Moving Forwards, or trying

So, the theft of stuff, as a general group, has had a real effect on my mood. Thankfully they didn’t come into the house, and really what they took has so far seemed to be fairly easily replaceable (in terms of it’s physically easy to get a replacement) although financially it’s another matter.

I’ve been trying to get back to actually doing stuff, which is hard, for a number of reasons. One of which is the all pervading negativity that’s wrapped itself around me since finding out. We’ve put so much effort into the house, and since moving in we seem to have had a bit of a run of bad luck with stuff. Our art deco sofa that we picked out is missing thanks to Mrs Vivienne Manning, director of Manning Logistics LTD (and partner of Andy Manning) who’ve disappeared without a trace, presumably having stolen our property*.

If anyone runs into them, give them our number and say we’d like our stuff back, incidentally.

Anyhow, so having stuff stolen from the brand new garage is upsetting because I’d been all excited about finally having somewhere to put tools. Now I have somewhere to put tools where some fuck is going to steal them. Instead of having a nice space, I’m going to have to fix cabinets to walls/floors with big f-off locks. I don’t want to live in a fracking high security installation.

Anyhow, it’s also not great to be working, because while the lounge is lovely to chill out in, the big TV, despite being very cheap is noticably a big LCD screen. One must assume that someone looking through the window is unlikely to realise it’s end of line cheap telly. So we’ve kept the curtains closed and will have to put up some net to make it less easy to just look in. We don’t actually like net, but there you go.

So we’re essentially sitting in semi-darkness all the time. Illuminated by one old 60W bulb (yes, it will be an energy saver when we get a bit further along).

I’ve also been constantly thinking about alarm systems. I’ve finally bitten the bullet and ordered one today, though I suspect it’ll take a while to get here. It’s a relatively posh one, it’ll ring us if anyone breaks in and will apparently allow us to listen to what’s going on in the house. It’ll cover the garage as well as the house, and sports separate keypads for the garage and the house.

It remains, however, depressing.

On the plus side I’ve managed to engage with the world enough to put the filler in the kitchen ceiling, and I’ve been playing with the ViewSonic VMP74 which is, it seems, working. Using UPnP (Eyeconnect – other stuff seemed to not want to stream AVIs) we’ve got video streaming from the mac – although it’s not as high-def as I’d like. I think it’s downscaling the video to get it through the narrow pipe of wifi. I’m hoping that’s what it is. When things are set up a bit better it should be pulling stuff across a nice fast wired network, which should make it happier. I’m looking forward to when we have the EntMac set up and we can have music pulled over the network by the power of MAGIC!

So tomorrow, hopefully, I can put at least one coat of paint on the kitchen ceiling (the ideal would be two coats) – and perhaps regain some of the lost momentum. Today, though, I’ve got stuff I should be doing, which I’ve been studiously avoiding.

Oh, on the plus side (double plus good) I’ve managed to work out how you remove the seat on the GT-550 (and I worked it out all by myself**). Now I have temptation to go and buy a battery – although I’m not sure if my battery charger’s in the house, the garage, or stolen. The most annoying thing about the theft (apart from the loss of Kathryn’s bike which is definitely more annoying because it’s not insured thanks to Halifax’s Opaque insurance policy) is that we have no idea what’s been stolen. It’s very hard to work out what they’ve taken because we don’t entirely know what was there. And we’ve only got 3 months to work out what else they might have taken. Given the abandonment of the bike I’m wondering if I should have a wander around the area out the back of our house and see if anything else has been dumped. But I think mostly what they’ve taken is stuff with carry handles that’s easy to nick and sell. *sigh*.

* I can’t work out how the fuck I’m meant to take them to court given that their registered address has been repossessed & their registered home address isn’t, so far as I can tell, where they live anymore. I can send them a civil court claim, but since they won’t get it… well, then they can say ‘oh, we didn’t get it’. It just seems that it’s throwing good money after bad. Everyone directs me to someone else, no one is responsible for this limited company which isn’t trading, hasn’t submitted accounts, has no property and has disappeared with our furniture.

** If it were any easier to work it out then it would have had neon flipping lights flashing all around it with the release lever is here! in giant blinking scroll text. Doh!