So, I’m still not back to pre-course levels of productivity, and some mornings spin by without so much as a by-your-leave (mostly with me either dinking on the laptop, watching some TV series or other* or disappearing into a book) but I’m maintaining a level of progress on the house which, whilst it’s not quite what I’d like is sufficient to keep me reasonably happy.
Today I’ve panelled in the side of the bath. For much of the last year and a half (since the heating was installed) we’ve not had any panelling on the bath, allowing open access to the crap underneath it. Giving rise to a gentle breeze through the hole in the wall where the waste water pipe exits into the roof space above the laundry/server room**. There’s still a breeze where the pipe for the waste water exits for the sink, but the bath one is now, finally, behind some panelling.
Yes, it’s scrap MDF which is about the least appropriate wood to put in a bathroom, but it’s what I’ve got lying around and I’m hoping that the application of sufficient sealant and paint will protect it well enough.
There’s quite a bit of filling to do (because I’ve screwed it in all over the place. I’ve left a nice little panel so you can access the waste water connections and the valves for the taps… And I’ve even primed it today. Tomorrow, despite being on nights, I’ll endeavour to get the sealant on around the edges and slap some filler on it. That’s about all I’m scheduling for tomorrow.
Handily, under the bath was lurking a multipack of blades for a razor which I’ve kept the handle for, which saves buying more blades for the current one for a while****. Also a lot of packaging for decorating bits which has now gone into the recycling…
I also spent some time fixing the clothes airer. A while ago it broke on one side and became rather a floppy object. I attempted to fix it with a bit of a metal sheath, but it kept coming apart and fairly quickly we got fed up of pushing it back together, and just used it with it flopping about. Now, I’m sure it’ll come as no surprise to anyone that of course this massively increased the stress on the other side of the airer, and yesterday it snapped on the other side dropping our laundry.
So today I set to with some of the spare pipework from the bathroom:
Which seems to have done the job. At least, it’s now standing up. Although it looks like the design was reliant on the flexing of the plastic (*shudder*) which means that some of the other clips that were previously fixed in place with lugs are now sliding clips. Which….well, it’s working for the minute. As it’s the third time it’s been repaired (if you count the lousy fix before) I think I’m being pretty generous to it. It falls into the ‘I don’t want to replace it before we leave’ category, because we have no need of more things that we need to ship.
I’ve also given the stairs a quick hoover, done my uniforms for work on Monday night, and had a quick hoover/pick up in the lounge… And now I’m relaxing to Blondie (Parallel Lines, on yummy yummy vinyl) whilst testing a theory about the VMP74 (which seems not to like streaming files more than 4Gb over UPnP*****). So that’s not so bad.
* Recent fixations: Community and MASH, although I’ll fairly frequently watch the Rachel Maddow Show, which is why I’m much more up on USian politics than our own. I think this is partly because Rachel Maddow is awesome, and presents a new show of a variety that just doesn’t exist here. And partly because it’s easier to cope with watching the insanity in the US than watching the painful horror going on here, as our government gut protections for those with long term illness or disability, as they’ve privatised the NHS (they really have, go look at who’s supplying NHS ‘services’ (even writing that makes me want to wash myself, it makes me feel dirty), and endeavoured to turn the lucky people with jobs against the many who are not so fortunate.
** Yes, I’m aware that this is a less than desirable combination. But it puts the server well out of the way, where the fact it’s an old machine with many, many fans is not a problem. It’s set up to shut down on all sorts of heat related errors, and has a virtually brand new power supply ***.
*** Unfortunately the PC in the garage appears to have died. I’ve not looked into this to see if this is the power supply dying or something else. But at any rate, I noticed it wasn’t running the camera software when I went down there, and on rebooting it’s not managing to restart. Indeed, it’s not even managing to POST. Which is probably bad.
**** Ever since realising that making the razor pink had little effect on it’s ability to produce smooth legs I’ve used whatever razor meets a complex mix of price/shape/number of blades criteria, and the winner for a long time was one which was sold for a long time by all the big supermarket chains in the UK. Slim, triple bladed and really, really cheap it was my fave. Unfortunately, they all stopped selling them – Tesco being the last to stock the blades. I bought several packs of the blades towards the end of production, but eventually ran out… only, apparently not.
***** It seems that it does work playing the file over the network not using UPnP.
