Once that’s satisfied, we plonk it somewhere, decide if we like it, and then plant it. This results in a terribly erratic garden, with messy, uncoordinated planting. Just like nature. Things land where they should be, and it’s terribly…interesting. Organic, even. We’ve just decided we need a second path, having originally been planning only one, but the garden’s just about big enough that a second path is probably going to be needed.
It will probably wend its way between the ‘bed’ and the ‘scabby patch of land for potatoes’. And yes, our potatoes are currently in the middle of the garden. Stop looking at us like that. We like them. Yes, they do get quite tall. Uh hu, not flowers, no, potatoes. In the middle. Yes. No, that wasn’t the original plan, but it presented an interesting option, and it allows us to get them in the soil *soon*, when we’ve got builders working where we were going to put them. Yes, it is odd. We like odd. Stop looking at us like that, seriously. Oh shut up and go away ;)
We’ve managed to get all the plants we bought, and quite a few of the salvaged plants from our last garden in the soil (including the fern, the sedum, etc). The Raspberries are, we think, probably going to have to stay in their pot, and possibly the gooseberry too. I’m pondering ‘siting’ them, so we know where they’ll go when their season is over…
The apple trees are looking terribly happy though, which makes me very happy.
I love the fact that we plant this stuff, and it *grows*. It makes new life, new leaves, and sometimes we manage to get some food out of it. It inspires me to awe in the universe that things can survive our minimal knowledge of planting and looking after them, and they grow into gorgeous healthy plants which make the world that bit more beautiful.
And it’s not just the trees, which came pre-tree like, also the peas are growing:
We grew them from seed. Well, from pea. Isn’t that totally awesome? And it’s not just peas that we grew from seed, the beans further down the garden are growing away happily, and the many other things from our first round of indoor planting are now outside:
Apart from the tomatoes which are hiding inside and just starting to grow their tomato shaped leaves…
So that’s the garden. Tomorrow’s the scary bit, the builders rock up, probably with excavatey tools, and turn our garden into…well, who knows what it’ll look like when they’re done.
Computer wise, I’m reminded how god-awful our wireless network is. For those not in the know and remotely interested, the Hackintosh is our aged entertainment machine, it runs an old, old version of OS X because I love OS X and I don’t love Windows. I used to love Linux, but I’m fickle with computers because I’m really trying to return to my first love (RISC OS). Anyhow, the Hackintosh is a problem, because while I have Snow Leopard, it looks at Snow Leopard and quietly weeps. It’s not like it’s ‘low spec’, well, not in terms that I think of as low spec. It’s low spec in terms of what most people consider low spec. In fact, I can’t instantly remember it’s spec.
Unfortunately, OS X does not seem to play happily with older versions of OS X. Or at least, not with much older versions of OS X. Perhaps, particularly, with older versions of OS X that are not updated to the most up-to-date free version. It runs something like 10.3.9, which is archaic in OS X terms, and the nice shiny MacBook won’t talk to it. It won’t copy files to it, it won’t screen share, the current releases of iTunes laugh hysterically at the idea they should run on it.
Which is a shame, because I’d like to be a more Mac household, but I can’t afford to replace it and what’s likely to happen is it’ll drift back to running Linux, perhaps an Entertainment orientated Linux, and I’ll just use iTunes on the MacBook so I can sync my iPhone. However, one thing that deeply drives me nuts is that the wireless network is somewhere around pathetic. It can’t even cope with streaming MP3 audio files without pauses – I have no idea why – need some one much better at network diagnostics, because it *seems* fast enough. It transfers data quickly enough, but every time you listen to audio you go ‘oh, it’s a bit slow’ because it pauses for a fraction of a second every so often. Which is irritating.
Anyhow, I’m hoping that I can get the hackintosh working, quietly, cabled, to the router and that might give us enough umph that I can listen to music remotely from it. I mean, I do listen to music remotely (at the moment, for reasons of my idiocy, it’s in the far corner of the room from the amp, so music is played by my laptop over the network). However, once we’ve done a bit more on the house, then hopefully it’ll be sat next to the amp again, and remote-access-play-music will be the way forward. Or indeed, using it connected to the TV will be the way forward :)
I’d like it to run OS X because then I can use the iTunes remote which is quite nifty. Anyhow I should get back to work and stop staring at the rain.
