Category: General

When I think about myself I often think I’m a bit lazy. I’m lousy at practicing things (I’ve fallen off the guitar practicing wagon, but have plans to get back on it when my 3 day stint of garden madness is over), I am terrible at studying, the house isn’t finished but clearly it could be, and I struggle to get going in the morning, favouring the dopamine-rush of internet dinking over real, actual work.

But yesterday, I was told by someone who barely knows me that I’m a devil for work. And perhaps, sometimes, I can be.

Despite the fact that I sat and watched two episodes of Marvel Agents of Shield* while I waited for the soil to be delivered (although I later worked out that I could have been outside doing ‘stuff’ because our portable door-bell does work outside) when it did arrive I truly slogged my guts out to get it round to the back of the house.

Getting it off the lorry turned out to be entertaining. Unlike our gravel which was delivered on a lorry with a HiAb, the soil came on a disintegrating pallet and the guy just had a little pallet truck. Having twirled the truck so that he could roll the soil downhill rather than up hill to get it out of the truck he attempted to manoeuvre it onto the tail lift; in the process of doing this it ended up tipping and he ended up clinging to the truck and leaning back with the pallet dangling off the edge and attempting to tip and dump the soil into the middle of the road. I ended up clinging onto it as well, dangling backwards hung on a strap at the same time as lowering the taillift myself. Having got it down we couldn’t get it up onto the pavement, so it sat in the street behind Rebecca Mog.

It’s about 800kg of soil (around 1760lb), which somewhere around the 10th wheelbarrow load I lost track of the number of trips it was taking. What made it more fun** is that the front of our house is about 1.5 m higher than the back, which you may think means ‘oh, Kate just rolled the barrow down hill, that’s easy’, but no. See, the path to the back of our house drops down somewhere in the region of 2.5-3m, so what I actually did was load up each barrow load, walk them down the row of houses, along the unmade track, down the dirty great dip in the unmade track, then back up hill, then up the ramp I’d built, up the garden, and then off load it.

It was demonstrated to me during this process how lovely our neighbours are. Two of them came out to apologise for not having a barrow to help, and offering to help just generally (including carrying buckets of soil through the house). One of those neighbours returned as I prepped the last load. I’d filled the barrow and decided that, as it was both dark and raining, I would stop and just drag the bag (which contains probably around a load-and-a-half more soil) into the front garden. As I returned from dragging the bag in, our lovely neighbour reappeared, and refused to let me wheel that last barrow around. He took it round for me, along with the disintegrating pallet, and helped me get that last load into the garden.

Of course, today I’ve got the 2 tonnes of gravel to take around. But that, the plan is to lay path matting and then take it around as I do each section. And I should get on with that because it is apparently going to rain lots later.

* I’m still not wholly convinced by this show. I think I more want to like it than I actually do like it. I think the problem is, when you’ve got Firefly and Dollhouse, well… maybe I was expecting too much.
** That may not be the right word.

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.

So, because I’m a moron, I booked tickets for Mark Thomas’s 100 Minor Acts of Dissent. This would have been an awesome idea, except for the fact that we’ve already seen that show. And a comedy show a second time is not as funny as a comedy show the first time. By a fairly long way. This is because for some reason in my brain he was doing March to March not May to May, so when I saw that the show was on in London I thought: “OhMyGodWeMustGoIMustBuyTicketsNowYay” thinking it was the one-off-final show. Despite the fact it was running for several nights. What’s that you say? Idiot? Yes.

Thus we flew into London on one of our days off. Cue debate abount Minor vs iMiEV. Thanks to Virgin killing our internet* we ended up taking the Minor which, I think, was probably a wise plan in the end. Because of a long, long phone call with Virgin we headed off late, flew to [special super sekret cheap daylong car park outside London] and got our return tickets with good old travel cards attached. Since we’re such infrequent visitors to London now, our oyster cards are both dead, like dead dead. So the good old paper tickets, whilst marking us out as country bumpkins, were our source of transportation.

First we hit up a shoe shop. Bristol’s ethical shoe specialist has, it turns out, closed. And my battered converse were looking, well, sad. Very, very sad. I’d been trying to get some Ethletic runners**, but everywhere seemed out of stock. Today I found out why – apparently they raised their wholesale price fairly markedly, and lots of places dropped ’em. Thankfully the awesome folks at The Third Estate in London had a few pairs in my size left, so I walked away with some olive colour high-tops for only marginally more than the online price for the normal runners, bargain, and I was supporting a fantastic ethical shoe place. There were so many shoes in there I wanted. So many. And had I not have just bought the awesome hoodie from Uchi, I would have probably got one there, and a tee (they’ve some great screen printed tees). Also, the woman who is part-owner from Leeds, incredibly friendly. Many recommendations.

Then we fled the scene of our spending spree and headed over to the British Library. We’d been planning to go to a couple of museums but were foiled by the delay in the morning caused by Virgin and me faffing trying to get it sorted. In the end we barely crammed in the British Library’s Data Visualisation exhibit and a little entertaining glance at their philately collection before we had to dash across town to get food.

A brief but very pleasant stop at Polpo’s Covent Garden restaurant*** before we headed over to see, what turned out to be the same show we’d seen.

After feeling somewhat sheepish and trying to keep up more mirth than was really being felt (to be polite to the people around us who’d not seen the show) in the first half, there was somewhat more differentiation in the second half as he talked about more new things that he’d done, which made it better. But afterwards the idea of heading straight back having forked out £25 on petrol, £6 on parking and £20 on train tickets seemed a bit distressing. But there, in that self-same theatre was the solution.

Bill Bailey was up for a 1hr show. We could watch that and get the train back to [Super Sekret Car Park] and make the whole day seem less of a long trip to buy one pair of shoes. But it was all but sold out, two tickets at virtually opposite ends of the theatre. We, neither of us, felt that was what we wanted. But we milled around outside watching the sell-out-full queue of people wandering in. And then, in an astonishing twist, the ticket-person asked the security guard to come and let us know that two tickets had come up as a pair. Second row, right in the damn centre. That is some pretty-damn-good seating for a last minute buy. And really very very good service. I didn’t expect them to do that.

And he was excellent. I’ve never seen him live, but would happily do so again. I laughed and laughed until my cheeks hurt.

And between them I came away feeling like actually, I can make a difference to the world. Something I’ve not felt for a very long time.

Then we began a very long journey back… and at 0245 we slid, very tiredly, into bed.

* Long phonecall: It’s being upgraded. Thanks for telling us first… Also, discovered that we don’t have a working phoneline because somehow in the order process our phoneline disappeared. However, realisation: We now have a good enough data service that we can have a VOIP phone again :) Cue saving money…
** Or some Blackspot sneakers but I’ve never tried them on, and want to be sure I size them correctly, since they come in US sizes.
*** Very nice, but not incredible. But then the prices are very reasonable. Their mocktails were really ace, and so were their desserts.

So, thanks to a very generous offer from Kathryn’s mom, we found ourself with the option of a four-star holiday in a Victorian hotel in Harrogate. Actually, there were a whole bunch of options from many places, but after much debate, Harrogate seemed the most practical and whilst it would almost certainly cost the same as a holiday outside the UK, it would do so in quiet easy to bite off chunks, so we could pretend we could afford it more easily (we were tempted by Paris, or Prague; but the cost of getting there, whilst not horrendous was enough to make both Kathryn and I pause).

The journey, one would think would be simple. And in most regards it was, we trundled off from Bristol, the sonorous wail of the 1300 and the slightly tired Morris Minor diff keeping us company was we trekked up the motorway. But as we neared our destination the weather deteriorated. I muttered a comment about the rain looking quite like sleat, and a then it was snow. We transitioned from flying up the motorway to creeping; the Minor’s tiny wiper blades beating against the mounting snow with increasing futility.
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So, those of you who are used to me are probably going ‘where are the videos with Kate running around with her new stabiliser toy’? The reason they haven’t appeared is, and it pains me to say this, that it didn’t really work.

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So, today’s been an odd day. Odd because I bought new clothing. The number of occasions I’ve bought actually new clothing in the last few years could be counted, probably, on one hand. Socks & underwear I buy new, shoes I sometimes buy new, but really other than that it’s second hand all around. And I don’t exactly replace my clothing frequently. For example, right this moment I’m still wearing a shirt I bought on my trip to Canada in 2006. It’s a bit faded, but otherwise it’s survived startlingly well.

Anyhow, I’d seen this hoodie whilst I was looking for something for my best beloved for Christmas, and finally bought it today. We picked it up after a nice lunch at Roll for the Soul (who do a fantastic aubergine (eggplant) burger). A quick wander down the street takes you to the surprisingly quirky end of Bristol’s old main shopping area which sports the old Police station, which apparently contains some sort of pop-up-arty-thing that’s never been open when I try and see it, and CoLAB, which is where we got my nice hoodie, and an excellent print by Martha Ford (that is, interestingly, not on her site).

We then bought far too many books/CDs/DVDs at Amnesty, because they were having a £1 sale. Most unfortunate, but much good stuff was obtained. However, in the process I discovered that my iSort database of books was lost in the iOS debacle, and I’ll need to re-upload it. Which is possibly pointless at the moment because it’s not kept track of the many changes to our library (we have got rid of something like 40 books, and err, bought a few replacements). So that’s a job for the future. Anyhow.

Having got home I then spent a cheerful ten minutes closing off (but not quite sealing) the three chimneys in the house that we don’t use. Because it turns out I was wrong. I was looking at the graphs of usage from ovo staggeringly incorrectly. I don’t know how I was looking at them, but yes, it wasn’t right. Yes, our usage in January appears lower than last January, but last year I kept forgetting to submit meter readings, and if you look at our overall usage it’s gone up fairly dramatically.

The car accounts for our increased electricity usage (but costs have actually dropped because it’s all off-peak ‘lecky), but having insulated the house one would expect our gas usage to have dropped. And it hasn’t. So I’ve been around and sealed up the ventilator that I reopened during the redecoration of Kathryn’s office; just with duct-tape over the unpainted metal grille for the moment, I’ll have to come up with a better solution. And I’ve thrown cardboard up over the chimneys and ordered new chimney cowls to go on the two upstairs chimney stacks that we’re unlikely to ever use.

Hopefully that’ll improve the energy usage, as will the tweak to our central heating cutting down the run-time by an hour in the evening. It’s a 5% reduction in ‘time the heating is on*’ which presumably won’t lead to a 5% reduction in price because the house will be ‘a bit colder’ in the morning now, so it’ll take more energy to heat it up. Ugh.

This is why we want to build our own, much more highly spec’d place. Money’s a complete sod, really, isn’t it.

I’ve also been pondering where to live. Whilst I still think we’ll land up in Astoria, OR, this terrifies me. I suppose it’s the whole thing of having had my dad die from cancer, and the years (5, I think) of chemotherapy and hospital stays, and the fact that I’ve had a delightful week in hospital myself, and a trip to the ED with Pyelonephritis, and perhaps just working in the ED. That deep and abiding understanding that it doesn’t matter if you look after yourself, it doesn’t matter if your genes are good (and mine aren’t), shit just happens.

Getting sick just happens.

And that kind of bill, that’s just insanity. It’s sheer bloody madness. How can anyone charge that much for healthcare? How can you charge $816 for an ECG. It takes me maybe 3 minutes to do an ECG, start to finish. A really complex ECG on a patient who’s poorly might occupy one of our senior doctors for 5 minutes, if they decide to debate it with someone else. I can read it well enough to spot most common concerning issues. They’re charging hundreds of dollars for IV fluids. Hundreds. The damn things, last time I checked, cost about 25p.

How the hell does anyone afford that without going bankrupt.

Of course, the UK is running full pelt at becoming some kind of totalitarian state; with the passage of the deregulation bill a likelyhood, and given that we have secret courts in this country…Good god, I can’t believe I’m writing that. We have secret courts in the UK… we have the police being able to access your medical records without your permission, we have the NHS selling your healthcare data improperly anonymised to anyone with the ready money for it, we have privatisation of the highly dubious already ‘nudge unit‘. Gods this is a scary country to be in right now.

So, err, leaving’s definitely still the plan. But anyhow, I’ve been finding the world deeply depressing of late. The rain probably hasn’t helped; the endless pityless rain.

On that cheery note I’m going to go and spend some time measuring up our artwork because I’m wanting to actually hang it up rather and most of it’s unframed…

* I’d like to do the thing where the heating is on all the time, but at a lower temperature overnight, but our thermostat won’t accommodate that.

Today the gas bill arrived. Well, technically, the gas-and-electricity bill. I can happily say that, according to Ovo, our gas usage has gone down about 8%, which is impressive considering the thermostat is set 3 degrees hotter this year (at 19°C or 66°F); meaning that whilst it’s certainly slightly cool in the house, but it’s not last year’s very cold running the fan heater lots condition.

However, the bill’s arrival has prompted the usual angst ridden reconsideration of the heating situation. Despite having heaped insulation in the loft and strapped it underneath the house; the fact that we have solid brick walls means that this house is never going to be incredibly energy efficient without slathering the interior walls in insulation (or covering the outside of the house in insulation). Neither of which we can afford.

I am still sorely tempted to install a stove on the basis that we could, theoretically, wind our craptastic thermostat down to something like 16 or 17 degrees, and then throw the stove on when we got home. It’d hardly feel warm in here until the stove got going, but we have an incredibly large source of free wood; and the space under the deck would make a pretty fair wood store… However, it’s a moderately large expense now with the hope that we’d save money later. Mainly next year, when we might be coaxed into not switching on the heating until later in the year; perhaps.

Anyhow, more consideration of the problem is definitely required, but needs to occur fairly rapidly because they’re coming to do our roof soon and whilst the scaffold is up is probably the right time to insert a chimney liner.

I’m trying to persuade myself to restart working on the house. It’s hard though, there are so many places that are ‘nearly done’ and many frustrating little jobs that need doing. It’s my fault for my lackadaisical approach to completing rooms. Once they’re fairly much nice and liveable I have a terrible tendency to stop (which is why when you look at The List there’s lots of small jobs on it).

The distressing thing is after today there are only 5 days in February where I don’t have stuff planned and am not at work. I’m also giving a teaching session at work about sepsis, and so one of those days will be spent panicking about doing so. However, I can feel the vague urge to work on the house increasing from the ‘I should be working on the house’ background hum into an uncomfortable sensation that I’m really letting myself down by not finishing the house off. It helps that whilst I was staring at a problem section this morning, sucking my coffee down, I realised what the answer was.

We have a doorframe where the trim piece (all our door frames still have their original 1930s trim) was cut off at the edge when the house was built (to install it around the built-in cupboard). That built-in cupboard was so very literally built in, incidentally. There was no plaster behind it, that’s how built in it was.

Anyhow, I’ve stared at this trim trying to decide how to restore it, because whilst I do have some spare lamb’s tongue trim saved from another doorframe, because we’ve now plastered the wall and the plaster stands out further than the original brickwork on which the trim was mounted, it wasn’t simply a case of pulling off the old trim and putting new on. Also, my experience with this stuff suggests that ‘simply pulling off’ isn’t something that happens in this house. The entire house appears to have been constructed with a “It’s never coming down” attitude, which is nice, but involves more nails, screws, and assorted other fixings than you can get at B&Q’s distribution depot.

Anyhow, I’ve come up with a solution that I don’t feel is entirely hideous, which has encouraged me to think that maybe I should get started on making the door fit the frame.

Once that’s done then I need to go and buy the paint, which means I really ought to go and try the tester pot out, since we’ve got it and it’s been sat around upstairs since before christmas.

Hrm, I can almost feel the urge to ‘do something’. Writing about how lazy I’ve been is generally what’s needed to push me into doing something. First thing I need to do is find the plane; I suppose; which means treking down the marshland to our garage. Meh. Shower, find plane, [remove hinges from door], plane door. There’s a plan.

In other news our roofer, who had been utterly silent, randomly e-mailed today to say he’s going to book scaffolding soon. Whee.