It’s been a bit quiet around here of late (she says watching the tumbleweed roll past). By which I mean, on my blog. Not generally. Not quiet in a general blogging sense. One of the problems is RSS. Since I discovered RSS feeds (quite a long time ago now), instead of my traditional approach to reading blogs which was reliant on me opening a bunch of tabs (each with one of favourite blogs in) then reading through them, and which would invariably lead to me forgetting some, or deciding not to bother with others. Instead of that, I now have the RSS list of doom.
And so I find myself increasingly desperately trying to read though 600 or 700 posts if I dare to not read my blogs for ‘a few days’. Say I’m on nights, then I get one hour a night (in theory*), in which I can cram-in as many of the blog posts and comics as my craptastic iPhone will cache (somewhat unreliably) before I head in to work (the breakroom is a depressingly signal free area).
Anyhow.
So I find I have this horrific fear that I’m going to miss just the most interesting news story ever which means that instead of doing something useful or creative like:
– Playing my guitar (very badly)
– Writing my (probably terrible) novel
– Exercising
– Finishing the house
– Playing the piano
– Reading one of the probably ~1,000 books we have in the house
I find myself sat on the sofa, laptop or phone in hand, flicking through. And then there’s twitter. And then there’s tumblr. And then, still lurking in the background of the universe is LJ. And occasionally I check up how my friends are doing on the ever-hideous Facebook. And then there’s Google+ which often sports interesting debates.
Which is unhelpful to my continuing progress in any of the things I actually want to do. It also seems to prevent me from blogging, for the most part, because I spend all my time absorbing other people’s thoughts, not creating my own. At least, when I’m sat in front of the laptop.
I think it doesn’t help that Feedly pops up with ‘700 unread posts’. When I used to do things the old fashioned way, I’d no idea how many posts I’d missed. I’d just scroll back until I was bored.
So, all this to say, yesterday I managed to drag myself away from the allure of the internet and actually get some damn stuff done. I was aided and abetted in this by the ineptitude of my bank. When I got married civilly-wed I told the bank I didn’t mind waiting until the next card was sent out for my name to be changed to the hypenated to-the-manor-born name that I have now. Just before my debit card ran out I rang them up to check, and no, they’d still got it wrong. So I changed it. Again.
Then the new card arrived. Lo, it was shiny. Only it had Miss instead of Ms. Irritating, but not a huge problem. Then another card arrived. Also with Miss. And my old last name.
I rang them up and their card services people said that I’d need to go into the bank to get it fixed and to use the one with the wrong prefix and wrong last name because that was the newest.
So a while ago I went to the bank and discovered that because they’ve been inept, the only way to get a new one is to cancel the current one, then wait whilst the new one is shipped to me. I demurred and indeed deferred it because I didn’t want to be without it for a minimum of 3 days until I knew I’d not need it. I’d continued to put it off, but then, on Monday, my card just stopped working. I stood in a store looking like a numpty with “CARD LOCKED” on the chip and pin display.
It turned out that they’d cancelled this card, because, apparently, I should have been using the other one. The one right name but Miss. Le Sigh. Anyhow, they can’t uncancel the card, so now I’m without a card for (at least) 3 days whilst they send me a new one.
Disregarding my woes, I did use the forced motion to get myself back into doing some work.
First up, the bedroom fireplaces (and the kitchen one) needed their temporary covers replacing with something a little more durable. Especially since they’d all dropped their cardboard ones on the floor.
My solution looks like this:
Well, if you lie down and look up into the fireplace. I’ve got the capping doohickeys for the chimneys sat in the kitchen so that when the roofing guy comes we can throw them up on the roof. However, so little crud falls down ’em that I’ve decided to fix the base bits in. I’ll regret it later, when some bird falls down the chimney and I have to pull them out.
But for the moment the hope is it’ll warm the house up.
I also popped a query off to a couple of HETAS registered installers who would be allowed to just rock up and line the chimney in the front room without building regs permission. Not that it’d be hard to get that, I just don’t fancy the hassle. Also, I asked whether the concept of trying to line the chimney without damaging the back of the original 1930s fireplace is insanity. But I love how original our house is and’d rather not trash it to install a cheap stove.
I then spent an inordinate amount of time lifting a door off it’s hinges (thank god for hinges that you can do that with), planing it, and putting back on. This would have gone better had I not failed to notice a nail standing proud on one pass and having totally munged the blade on my plane. Having just sharpened it, that means the door has thin tracks all over the edge. I might have to get it professionally resharpened because it has taken a bit of a notch out of the blade.
However, the door on-off-hinge game did finally lead to the door fitting the frame. Sort of.
Unfortunately the door is warped, the frame is off-square both horizontally and vertically, and having managed to persuade the door to fit into the frame it became apparent that the warping of the door means that the top corner of the opening-edge of the door is at the outermost edge of the frame when the bottom opening-corner of the door is roughly in the middle of the doorframe.
After some debate holding chunks of trim in my hand I decided to follow the hearts and minds of the builders of the house. Throwing caution (and the spirit level) to the winds I just stuck the damn things on so they ‘look right’. Unfortunately, I’ve no idea where my dinky little subtle nails are so at the moment they’re just glued on…which didn’t work so well. So err, we’ll be revisiting that with nails.
I also finally bought the paint for the feature-colour on the trim in the hall. Which is quite exciting. I’m also quite tempted to see if we’ve enough paint to change the colour of our front door from Brown to Red. Perhaps also getting a house number that’s not plastic-and-1980s.
I have this feeling I also did some other job or other, but hey, I’ll take any progress at this point.
Oh, I’ve also worked out how to fix the bit of the doorframe that’s missing without chopping up the few remaining bits of lamb’s tongue trim that I’ve got left. I’ll give you a hint; it involves wood, glue and filler. There’s a surprise. I bet you never saw that coming. Hopefully I can get it to ‘look right’. It’s one of the sad things where the trim’s damaged, we just don’t have the money to throw at getting someone with way better skills than me in to do a ‘proper’ job. We just have to do the best we can with the skills we have.
Still, just looking at the lambs tongue trim, even duct-taped and glued in place on a frame that’s horribly ill prepared*** makes me feel happier. It just looks more finished.
Anyhow. Progress. ‘s good, yes?
*This last block of nights, one night was so unutterably awful** that I got no break at all in the 12 hours of my shift. I ended up taking my food to the coordinator’s desk and managed to eat exactly 1/2 of my sandwich (7 hours after I started the shift) and the eccles cake (11 hours after I started the shift). The rest of the time I just lived on adrenaline and misery.
** In fact it was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad night
*** Before we painted the kitchen, if we’d’ve had time, it would have been nice to heat-strip that door frame, because it’s in pretty poor condition.
