Mostly lemon based

Category: General

  • Planning

    Linky: This looks fun.

    We had a positive progress day, most of the kitchen walls are clean; most of the ceiling is washed; a good chunk of the paint is stripped. Plan is, over the next week:

    – Order topsoil tomorrow
    – Strip the rest of the door frames tomorrow morning and give them a light sand
    – Wash the rest of the walls and ceiling
    – First coat of primer on the walls and ceiling tomorrow, first coat of vicious primer on the skirting and wood, hopefully

    Then over the next week we need to do coats of paint on the ceiling (x2), coats of paint on the walls (x2, hopefully) and coats of paint on the skirting and the woodwork (x2, again, hopefully). We also need to clear some rubble, potentially build a little rockery, mount the metal gates that were once the drive way gates in front of the shed (if we can, ready for some climbing plants, which’ll cover the grotty old shed base).

    Saturday my mum’s coming to do the garden, and Sunday is for restification.

    And that is our week, in short form.

  • Mud, muck and paint.

    So, today is house day, we’re not quite up and running yet although we’ve had our pancakes :)

    I attacked the garden a bit more yesterday, spending about an hour separating bricks and laying them next to the path, I even took the old concrete edging off the path, the only problem is that I can’t easily justify the cost of gravel to cover the path. I suppose it should wait until the decking’s done anyway.

    I’ve also been looking at topsoil which is a bit more pricey than I imagined. We need approximately 1 cubic meter of topsoil, which is quite a lot, when it comes to it. And basically ends up being 70 quid; unfortunately the company that’s cheapest can only do 3-4 days delivery, and I’m being screened for allergies on the 4th day, so we can’t have it delivered that day. I’m going to ring them tomorrow, ‘cos if they say ‘we can do it on day 3, definately’, then that’ll do. Otherwise they cost the same as everyone else.

    My other plan is to ring the dubious company that’s local, and used to have a big sign up saying ‘topsoil’. I’m sure it’s no-where near such a good quality of soil, but if it’s cheaper and they can do it tomorrow or tuesday, that’d be a lot more convenient.

    That should give us the veggie patch, anyhow. A nice raised veggie patch (or two). I’m suddenly contemplating a little rock-garden, too. Essentially, the plan as I have it, is to use up as much of the rubble as I can.

    Wondering about filling in that front garden with concrete, most of it, anyhow (not very environmentally friendly, better for parking tho’). Would probably sell the house better though, 2 parking spaces, even if they’re just plain concrete and would definately be better with Kathryn’s car, my bikes, and Jejy and Rebecca trying to squeeze in. No way we can afford the current brick drive way fad though, so it would just be plain concrete..

    Now, today is a different day. Hot air gun and removing the paint from the trim around the kitchen and larder door, and perhaps remove the hardboard from the larder door. Anyway, it’s time to get on.

  • Luncheon with left overs.

    We’ve been very good of late, cooking most nights, and cooking new and exciting things. So much so that we’re running out of recipes in the Vegetarian cookbook of choice; which has proven to be a fairly reliable meal producer, while some of the meals have been not-great (usually a great deal of work for not a great deal of excitement on the eating front), they’ve all been quite edible (with one notable exception).

    Anyway, I’ve been meaning to share some of these cooking adventures on here, but the near death of my camera’s batteries has put me off doing so, but today’s lunch was so yummy looking (at least to us) that I spent several minutes shuffling the near dead batteries until my camera gave in and took one photo.

    And here it is; yesterday’s frittata rewarmed, with home made soda bread, home made jam, fruit, and quorn eggs. Num num:

    It’s labelled on flickr, here :)

    Anyway, it’s probably getting on for time to cook our Calzones :)

  • No going back

    So, the Dell and the Apple are both now on ebay. Shinymac and Lapytopy will hopefully go to new owners, although to be honest, I doubt the Dell will sell. Added to the near 100 quid I got from the first auction I’m hoping that I’ll get enough from the Apple (starting bid 580 quid) that a MacBook (or ideally, a MacBook Pro) will be mine. I doubt the latter, but the former’s definately achievable. It’s a little weird to think that in a week I won’t actually have a ‘main’ computer. The RiscPC’s a bit past it, and the EntMac’s only connected to a TV (and not a HiDef one) so isn’t really useable in that way.

    The DAF’s been ministered to, yesterday the throttle stuck open, the kink in the cable caught on the cable inner and it also seemed to possibly be unhooked at the pedal end. I’ve checked it over, and it shouldn’t happen again – but when the new inner arrives (it’s going to the new DAF) then I should hopefully be able to replace it without too much pain.

    This time I shan’t kink it.

    I went to pick up Kathryn after work yesterday, missed her junction and got to travel all the way into London before I could turn around. The traffic was awful and I ended up being around 40 minutes late :( But, it did mean that Kathryn had the opportunity to go out for more driving practice yesterday, and we pootled around Slough. Apart from the incident with the pedals (before we moved at all) there weren’t any problems, but the traffic was lousy, and it opted to snow, which was a little cruel. Today I’m hoping to put an hour or two into clearing the garden a bit. I’m just going to suck down my Chai.

    I’ve been incredibly lazy today. Really, ridiculously lazy. Although, to be fair, it took me ages to get the Dell posted on e-bay. It’s taken days, actually, ‘cos the photo-upload wasn’t working last night.

    As a side point, I’ve been listening to far too much VV Brown and The Ting Tings. The bloody VV Brown song (Crying blood) keeps getting stuck in my head. Too damn catchy.

    And I keep wandering about going ‘Aaaaree yoooooooou caaaaaalling meeee darrrrrrlin(g)…’

    I had something else to ramble about, but I’ve forgotten. I blame the Ting Tings.

    Oh, no, I remember; I finally got around to entering Snapshot Hunter again. It’s not a great shot, some of the ones up there are way better (already, and we’re only on like the 6th photo), my excuse is that my camera dies after 8 photos now. Do I need new batteries? Yes I do. Not this month though, I think I’ve spent my money for this and next month.

    Oh, and yes, my minimal bid is on the shite DAB adapter. I won the amplifier, so we’re all go for taking the Radiomobile to bits. Anyway. Chai. Garden. Collect Kathryn.

  • 70 working days

    Worrying: We’re going to Ireland for Kathryn’s birthday (and as an anniversary present). The passports aren’t back from the Home Office yet. Having rung them, and listened to their message, and checked the website, they won’t give you any further information about a query until 70 working days (‘we aim to process 90% of applications in 70 working days’).

    We’re at just over 50.

    Those of you who know when my birthday is, and when Kathryn’s is, will know that there’s not a *huge* amount of time ’til we go on holiday. Reports from a forum on immigration suggest that at 70 working days they’re unlikely to be able to tell you a great deal more about your application than it’s “in progress”.

    Asking for your passports back is, apparently == I’d like to withdraw our application. I’m not deeply concerned, yet. Hopefully we’ll fall within the 90%. Neither of us are interesting in an immigration sense, I would have thought. I’m gainfully employed as is Kathryn. We don’t claim any benefits, we pay our bills and taxes…

    But still. One can’t help but be a little nervous. Can you still travel to Ireland on a Driving Licence?

  • Arse

    So, I’m not renown for my ability to manage money well. In fact, those who know me would probably be able to pitch my financial skills as something around the level of ‘hopeless’. It’s not really living beyond my means, it’s that I just don’t take enough care of my finances.

    I should care more, but watching my parents struggle and save all their lives, only to have my dad die before he retired, it seems a bit difficult to care that much.

    But I don’t want to drag Kathryn into my money pit, so I’ve been trying to sort them out a bit. Part of which was transferring some of the vast balance from the main credit card to a succession of low or no interest rate cards. These cards then lurk in the house and don’t get used. At least that was the theory.

    To give you an idea of how bad I am at managing money, I didn’t notice that one of the balance transfers didn’t go through. In fact, I think that both of them haven’t gone through. I need to look back at my statements but I think I’ve been paying interest on money twice. Cunning, eh.

    Thankfully, AmEx noticed that my other card never cashed the cheque. The good side of this is that I get to, somewhat suddenly, pay off a big chunk of the debt. I’ve got the interest payments back from AmEx too, so I’ve only paid the one huge amount of interest. But it’s somewhat frustrating.

    Still, it means I’m in a better financial position than I thought…

  • Wakey wakey rise and shine

    Said my body at 4:45am. I’m not quite sure why, I think I was woken by my throat, and then my brain started listing all the things I need to do today. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) Kathryn said I wasn’t to do anything that might upset my throat further – so my cunning plan to strip the paint on the door frames, and uh, paint them is off*.

    I’ve still got a fair bit to get on with. When the frost’s melted a bit I need to take jejy round to the tyre place, having found that the ‘slow’ puncture’s got quicker, and that it’s leaking from the valve. Now I can point and go “look, it’s leaking from the valve; that’s definately your fault, please fix it”. I also am debating getting an external enclosure for my now spare SATA hard drive (what? why?!)…

    Let me explain. I want to sell the G5 Mac. The G5 Mac currently sports 2 largish harddrives, a lot of memory, a 20″ monitor, a 14″ LCD monitor and so on. To sell it, I have two options:

    1) Dump all my data onto and remove the second HDD.
    2) Copy all my data onto the 500Gb ex-entertainment-Hackintosh drive in an external drive case and then nuke the two drives.

    I think the latter is probably the better solution. Whilst it will cost 20 quid, it will probably add more than 20 quid to the value of the Mac, selling it with two big hard drives in. Mind you, if one of them is bigger than 500Gig it’ll be being swapped around.

    At any rate, I’ve been travelling in the DAF a lot recently, and it’s come to my attention that the Radiomobile radio doesn’t work…

    It did work when we got the car, it stopped working a while ago, and has not spontaneously reanimated itself. But I rather like the look of it. Ratty and tatty though it is, it’s part of the car’s 1970s charm. The plasti-chrome is peeling and the volume knob turns on it’s spindle. But I have a solution. Rip out its guts and throw them away.

    I’ve finally found a cheapie company making (almost certainly lousy quality) automotive amplifiers (but you’re in a car with no soundproofing to speak of). In fact, the one I’ve bid 75p for (but £9.99 shipping) also sports 2 inputs (but no means of switching between them, switches, presumably, are extra). But since I intend to gut the poor wee beastie, that’s fine. I’m also hopefully going to get my grubby little hands on one of the Matsui DAB tuners. Back before I planned to move to Canada I debated buying one of these for the Minor. But they were 30 quid at the time.

    Now, at a few quid second hand, they’re tempting to again be the subject of my soldering iron. The plan is simple; gut the DAB tuner, gut the amplifier, make Radiomobile into DAB tuner. Leave socket for MP3/CD player. And lo, we’ll have the perfect modern stereo in a 70s box.

    Mind you, that’s how it is in my head. How it’ll work in practice is another question. The other thing I quite fancy, having driven the car a while now, is a small amount of illumination around the air vent controls and the hot/cold air selector sliders.

    I usually end up waving my arms around under the dashboard to find them (when driving in the dark) so a little glowy white LED illuminating the up/down arrows seems quite tempting to me. And a little red/blue illumination on the hot air and cold air sliders also seems like quite a nice idea (potentially mounting them in a small piece of sanded perspex to diffuse the light). I’m slightly concerned she might look a little boy-racer though with the blue/red glow eminating from the dash, but at least I’d be able to control the temperature while driving without too much concentration. I’m also slightly concerned that I might get overly attached to Jejy. But hey.

    This all comes about because I need to prepare Jejy to be Rebecca’s temporary replacement while I fit the diff (when it arrives), the gearbox (when it’s ready), the new swivel pins (when they’re manufactured; if ever), trunions, poly-bush the front suspension, and repaint the damaged paint areas of the engine bay. Oh, and strip out the dash, find all the things that are rattling, stop them from doing so, clean out the heater, fit a new inline heater control valve (from a golf, apparently), and potentially convert her to Left Hand Drive (which involves moving the brake master cylinder and associated plumbing, remanufacturing the dash I made (otherwise the worry gauges will all be in front of the passenger), fitting the other gearbox front plate and somehow working out how to lock and unlock the passenger door from the outside), oh and ideally fitting a heated rear window that works, and in a perfect world sending off the speedo to be recalibrated, the revcounter to be reinternalised and the clock to be made to work (a car with a working clock! that’d be a novelty).

    Just a short list of jobs…

    So Jejy may have to do service for the minor for a while. Which is why I fancy a radio and a CD input.

    Anyway, today I need to get my act together and sell the Mac, and possibly the Dell (although I doubt the dell is going to sell). And in aid of getting started, I shall now have my breakfast.

    * Yes, yes, I know she’s right, but it seemed like a good idea in my head :)

  • And today I failed to save a life…

    Only, it must be said, that of a Resusci-anne*, but there y’go. She was in Asystole for which the outcome from resuscitation is pretty poor – and she went straight from compromised bradycardia into asystole, so we were pretty buggered. But I did my best, and since I’ve never seen a successful resuscitation then it’s fair enough.

    I’m hoping I’ve passed my ILS. They didn’t stop me and say “Good lord, what are you trying to do!?”, which is obviously a sign that things are going wrong, and they usually (or at least did last time) prompt you to get you going in the right direction, and the only thing that came up was atropine to treat her bradycardia. Since she was (notionally at least) bleeding into her abdomen there wasn’t much we could do for her in the (imaginary) A&E. I hope I’ve passed, otherwise it’ll be a bit embaressing.

    I’m still really peeved about the ALS. I spoke to loads of other nurses and we all find it grating, because the trust doesn’t run many ALS days, and the problem is the Doctors rotate every 3/4/6 months, which means that we’ll potentially never get on an ALS course run by the trust. It’s about 300 quid to do it, and I’m tempted, once I’ve read the book, to see if I can do some Agency work and book myself on ALS.

    I wonder if my agency give me any discount on ALS…

    Anyhow.

    In other news, I took the DAF in today, and she behaved impeccably. The traffic was awful, but we pootled along stopping every 8 feet or so as the accident on the motorway which closed my junction was cleared. Thankfully, just as I came up to the junction they reopened it, and I managed to get to my training on time. But the journey home was just as un-eventful. I fear the condition of the (expensive) clutch shoes when they come out – because the drum was fairly sharp edged, I suspect. And although I’d like to imagine that the friction material wore the peaks off a bit, I suspect that the peaks wore the friction material off and that those self-same peaks are in the process of destroying the shoes. I don’t want to put ridged shoes on a good drum either. Poot.

    But, in super-good news, and relating to the nature of awesome which the DAF club (who I must get around to joining (and I need to renew my MMOC membership as it happens)), a member of the DAF owners’ club has offered to supply us both with a manifold that’s in better condition than our really crackedy one and a drum which is not ridged to hell and back.

    But (another but, not a butt), while I’m waiting for that to come, and the other DAF to surface from the garage in which it lurketh, I must get around to preparing my Mac for sale. This means: fixing the Sony monitor semi-properly, removing the second hard-disk, and a veritable cornucopia of file-shuffling. I am debating selling my dad’s old DEC monitor. I really *love* the DEC monitor, it’s 21″ of shiny shiny trinitron goodness; but do I want to lug that all the way to Canada? At some point I need to move on from hording all the things my dad used, and perhaps it’s time to let that go and get some shiny new tech in. I can carefully remove the sticker with his name on (and my stripey apple sticker!) and it can go on a new computer…

    Anyway. It’s bed time here in ChezUs. So off we toddle.

    Oh, and Being Human? Excellent TV. Thank you Auntie beeb.

    * I just found out something truly creepy about resusci-anne; her face is modelled on the death-mask of an unidentified 19th Century woman. That is entirely freaky. I’ll have to share that at work. *creeped out*

  • Post Spam: More thoughts

    So, with me taking the DAF more days than not last week I had plenty of time for contemplation on my journeys – the DAF having no working Radio (she came with one, it just, somewhat unfortunately, died).

    The Canada plan had been troubling me not because I’d any less desire to do it, but my cunning plan of funding the move by selling the vastly more valuable house (having done it up and added central heating and so on), and skipping all the way to Canada on tens of thousands of ill-gotten gains has somewhat vaporised. The house is probably worth more money than I/we’ve put in; or at least, it will be when it’s all finished and painted, and when the standard of finish can be shown off.

    But it’s unlikely to do what I hoped, which is to give a big chunk of cash on which we’d be able to live and sort out where we want to live in Canada, and to give me those ever elusive ‘savings’ of which I’ve heard so much about.

    I’ve found out that, apparently, I’m actually in-line for some inheritance from the death of my Grandparents. This is somewhat of a surprise. I’ve no idea how much; it could be £3.50, £3500, or £35,000. I don’t know whether it’ll help sort out the financial situation I find myself in; and clear the decks which’d make me feel more hopeful about fleeing this place.

    It is terrifying for me though; the idea of ripping up my life, small as it is, and moving it, roots and all to another country. I know my mum did it before me, and Kathryn’s here in this foreign (to her) land. I know Kathryn will look after me, and hold my fear in a bright shiny ball that I can gaze on and see it’s beauty, but it’s still scary.

    I’ve spent 30 years in this land of rain, semi-detachment and knowing how it works. Knowing that if I don’t know, I know who to ask. And suddenly I find myself with this idea of being in a land where I won’t know how any of it works. Where I’ll be the foreigner, and where my very Englishness will make me stand out.

    What does scare me is I don’t fit in here. I am quirky and strange, and I don’t think people quite know what to do with me. Apart from my friends. I don’t readily fit into a pigoen hole, and I don’t want to end up without the freindships I managed to make here.

    Anyway. Thoughts.

    In other news: the Ent Mac contained more dust than it should’ve. I spent some time with the Air Duster cleaning it out, it’s now substantially less dusty. It’s open, at the moment, as it’s copying the contents of the drive ‘Baird’ to the new drive ‘Baird’ (can y’guess where the TV/Videos are stored?). I didn’t realise it boots of a PATA drive.

    Incidentally, PCWorld: No SATA cables?! WTF? They are a PC shop. *rolls eyes*. Did play with a MacBook though. It was shiny. I think I’d want a matt screen though, which is a bugger. I find it hard to imagine spending the cash on such a thing. But there y’go.

    Continuing to enjoy Danielle ate the sandwich and have added the Ting Tings and VV Brown to the list.

  • Post Spam: Frustration

    So I was booked on an ALS course, it’s one of the things missing from my repertoire. I’m trauma trained, ILS trained and so forth, but I’ve not got Critical Care or ALS. They’re the two things I’d really like to have got on my CV.

    I got on the ALS course by dint of the fact that people ahead of me in the queue are doing Critical Care, and thus don’t have time to study for and do the ALS course. Unfortunately, I just lost my place to junior doctors. Now that Hospital at night’s running, the junior doctors have to do it. Which means that all the ‘nurse’ places have been taken by junior doctors.

    While I see the point, I can’t help but be frustrated. I was complaining about it, and nervous about doing the ALS course, but now I can’t do it, well, *feh*.