Category: General

So, we have an ancient iron. I think it’s 1960s, which is not totally ancient, but is pretty old as far as consumer electricals go. We also have a 30mA RCD. This, it turns out, is not a combination that leads to joy.

Anyone with better electronics knowledge than me have any suggestions as to how to stop our beloved iron (which I love because it just works and works and works, not like this modern crap) from tripping the RCD most times that we use it? It usually only does it once, or maybe twice, but we didn’t notice today and thus left the house (most importantly, the fridge) without power for 4 hours.

Some shite scraped Rebecca, either today or yesterday…

I’m hoping that it’ll mostly polish out.

On the plus side, it turns out the 70 year old tyres on my push bike hold air. On the minus side I suspect that the bottom bearing on it might need replacing :-/

So, the insanity’s stopped me posting for a while. It’s been insanely hard going here recently, as we fly towards an optimistic completion date. Both Kathryn and I have been really quite busy, and between it and the MSc I’ve been a bit too busy to post.

So, anyhow. Kathryn’s been sanding the trim in the spare bedroom library – and has popped the first coat of paint on there; the skirting’s looking like it’s going to be very nice – indeed, the whole room is looking gorgeous. I’ve freecycled some scaffold poles and bought some scaffold joints to make the desk. Since finding how pretty scaffold board is, I’ve been really rather keen to have a scaffold plank desk – and what’s the obvious thing to support a scaffold plank desk? Scaffolding :)

Of course it needs a bit of cleaning up before installation and we need to decide if just ‘clean’ or painted is what we need in terms of look. (more…)

So, the theft of stuff, as a general group, has had a real effect on my mood. Thankfully they didn’t come into the house, and really what they took has so far seemed to be fairly easily replaceable (in terms of it’s physically easy to get a replacement) although financially it’s another matter.

I’ve been trying to get back to actually doing stuff, which is hard, for a number of reasons. One of which is the all pervading negativity that’s wrapped itself around me since finding out. We’ve put so much effort into the house, and since moving in we seem to have had a bit of a run of bad luck with stuff. Our art deco sofa that we picked out is missing thanks to Mrs Vivienne Manning, director of Manning Logistics LTD (and partner of Andy Manning) who’ve disappeared without a trace, presumably having stolen our property*.

If anyone runs into them, give them our number and say we’d like our stuff back, incidentally.

Anyhow, so having stuff stolen from the brand new garage is upsetting because I’d been all excited about finally having somewhere to put tools. Now I have somewhere to put tools where some fuck is going to steal them. Instead of having a nice space, I’m going to have to fix cabinets to walls/floors with big f-off locks. I don’t want to live in a fracking high security installation.

Anyhow, it’s also not great to be working, because while the lounge is lovely to chill out in, the big TV, despite being very cheap is noticably a big LCD screen. One must assume that someone looking through the window is unlikely to realise it’s end of line cheap telly. So we’ve kept the curtains closed and will have to put up some net to make it less easy to just look in. We don’t actually like net, but there you go.

So we’re essentially sitting in semi-darkness all the time. Illuminated by one old 60W bulb (yes, it will be an energy saver when we get a bit further along).

I’ve also been constantly thinking about alarm systems. I’ve finally bitten the bullet and ordered one today, though I suspect it’ll take a while to get here. It’s a relatively posh one, it’ll ring us if anyone breaks in and will apparently allow us to listen to what’s going on in the house. It’ll cover the garage as well as the house, and sports separate keypads for the garage and the house.

It remains, however, depressing.

On the plus side I’ve managed to engage with the world enough to put the filler in the kitchen ceiling, and I’ve been playing with the ViewSonic VMP74 which is, it seems, working. Using UPnP (Eyeconnect – other stuff seemed to not want to stream AVIs) we’ve got video streaming from the mac – although it’s not as high-def as I’d like. I think it’s downscaling the video to get it through the narrow pipe of wifi. I’m hoping that’s what it is. When things are set up a bit better it should be pulling stuff across a nice fast wired network, which should make it happier. I’m looking forward to when we have the EntMac set up and we can have music pulled over the network by the power of MAGIC!

So tomorrow, hopefully, I can put at least one coat of paint on the kitchen ceiling (the ideal would be two coats) – and perhaps regain some of the lost momentum. Today, though, I’ve got stuff I should be doing, which I’ve been studiously avoiding.

Oh, on the plus side (double plus good) I’ve managed to work out how you remove the seat on the GT-550 (and I worked it out all by myself**). Now I have temptation to go and buy a battery – although I’m not sure if my battery charger’s in the house, the garage, or stolen. The most annoying thing about the theft (apart from the loss of Kathryn’s bike which is definitely more annoying because it’s not insured thanks to Halifax’s Opaque insurance policy) is that we have no idea what’s been stolen. It’s very hard to work out what they’ve taken because we don’t entirely know what was there. And we’ve only got 3 months to work out what else they might have taken. Given the abandonment of the bike I’m wondering if I should have a wander around the area out the back of our house and see if anything else has been dumped. But I think mostly what they’ve taken is stuff with carry handles that’s easy to nick and sell. *sigh*.

* I can’t work out how the fuck I’m meant to take them to court given that their registered address has been repossessed & their registered home address isn’t, so far as I can tell, where they live anymore. I can send them a civil court claim, but since they won’t get it… well, then they can say ‘oh, we didn’t get it’. It just seems that it’s throwing good money after bad. Everyone directs me to someone else, no one is responsible for this limited company which isn’t trading, hasn’t submitted accounts, has no property and has disappeared with our furniture.

** If it were any easier to work it out then it would have had neon flipping lights flashing all around it with the release lever is here! in giant blinking scroll text. Doh!

So today we I found out (Kathryn’s not home to hear the shit news yet) that the home insurance policy does not cover such minor piffling items as a bike. Despite them asking me to run through the ‘High Risk’ items when I did named items for the policy, Halifax neglected to mention that bicycles aren’t included as standard.

When you get the booklet, in small tiny tiny print under high risk items, somewhere after ‘crowns, Arabian princes, priceless frog collections’ it says ‘oh, and bicycles’. Even the claims adjuster admitted that ‘the booklets aren’t very easy to follow’. Well, no. Not unless you’re into fucking insurance, no.

This however makes me more committed to working out what the hell else they might have taken, because at the moment, what they’ve taken is swallowed up by the policy excess. In which case, it’s probably not worth making a claim.

This might manage to get me over my failure to really develop hatred for the people who stole our stuff. Mostly I’ve been vaguely annoyed and stressed and quite down. Being a lefty liberal, some of me’s still stuck being nice about the shitty little sods. Commenting on bad choices, and so on. What I want to do is yell and shout about wanting to break their fingers, but I don’t, because I don’t want to. I want them to be caught and punished. I want justice done. But really, they’ve just annoyed and inconveninced me. However, they have just cost us £400 of bike, and right at this moment, I’m not exactly sure what the policy does cover, because everything seems to be listed under ‘exclusions’ (computers/electronics/cds/music/furniture/possessions/bricks/wood/anything containing any elements included in the periodic table). Might ring Halifax again and just check exactly what is included.

So, yesterday was a total high. We ‘finished’ the lounge. Well, actually, more accurately Kathryn’s slogged her guts out painting and so the room is completely painted. It’s not really ‘finished’, there’s still shelves to go up, the fire place still wants cleaning, we hadn’t actually put the telly on the wall, but we scrabbled around in our storage unit and got the sofa back to the house (and our standard lamp). We fell into bed tired but pleased. What we didn’t know is that either while we were at the unit, or sometime during the night to come someone would enter the garage and make off with a bunch of tools, my motorbike and Kathryn’s very nice pushbike.

They kicked down the back gate, wrenching the fence post from the wall of the garage. It never was intended to do more than provide a discouragement anyhow. Then they kicked / broke the lock on the garage side door, let themselves in, let themselves out with our stuff.

It’s worrying, there’s some important documents in there. There were a bunch of hand tools they’ve nicked, they went through some of the other boxes too, clearly looking for stuff they could quickly nick and flog. Ironically they missed (so far as I can tell) our ViewSonic net-TV adaptor. When I go down to put the alarm on there in a few minutes, I’ll check for Kathryn’s laptop – because it just occurred to me that that was in there, I think.

*sigh*.

Instead of spending the evening doing a smidge of work on the house, then doing my course, I got instead to talk to the police, and then spend an enjoyable few hours putting new padlocks on the doors, rehanging the gate and putting longer, nastier screws into the garage wall. But really? If someone wants to break into a wood framed garage? It’s never going to be impossible.

The geniuses who stole the bike made it about 100 meters before abandoning the MZ. Thankfully they didn’t take the uninsured GT550. The MZ, being it’s recalcitrant self, I suspect they tried to hot-wire. The faint hilarity of some stupid little scrote attempting to hot-wire a kickstart bike is not entirely lost on me, although the humour of the situation is limited at the moment. The police have actually expressed an interest, which surprised me, I assumed the crime would fall somewhere below ‘statistic’. Apparently, due to the government’s obsession with statistics, it’s a crime where, because they touched so much stuff they might actually CSI the garage and see if they can pull the scrote in off fingerprints.

Unfortunately, Kathryn’s very nice Giant bicycle did not get abandoned so conveniently. I’m not sure if she ever had it marked (and if it is marked, it’s probably with our old postcode).

Still, to cheer me up I’ve put the TV on the wall. Tomorrow I get to deal with insurance companies and so on.

Quick question (mainly for the LJ followers). Is it useful having the aggregated twitter feed on here? I added it ‘cos of the instagram posts which were hiding separately. But if it’s annoying I can turn it back off!

So, I restart my course next week (it was meant to be this week). Between that and the house things may get a bit less frequent here. Although they’ve been staggeringly infrequent this month because we’ve been desperately trying to get as much as possible finished…

(more…)

Okay, I started this post a few days ago on the laptop. I know it goes on to talk about the chaise longue, but a but in the implementation of the textbox editor on the very decidedly not an iPad (I’m tempted to call it nanolax) means I can’t edit the text at the bottom of the page. Or indeed see it. The idea of doing multiple windows to copy / paste / link to photos is just laughable! But I plan to carry on regardless! I might fire up opera in a sec and see if that’s better.

Anyhow, the new plasterer turned up today, he seems very nice, he’s quick too. Removed the rotten board and replaced the whole bay’s plasterboard then reskimmed the whole room in one day. To those who missed the developments with our old plasterer he decided to go to Manchester rather than plaster our upstairs and we had to find a replacement plasterer super quick. LUckily he seems good.

I’ve moved the gate and spent a delightful afternoon fittig a lock to it (in the rain) so you can now get in and out with a key (from the outside as well as the insid, whichis nice). Hopefully the bike should arrive tomorrow… hence the need for rear access that didn’t require walking through the house to unlock it!

So, I was slightly inaccurate in my last post. I’ve bought a 27 year old bike to replace my 22 year old one. Astonishingly, it’s not an MZ. Not that I don’t love my MZ, but I kinda want something that’s not a project, or at least, only a small project at the moment.

And I’m sick of losing 3rd gear. I could get another ‘zed, but really? I think it’s time to try a different biking experience. And so, I’ve finally picked up a Kawasaki. It’s a D reg GT550 – in blue – so it’s in keeping with the rest of the fleet. Apparently it was a good runner, then wasn’t being used so was just being started and allowed to warm up regularly, and then the battery died… and it’s sat for about a year.

I’m essentially hoping that a quick service, a clean of the carbs and it’ll be good to go.

Here it is in all it’s ebay glory:

This sadly means that the ‘zed has to go. Much loved though it is, it’s also provided much difficulty. I need to sort out some photos and stick it up on e-bay. Although I’ll probably offer it on the owner’s club first.

I am, however, deeply looking forward to the arrival of the blue, as yet unnamed, GT 550. I’ve sat on one before, and that’s it. I’ve riden a four-stroke bike around a carpark and it was a wholly different experience to the all-or-nothing ‘zed. Mostly, though, I’m looking forward to third gear.

We’ve also had a freecycle success. I have wanted a chaise – for quite a while. It’s a ridiculously frivolous item and given the state of our finances on this project one I couldn’t quite deliver. Not least because we, well, had only seen one that I wanted.

I just bought a 30 year old motorbike to replace my 20 year old bike. Um. Oops.