Category: General

So, not much in the way of posting at the moment, perhaps because life has fallen into a holding pattern, waiting for a baby appointment, waiting for a baby before we try for the US, and I’ve taken the Christmas period off from working on the house (I know, I only just restarted, but hey). Despite the holding pattern, we’ve had a delightful Christmas here, with incredibly Kathryn and I both being off for both Christmas and Boxing day, which was utterly fantastic.

Despite our usual failure to coordinate well enough to get presents and cards off to people (there’s still, shamefully, a pile of cards sat on the table (sporting stamps) that we failed to actually even send. They’ll go in the post…err, so sorry if yours is one of them. We actually carried them to my mum’s before Christmas, and back, and still forgot to send them).

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So… Oh, before I get started. Didn’t finish NaNoWriMo. A mere 22190 words, sadly.

Annnyhow. I spent some of today and much of the last few days off working on Kathryn’s office. With my mum coming to visit soon, the pressure’s on to get the walls prepped and painted in there, so we can move the stuff from Kathryn’s office back in to Kathryn’s office. No doubt, she’d also like her office back anyway.

The problem is these are probably the worst walls in the house.

Every other room had some form of heating, but this one never has (until we install the central heating, but even that’s been disconnected while we’re decorating). I suspect that’s part of the reason the paint and plaster are in such poor condition, they’ve just been endlessly damp for the last 80 years. When we started stripping the paper in there I was foolishly relieved to see paint.

Unfortunately, the walls are covered in a hideous agglomeration of paint, some sort of water-resistant wall-paper adhesive and loose, crumbly plaster.

Really, in reality, what we should have done is bitten the bullet and had the whole room at the very least reskimmed, but ideally taken back to brick and replastered. Horrific though it would have been, it is, at least, a small room, and it’d’ve produced a nice finish.

Instead I’ve been trying somewhat desperately to come up with some kind of plan that resolves with the room actually having some sort of reasonable finish. The first prong of this attack was the first layer of filler over the artex. That needs more filler, but I wanted to ‘stabilise’ the walls a bit before I tried to fill them because I’d had no joy at all removing the paint. Whilst some of it flakes off so easily that you just have to look at it and it falls away, some of it seems welded to the wall. Scraping doesn’t pull it off, oh no. The only thing that seems to fairly effectively remove paint is… painting over it.

We tried steaming it off, steaming and scraping, scraping, sanding, caustic ‘sugar soap’. It’s not coming off, and nor, quite frankly, is some of the stuff that I suspect is mould/water resistant wall paper paste. Eventually I resorted to plan B, or possibly, C. Anyway, whatever plan it was, it’s my current one, which runs:

1) Fill the very worst bits (and run caulk around the edges)
2) Paint walls with plaster sealant
3) Paint over sealant with Basecoat
4) Fill the now, hopefully, less crumbly, less flaky walls.
5) Repaint with basecoat until it looks acceptable.
6) Topcoat.

Steps 1 & 2 went about as well as I expected. Step 3, also went surprisingly well. Plaster sealant is, essentially, PVA glue diluted anyway, but I hoped that would provide enough of a surface that the basecoat would stick.

Which it did, although in quite a few areas it yanked the loose paint off the wall.

It’s never going to be a great finish, and I’m terrified it’s going to do the cracky-thing that the paint did in our old office; but it looks fine at the moment.

So, fingers crossed for success…

So, I’d have photos of progress in Kathryn’s office to show you but for the fact that my iPhone is shittier than a shitty thing on Saint Shitty’s day. I made the mistake of upgrading to iOS 7.0.4, which should have been fine. But for the fact that for whatever reason the backup made before the upgrade didn’t work, and now the fscking thing won’t sync. Oh, and it reset everything. Oh, and lost all the data on it. Oh, and now, despite claiming to be working, still won’t sync and thinks it’s a new iPhone.

I fear I’m actually going to have to go to the apple store and get them to look at it, because it does seem to be spectacularly broken. ETA: Found a fix – apparently it had corrupted the backup, perhaps, just before the update and now couldn’t do whatever it needed to do to the backup file. Anyhow, removing the backup and making it create a brand new one, from scratch, seems to have, for the moment, fixed it. No, I will not be getting another iPhone.

Anyway, irritatingly, that meant it lost a bunch of photos of Kathryn’s office, which I’m part way through renovating.

However, I’ve not been doing that today, which was the plan. I had sanding and priming scheduled for this afternoon / evening, but unfortunately yesterday I came down with a reasonably spectacular case of D+V. No idea what caused it, whilst we were away on holiday we tended to have separate meals and just taste the other person’s. Kathryn’s felt a little off, but I was taken out fairly spectacularly yesterday morning and spent the entire day vomming. Not that you want to know that, but I want your sympathy. Anyway, that’s meant that today I’ve treated myself pretty damn gently. My stomach is still not entirely sure that it’s happy with the world (I’ve fed it live yoghurt today to get some friendly bacteria in there, not whatever evil bastard bacteria were in my gut yesterday) and crackers and even graduated to slices of bread at lunchtime. But the gentleness has meant no decorating (sad-face).

But we had a fab weekend otherwise.

We headed down to Crafty Camping which is a Dorset Eco/Glamping place and stayed in a Bell tent. Now, Bell tent in November? Cold you’re thinking. Err, well, yes. At times. We spent most of the day time out and about but in the evenings when we got back it was certainly pretty cold. Getting the fire going would take it down to being chilly, except the last night where we really went for it with the stove, piling the wood on pretty much continuously. That night we actually got it pretty warm. But the beds sported heated sheets and were cosy-cosy to get in to. So it was all okay. And the showers? Showering out in the open woodland, flipping ace. I just wish I had better eyesight, because looking up at the trees and standing in the lush warm shower was inspiring. Oh, and the sauna. We liked the sauna.

We pootled around the surrounding area, getting some nice 1960’s glass jars and a 1980’s biscuit barrel from the antiques/bric-a-brac area of Bridport. We spent an inordinate amount on food (but nothing on petrol, having taken the iMiEV – there’ll maybe be a post about that up on Transport Evolved soon – where I seem to be doing the odd guest post).

We ate in the River Cottage Canteen and the Alexandra Hotel… We made wood-fired-oven-cooked pizza.

It was, in fact, a really lovely anniversary weekend. Just something gave me food poisoning, or I caught some kind of bug. At any rate, yesterday was a write-off (although I did read the rest of my V.I. Warshawski novel, and started another). And today I’ve just sat around watching Blackadder and reading more V.I. Warshawski – but today I’ve eaten. Food. Actual food. And not seen it again shortly afterwards, nor had agonising cramping pain in my stomach, nor felt like I was going to pass out immediately after vomiting. Yay for that. Occasionally I forget how unpleasant D+V is, and how miserable it can make you. So, err, the reminder was great. No more, now, though, thanks.

So, I realise that your life is devoid of meaning without my posts, and that you find yourself weeping quietly to yourselves as you fall asleep on days when I don’t post, so I thought I ought to update you all on the quiet.

So, why’ve I been quiet.

Well, I’ve been working a lot, including doing some agency work because our roof is leaking, which costs money, and we want a baby, which it turns out also costs money. Ironically, for once, this bit would be cheaper in the States. The ‘getting a baby’ theoretically, would be cheaper, ‘cos we could just buy some sperm.

In the UK with the cost of treatment options being so ‘not cheap’, and having no actual source of sperm, we’re essentially forced down the IVF route. And the IVF route is nearly £4,000. And that’s when it’s on special offer (buy 2 for 1! Reduced to clear…).

So over the next few weeks quietness will probably continue to reign over the blog.

I’ve also been working on the house, intermittently at least. So the under-stairs area now looks like this:

It is looking pretty good, if I say so myself. It is waiting for a touch more filling and sanding, then some painting. I’m rather happy with it though. Definitely an improvement over the old arrangement. I’ve also started on Kathryn’s office, which later today we need to try and clear so I can finish filling over the evil, hideous, awful, nasty, gnarly Artex.

As you are all no doubt aware, Artex is made from Synthetic Evil Diamonds encased in a concrete like slurry of misadventure, and thus no quantity of mere mortal tools can remove it. Indeed, the only way to truly remove Artex from any surface is to destroy the entire surface itself, and then have the wall thoroughly exorcised. I don’t have the money, time, or patience for that so I’m plastering over it. Which is, of course, a deep joy. Because trying to put a thin skim of plaster over a surface that’s sharp and uneven is, of course, as much fun as you can have standing up.

It’s going okay, I’ve got a ‘first coat’ over much of it, which I’ll sand back and then re-fill over with filler to try and get a fairly smooth surface. It’ll never look as good as the ones the plasterer did, or the ones where they’d (thankfully) applied it over wallpaper (and we peeled the wallpaper off, and there was great rejoicing). I can’t say that the process is adding to my already minimal appreciation for Artex*.

Oh, and I’ve been doing NaNoWriMo, which is unlikely to produce anything astonishing, but it’s a lot of words. I’m hideously behind, because I essentially only write when I’m not at work. But it’s something (my progress is here. I’ve also been doing the odd bit of writing for Transport Evolved.

And we’ve been having a life. For example, last night we went to go and see Mark Thomas in Cheltenham, doing part of his 100 Minor Acts of Dissent tour, which was, quite frankly, Brilliant. We then had a late, but very pleasant dinner out. So not very exciting for you guys, but busy for us.

* We did try something called ‘Smoothover’ in another room. As I recall this appeared to be a product made by Artex or it’s subsiduaries entirely designed to make you lose all hope that the artex’d walls would ever be smooth again and thus, give up, leaving the artex in place.

So, this is mainly directed at the Americans who read… I have a question for y’all. So for *reasons* we have had the experience of meeting and getting advice from a private healthcare specialist. Now, I’ve had one prior experience with private healthcare, but I knew what I wanted, what I was going to ask for, and frankly, what I’d get. All I needed was the price.

This time there are lots of options, lots of possibilities, and the price is truly mind-blowing. But whilst we sat in the very nice consultation room with views across the city rooftops, having passed through the plate glass doors, and in a Victorian building which still smelled of fresh paint, and didn’t feel quite so much like someone had just hurled walls up where they might fit…. Whilst we sat in the much nicer than any NHS chairs and faced the doctor using the computer on the not-basic-formica desk, and she politely discussed options, and suggested what is not the most expensive, but way more than the cheapest, and quoted stats at us…

…I came away from it and still have no idea whether I believe a word of the stats or not. I don’t normally step away from NHS appointments and feel the need to google the stats, because for the most part, I don’t imagine that the doctor/nurse/medical professional has any interest in upselling me. I trust them to be moderately impartial. Not always perfectly informed, not always knowing the most up to date stuff, but I trust them to impart in good faith information more-or-less-without bias.

Knowing that this doctor is invested in having the company make more money makes me much more suspicious.

How do you ever fully trust them?

How do you trust health professionals who make a profit off you?

*sigh*

Yesterday was spent working on the house, actually doing some fairly significant renovationy things. Sadly, mostly things that don’t really do anything terribly visible, but that should make a reasonable impact to heating the house this winter.

The insulation was scheduled to arrive yesterday morning, and given that I had the whole enjoyable day off I decided to mount the radiator on the wall and start the above floor plumbing work. Thankfully, the insulation arrived early in the day allowing me to nip out and grab the TRV and some shiny chrome pipe for the run to under the floor.

The bolts that came with the radiator are pretty crappy, sadly. They’ve pulled out a little from the wall (about 1mm), which is slightly frustrating. But still, it’s looking reasonable.

The insulation, we discovered, pretty much fills the kitchen.

Having got 3 rolls of the stuff under the floor I got the fun of zig-zagging under the house in the filth dragging the rolls from the access point to the kitchen.

Finally, having got them to the right area I started sticking them into the joist spaces. I worked my way around with the staple gun and my roll of wire, holding the insulation up, stapling, and moving on. Can I just say, dear god I’m glad that they’re not glassfibre. I came out of doing this filthy, tired and sore. But not itchy. This stuff is heaven to work with compared to glass fibre.

I’ve only managed about 1/3rd of the job, and christ am I knackered today. Slept well last night though!

Whilst I was under the floor I also used the pipe-freezing kits and let the new radiator into the circuit. I admit to giving in and using quick-plumb stuff, saving me the pain of dragging the blowtorch down there. It all worked very nicely, actually, although the radiator promptly leaked up in the kitchen. I ended up spraying myself with a moderate amount of water this morning as I attempted to persuade it not to leak. I think I’ve just not been generous enough with the PTFE tape, which is not unusual, at least, not when I’ve have a big gap between now and the last time I was doing plumbing. I think, having had an impromptu shower in radiator water this morning I’ve managed to get it to seal. I’m not 100% convinced yet, though.

I’m now pondering whether I can get any work done on the deck today…

So, for ages I’ve been wanting to try out enamel bakeware. Why? Because my mum used to use it and I recalled it being about a million times better than non-stick teflon coated crap. Not because it’s wildly non-stick, because it’s not as non-stick as teflon, but because it was easier to clean, way more durable, and frankly looks prettier. Also, my recollection was that even when it gets damaged, it resists rusting better, and you don’t end up with lumps of unstuck teflon in your food.

We’ve used teflon coated bakeware for a while, a mixture of ultra-cheap student stuff that came from the likes of Poundstretcher, slightly nicer supermarket own brand stuff and really quite nice John Lewis kit. All of it, to some extent, has suffered the same fate*, the teflon’s got scratched and then started to peel off, as soon as that’s happened the pans start to rust, and then the whole thing just turns into a general disaster.

I’d been scouring second hand stores and ebay for reasonably priced second hand enamelware without success when my mum mentioned that a local store carried Falcon Enamelware and that she thought it was ‘very reasonably priced’. She then turned up with three baking dishes as a gift. Having had them a while and given them a fair bit of a work out, I think I can safely say that I love them. I am biased in that I wanted to love them, and they’re old-tech (1850s, apparently, is when it first started being reasonably commonly used), but I do indeed love them all the same.

They don’t have to be mollycoddled like teflon; metal spatulas, cutting things in them with knives, anything goes, and when something does stick, a quick soak in the sink will almost invariably have it loose. But to be honest, most stuff doesn’t seem to stick much anyhow. I don’t stress about them going through the dishwasher (nearly all of our teflon pans have come out rusty after a while, the teflon peeling off edges, or water rusting under rolled corners), the enamelware just seems to come out clean. Frankly, they come out cleaner than our teflon stuff ever did.

In fact, in all honesty, I don’t have a bad word to say about them. Hardy, relatively cheap, pretty and easy to use. What’s not to love?

* Although the frying pans have lasted pretty well, actually. As did my unbranded pans from Euroco Discount Stores in Birmingham bought back in 1996. They endured every hardship and were only finally retired this year after a handle broke, and the non-stick finally really did start to give up the ghost fairly thoroughly.

So, before I start, I have a new job. It’s exactly the same as my old job, in the same place, but with ‘Senior’ prefixed to my job title. Despite the interview, I managed to get it. Err, so yes. Go me :)

The main purpose of this post though is not this self congratulatory back slapping, it’s a different bit of self congratulatory back-slapping.

So, in my last post I delighted in the joy of my 47p radio. Today I upped it to a total cost of around £3.50 (if you exclude the eventual decision to buy a hot-melt glue gun and the ultra-short stereo 3.5mm / 3.5mm jack cable – then it ups it to around £12 all in). It now works as an amplifier with a stereo-in (which becomes mono).

It’s got a bit of a potential design flaw, in that now both the audio from the radio circuit and the audio from the stereo jack plug are subject to the mono-ising resistors (two 1kΩ resistors in parallel when it’s the radio (so 500Ωs)). Which might be why it’s such an awful radio, but I suspect given the givens that the 1960’s Fergie was a pretty crap radio to start with. I’d forgotten the joys of waving the small plastic box around to get decent MW reception, and the terrible cheap 1960’s transistor audio sound.

But it was never intended to be awesome quality. It’s for wanting to listen to NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me or the BBC’s Friday Night Comedy Podcastin the garden. It’s for hearing Transport Evolved as I dink with my Minor in the garage, or Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap whilst I paint the trim. All of which don’t require the high quality audio of my Hi Fi. If I wanted that I’d need to lug the Cambridge Audio amp everywhere I go.

So here it is:

The orange lead flying up to the back of the case is the original audio feed from the radio circuit to the volume control (and thence to the amplifier), it’s now routed through the 3.5mm jack:

Which neatly disconnects the radio and connects that 3.5mm jack…

Up in the other corner the…orange wires…I really need to get some more colours… connect up the 9v input socket:

That fitted better, the 3.5mm jack was a little short on thread so I had to countersink it into the case slightly.

After a good clean and the addition of some silver marker to the lettering, the dials are looking much more respectable. Still useless, given that I’ve no idea what frequency any of these stations were on…

But the thing as a whole, just a reminder of what it looked like before, when it was just out of the store:

And now:

So yay to me.

Also, yesterday’s rendering has taken this:

To this:

Which is looking much better, if you ask me. I need to break out the paint when it’s dried off a bit, and then I can carry on with the decking :)

All in all, I’m feeling pretty good about progress at the mo. Which is a novelty.

Of course, all isn’t happiness and joy. Oh no. I think I’ve caught a cold. Certainly I’ve got a sore throat and feel feverish, and since I’m starting nights today, well… that’s unhelpful.