Plagues and Perturbations

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So I appear to have entered the arena of the unwell. This is irritating because even were I in Europe, where being ill and off work is not seen as some sort of moral failing, and where workers are, for the most part, encouraged to stay home when they’re sick; I have training the next few days.

And that training is an expensive course that work paid for, so I damn well better be there.

Bother.

It’s hard to say how much of this is unwell, though, because I had another delightful night of insomnia. I got to enjoy the hours of 1am to roughly 4am. Which, it turn out, are very unexciting.

Also, this weekend, I booked tickets for us to go to gig. Which I really do want to go to. Although if Kathryn’s okay with it, it might involve me resting on the way down so that I can make it through (and, obviously, spread my plague).

Despite the cold I headed over to the house today – there were three reasons for this. One, obviously, is that I’m a stubborn so-and-so. We’ll skip over that one. The second was that our washer and drier were being delivered today. They arrived without incident, which was pleasing. And they’re now sat in our house.

We still haven’t actually paid for them because Best Buy’s policy seems to be to randomly put a hold on our card for days, or indeed weeks at a time. Then remove it without actually taking payment.

I’m unclear how this is sensible, or helpful.

Anyhow, a payment hold is on the card (again), and the washing machine and drier are in the house. Now they just need a floor to stand on, and to be plumbed in. Oh, and wired in. Because US driers don’t come with a power cable. It’s quite exciting. We’re now down to just the cooker and the fridge to order and arrive.

Since I was going to be at the house, I had a delightful morning of tiling. I didn’t quite get the bits I really want to finish done, but it was close given how lousy I was (am) feeling.

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I really want to get the cubby/shelf finished and the entire shower/bath area done because once that’s grouted I can clean the bath off – and then prep and re-coat the bath. I am starting to get a liiiiittle nervous about the number of tiles we have. I’ve made quite a few errors cutting the tiles for the shower cubby, and BOB no longer sell the tiles that we bought.

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The current plan is to finish the bath area, then finish the wall you see when you walk in to the bathroom, then work from the door back to the toilet. My theory being that if I have to get some not exact match tiles they can go behind the toilet where they’ll not be so visible. Unfortunately, because I forgot when I started that I wanted to have a half-cut tile when I got to the three walls with lime plaster on, now I’ve reached them they’re irritating sizes that don’t cut easily from one tile. On the other hand, I really like the look of the half-tiles at the joints that you see around the bath, so….

Anyhow, we’ll find out when we get to the end, I guess.

I think I added 20% overage when calculating, so *hopefully* it should be okay.

So I cut tiles until they arrived with our appliances. Then I took a break for lunch before attacking the third reason I went over. Putting antifreeze in the hydronic heating system.

The antifreeze arrived a few days ago, but I had to wait until after the weekend to get the pump from the attic, then yesterday I was tired and grouchy (probably because my body knew the lurgy was lurking). Today I was tired and grouchy too, but I didn’t really want to risk leaving it any longer. All it would take was a decent power outage, or the radiators tripping the fuses, and the house would end up freezing.

Sooo. I gave the system the required flush (a minute for every 100ft of pipe, apparently); plus a goodly chunk extra. Then I pumped in 6 gallons of antifreeze. Well, due to a slight act of idiocy*, I pumped in-and-back out about 1/4 of a gallon. But I then pumped in the rest of it.

Hopefully I’ll be feeling better on monday and can run through the rest of the boiler filling procedure, maybe get some grout around some pipes and we’ll have hot-and-cold running water. Which will be a f’kin miracle.

*I left open a valve that I didn’t mean to meaning that the easiest route for the fluid to take was in-and-back-out.

KateWE

Kate's a human mostly built out of spite and overcoming transphobia-racism-and-other-bullshit. Although increasingly right-wing bigots would say otherwise. So she's either a human or a lizard in disguise sent to destroy all of humanity. Either way, it's all good.