Category: General

Now, I hate to be revolting. Well, actually I don’t give a fig whether I’m revolting or not, but I just have to say how awesome Kathryn is. She’s sweet and kind and thoughtful. She’s generous, intelligent, creative and wonderful. And today she was just so lovely; despite the temperatures of 2 degrees C (and below), the snow, the oil and the gunk she worked away with me on the DAF today. Without her it would have been impossible to get nearly as far as we did, and getting the bonnet off alone would have been nightmareish.

She is, I am convinced, the most wonderful person in the world.

That having been said, we didn’t finish the DAF. 5 hours of solid work, we’re down to detaching the exhaust from the head (the book seems very vague about this, in fact, it actually suggests detaching the exhaust somewhere else, but then it’d still be curving round the suspension). All the wiring is detached, the bonnet, grill, bumper, air filter, various other ancilleries are also now in the boot and hopefully tomorrow we can get to the clutch and fix the poor benighted object, and then get her back on the road.

So, five hours in and we have this:

So, uh, wish us good weather for the morrow.

It’s snowing. The thermometer reports a whopping 2.1 Degrees Celcius (that’d be 35.8F) outside and we are working on the DAF. Well, right now I’m trying to find out if my toes are still attached to my feet and Kathryn is kindly making lunch. But we shall be back out DAFing in a bit. This is in aid of Kathryn having a licence and not wasting the 120 quid of poundlingtons it cost to Tax the poor thing.

Unfortunately, it’s snowing. Despite my denial of the snow falling on us, it continued. It’s not snowing heavily…yet. I’m hoping that it’s going to stop, although it seems unlikely to warm up. The weather forecast suggested 4 degrees, which would, I suppose, be an improvement on 2.1 :-/

Ironically, in a few weeks time we may have access to a garage. The owner of said house on the corner having said we can use it subject to the rentees agreeing. He’s renting it out in a couple of weeks tho’ and so we can’t fix it or use it ’til then. I originally thought that 2 joists needed doing, but it looks like 4. Ironically, he suggested the workshop might be a better bet, but for the concrete wall, and the fact the ceiling has actually come down, and there’s no way to get a car into it, he’d be right. The space would be lovely.

So, massively overtired as I was, thankfully yesterday’s shift was in an observation ward. A proper obs ward, not like where I work. Or perhaps that’s backwards. Our obs ward is really just that, it’s clearly intended as a place to keep an eye on a few people who you can’t send home immediately but don’t really need admission. No nurses’ station, no drug cupboard, nothing but a few beds and chairs, and a loo.

This one had a showers and bathrooms and isolation rooms, and a full range of drugs like you get on a ward. It had it’s own resus trolley, a large nurses station and a dedicated A&E doctor. Quite odd. Dear god was it dull though. I hadn’t realised how much I hate ward work!

I’ve not been so bored in my life. Mind, at 50p a minute for me to be bored there are worse things.

And I got to read the independent, from cover to cover.

The trains were very good to me too.

And Kathryn, very kindly, bought me drugs. I came home and there was a bottle of night-nurse waiting for me, so last night I slept all the way through, from 2200 to 0600 when I, with some poking, was encouraged out of bed. Rebecca, you see, had a date. She was to go to Southam Mini & Metro Centre to have her leaky engine looked at. She now sports a new timing chain cover, one without a pinhole in it (I hope), and the water leak has hopefully been sorted too.

Also slightly more sorted is the heater. It’d not been getting warm, as such, and as winter’s got on I’d got bored of being bitterly cold, so asked if they could fit a 88 degree stat. When they checked, they realised it didn’t have a stat at all, being still set up for running in – so that ended up being a freebie (always good), and it does now get warm, at least some of the time. I am vaguely wondering if it’s got an airlock or somesuch problem though, ‘cos it does seem to run cool at points, but I’ve checked and there is definately a full radiator of coolant.

It needs more exploration.

One thought that struck me today, as I noticed I’m less than 1000 miles from an indicated 30,000 is that, well… I got Rebecca at 60,000 miles (ish). She’s now displaying 30,000 (whether that’s 130,000 or 230,000, or indeed more is a bit of a question). So that’s 70,000 miles in her, except… for 2 years or so she sported another speedo. And I faintly recall that one had 30 or 40k put on it was in use.

So in fact, Rebecca and I may have travelled around 100,000 miles together in the last 8 years. Not bad for a 40 year old car, I’d say. Anyway, I need to go and write a note for the owner of the corner house, apparently he said ‘no’ because the roof of the garage is falling in. I *know* it’s falling in, my point was that I’d deal (at least temporarily) with the roof if I can use the garage for free for as long as it’s standing… So I’m going to go and drop off a note.

I have been completely unable to get into a sensible sleep pattern again after nights. Last set of nights was bad, I presume, because I was sick and just spent most of the week asleep. This set there’s no such reason.

I just can’t get to sleep. I’ve got a lot going on in my head with the list of jobs I think need doing; but even still, tonight I woke up at 12:48 having only gone to sleep just after 2200. 3 sodding hours of sleep. Since then I’ve been awake. I’ve counted, I’ve tried relaxation things, and as it gets later I’ve got that angst that comes of knowing that you’ve got a long shift ahead (12 hours) and that you’re tired already.

Lord only knows how I’ll feel walking the mile to the railway station at 20:00 to get the train back home. I’m quite tempted to drive in, but I suspect parking in London Hospitals is a bit more tricksy than the suburban ones I normally do shifts in.

Anyway, one cup of sleepytime tea and we’ll try again, an extra hour and a half of sleep’s definitely better than no more sleep.

I was meant to be going out to lunch today, that was the plan. I worked last night especially to ensure that I’d be tired and sleep through the night and thus wake up at a sensible time.

Unfortunately, my body had other ideas, I woke up at 4am, then took 2 hours to get back to sleep. Either my alarm didn’t go off, or I didn’t wake up, but I then next woke up at 12:32. I was meant to be meeting people for lunch at 12:30, 15 miles away. I guess I missed that then :-/

Have to admit I’m somewhat peeved. I was really looking forward to getting out of the house and getting lunch somewhere nice. ‘s scrambled egg for me today then :-/

Hope I can sleep tonight, ‘cos I’m meant to be on a long day tomorrow.

So, yes, sorry for the inconsiderate post-spam, but I’ve been so tired this last week that I’ve not been able to post anything. This has, of course, been annoying for me because most of the things I wanted to talk about have gone from my head. You’ve got one work related post, I think there were going to be four or so, but can’t even recall what they were going to be about.

The reason they’ve been spammed, as opposed to one post, is simple. They don’t fit together at all. The car rant, the work stuff and this, which is a thinking about the ‘week off’ (for what it’s worth, since I plan to work 2 shifts) are all really somewhat separate things. I probably ought to cut-tag the LJ ones though, so I’ll pause for a second, go back and do that now…[processing 2 posts]…done.

Anyhow, this week off seems to feel somewhat cramped. It’s tuesday and I have a huge old list of things I want to get done:

Unblock the shower again. I’m not sure why, but it’s not draining very well, again. I’m going to do that in a minute, before I go shower. I am thinking about constructing my own little drain explorer with a little USB camera and a long USB cable, because I can’t figure why it blocked so quickly. I made it more than the minimum fall, the only think I can think of is that the grout that we washed of the shower has sat in the waste-water pipe and solidified, but if that’s the case I would have thought that my drain clearing (with the drain clearing wire-whatsit) would have got rid of it. My problem with the USB camera idea is that I fear getting the damn thing stuck in the drain which would be expensive and awkward to explain. Anyway, so that’ll take maybe half an hour.

The rest of my list for the week includes:
– Making an animation for the Rock ‘n’ Roll or Trains track off ‘today is..’ (by A.M.). Kathryn’s mom very kindly got this for me for Xmas, and it’s an excellent album, I’m much enamoured with it, but AM is cruel and evil, for he’s filled my head with an image for an animation sequence, and I can’t get it out of my head, and therefore must attempt to make it.

I’ve never done real animation before – and my aged copy of CS2 doesn’t really handle animation in a way that I’m enjoying. I was quite proud of my little chap wiggling his legs, more or less as I wanted, yesterday. Then I realised just how many million billion separate layers I’d need to get what I wanted done, and thought: “Shite. I need a different way to do this”.

So, suggestions please, on some electrons, to the usual address, for software to make a dinky little animation mostly using vector graphics.

So that’s the fun things.

Less fun things: I’ve got to go up to Southam for to get the car seen to on Friday. They’re going to look into the coolant leak, sort out the oil leak and do the ‘500 mile’ check over (at a mere 4,000 miles ;)

Less fun things, the second: I need to sort out the DAF. Since I’ve had no luck with the garage on the corner this will have to be outside, in the cold (unless, when I get dressed and pop around there today I manage to convince them). This is an ‘engine out’ job and is therefore saved for the weekend when Kathryn’s here, because I need help. One to get the bonnet off and two, to get the engine out.

I want a garage *wail*.

The kitchen also needs painting, which means washing down the walls, a job Kathryn’s started, and also washing down the skirting boards (which should, since they’re not primed, be painted first, ideally). The thing about painting skirting boards is that the paint is (a) cheap and (b) not very quick drying. ISTR it needs 12 hours between coats. Thankfully it doesn’t need many coats. Also, though, in that job, is stripping the paint off the door frame into the lounge and the door frame into the larder, such that they can be painted at the same time as the rest of the woodwork. A job that will fill the house with revolting fumes :(

Anyhow, despite my desire to lie on this sofa and repeat yesterday’s impressive TV feast* (I watched 6 episodes of Blackadder, and one of Homes under the Hammer), I really should get up and move and do stuff. What with the list getting longer by the day, and my effect on it so-far having been minimal.

* All my flailing, incidentally, about the TV may have been down to a dodgy connector, and not the TV set dying. It gave impressively similar symptoms to my mum’s TV set dying, and symptoms which fit with my experience of failing HT circuitry (I’ve watched it go on 3 sets now), but seems to have resolved with me fiddling about with the connectors on the back. Of course, now it’ll probably let out the magic smoke, then I’ll be sad.

It went wrong a lot last week, really it did. It was insanely busy, perhaps even dangerously so, even with full numbers we were run off our feet. Amazingly, New Year’s night was seriously not-that-bad. Busy, yes. But not like every night following. People can’t drive in cold weather, I’ve noticed that. I’ve known for a long time people in Britain seem unaware of dangers like black ice, or just plain old ice, when one would think “Hrm, it’s cold and it’s winter, perhaps I should drive a little more carefully on this ungritted road”. I knew that people here have difficulty understanding that snow makes stopping difficult (and indeed, at times, starting), but the number of ‘hit by car skidding on ice’ ‘hit wall after skidding on ice’ ‘hit barriers after skidding on ice’ ‘RTC: Collision with another vehicle, skidding on ice”s, that we saw was quite astonishing.

I was actually sick, too, so was being fairly ruthless in my Triage, because when your Triage nurse has a temperature of 38.2C she’s not inclined to feel sorry for you having ‘a bit of a cough for a few days’.

But anyway, things that went wrong? Well, when it’s busy and you’re stressed it’s easy to miss the obvious. The head injury that the Doctor was stropping about as being drunk who, it turned out, was sober as a tea-total vicar. He did, however, have a bleed inside his scull. Thankfully, it was spotted before he shoved off home.

But the one that got me was the abdo-pain which rapidly turned into Ectopic-going-to-theatre. Every trust I’ve been to has some kind of disaster-management for ambulances queuing in the door, the trust I was at when this happened, up to a point the crews just hang around in the corridor, their patients sat on stretchers or wheelchairs. They are not our responsibility but we do book them in. This is good, because as one of the RN’s pointed out, as this woman screamed, we could actually ‘get her some pain killers’ and ‘check if she’s pregnant’.

10 minutes later, she was out of that queue and in Resus with two whacking great needles in her arm, morphine flowing round her system and blood being crossmatched as she was prep’d to go to theatre.

In my own head I’d only made it as far as ‘we really need to do something for her, she looks like she’s in a lot of pain’. Thankfully, that RN stood next to me and pointed out that she was booked in, and we actually could start the care process before she was on our trolley.

What could have happened had she sat (well, that’s a loose term for it, more writhed) in that corridor for another 20 minutes or so doesn’t bear thinking about, not just in terms of her pain (which must have been horrendous), but also in terms of the dangers of an haemorrhage with an ectopic pregnancy.

In a way it went right, it was caught and she was treated, but if that RN hadn’t been there, maybe it wouldn’t have gone quite so well.

In a much lesser way, one way in which it went wrong was that I had to start ‘training’ a new doctor. He’s arrogant, stuck up, rude, and frankly wouldn’t be out of place in a 1960’s Carry On film as a consultant. He is, however, I think, only a baby little SHO*.

He almost certainly knows lots about lots of things which I know little about, and should I need my bones fixed he’d probably be a fair candidate for organising something being done about it. But when he tries to tell me how to take blood, or more accurately how much blood is required in the bottles, he’s going to get short tempered, sick Kate giving him a verbal smack upside the head. Bear in mind that I take probably around 10-15 sets of bloods a day. That’s around 30-45 blood bottles, and I know how little I can get away with in each one, because some people are right buggers for giving you blood samples.

He told me I needed to take another one ‘because the lab won’t process that, there’s not enough in it’ (and he didn’t say it in a “I think this is the case” way, he said it in a “I know this is the case and you’re just and incompetent, untrained nurse who knows nothing” way***). I told him that in fact “you can get away with a hell of a lot less in the tube than that”, and I had to really restrain myself from commenting on his general approach, which appears to revolve around him being the God from On High sent down to leave his Commandments with us mere nurses.

When I first met him I thought he was rude, but tried to tilt it as “he’s just quiet and poor at communicating”, but over the last week had given in to “he’s a rude little shit”. Unfortunately, I’m given to be terribly friendly, and tend to assume that if I’m friendly to people eventually they’ll start being nicer, and had continued to chat in a polite way to him ignoring his somewhat problematic communication method. This has, for the most part, worked with virtually every doctor I’ve ever known. However, being sick, incredibly tired after shite-shift after shite-shift, and somewhat out of patience** I just decided I didn’t need to have any conversations with him which weren’t entirely professional. I suspect he noticed that the irritating, grating nurse who keeps chatting to him had stopped. A few hours later, when he was looking at another patient in the department he walked up to me and quietly said ‘the clotting results came back’ and walked off.

I think we may have reached an understanding.

* He may even be a locum, or he might have reached the lofty heights of Registrar. At any rate, there’s no need for him to be rude.
** This may, or may not, have been related to my urge to give him an hour long lecture on appropriate behaviour and respect for one’s colleagues.
*** As a side point, I’m probably more qualified than him. Never forget people may have done other things before they started doing their current job.

Honda have apparently, somewhere, released the statistic that the production of a new car produces 840kg of CO₂, a figure which roundly stamps upon the accepted wisdom that Greenpeace used to comment favourably upon which was that if you must drive a car, drive your car into the ground; because buying a new one uses much more energy than replacing it with a new one.

So really, to be as green as they can be, according to the propoganda machine run by the motor manufacturers, if I must drive (and I must, for otherwise I can’t actually do my job), I should immediately and forthwith scrap my minor (and the DAF, and surely also the ‘zeds) and replace them with brand-spanking-new ultra-efficient modern cars.

Of course, there is one tiny tiny omitted detail from this figure. That’s the amount of CO₂ the factory produces while putting together the car. Things not included in the calculation:

1) Energy required to obtain raw materials (so that’d be all the energy to mine the ore to produce the aluminium or steel, or to recycle the aluminium or steel from scrap).
2) Energy required to transport that raw material from where it’s made to the plant
3) Energy required to extract the vast amount of petrochemicals to make the plastics (and there’s a bucket-load of plastics) that go into the car

I suspect, although I can’t find the original source for this figure that it probably doesn’t include teeny things like people getting to and from the factory each day; it doesn’t take account of the fact that they over-produce and stock-pile cars, so the actual per-sold-car amount is higher than the per-car amount, and I suspect it takes no account of the energy cost of scrapping and recycling the car at the end of it’s short, short life.

I personally thing it’s a disgusting fraud to make, and a mark of what we’ve come to expect of industry and advertising that they’re allowed to get away with publishing and publisizing such a misleading figure. We need to stop listening to these people and start getting some actual facts out there.

This, incidentally, came about because Europe is apparently trying to define a ‘classic car’, presumably so we can get into classic cars being legislated about. I have little hope for this being a positive thing, since their proposed legislation wording currently differentiates between a classic car (over 30 years old, in original condition and of significant cultural value, or somesuch) and an old car used every day. I suspect that what’s coming is an artificially high tax band for classics that are in use as daily vehicles because they have a ‘high carbon footprint’. Bucket-load-of-crap that is. So I’m keeping my eye out for any info on this, because my oar will need to be stuck in good and early to try and stop such a thing from occuring. Although my plan to flee the area becomes ever more a positive one :)

So, it being the holiday season, or at least the tail end of the holiday season I thought I’d emerge from the hole in which Kathryn and I have been hiding and wish you all a Very Merry (if somewhat late) Xmas. We, for our part, lurked inside the house and I had a fantastic day. Peaceful, relaxing and with the woman I love.

We had a slightly lazy morning (by my standards), and got up at half-8/9ish when hunger and the fact that I’m still like a child at Christmas (bouncy, in my usual bouncy way) got the better of us. Thankfully I didn’t get an agency shift, something my bank account is less overjoyed about than me, which mean that we could munch on home made Chocolate and Pecan pancakes (Americanstyle). Then we did prezzies, and Kathryn’s mom & dad had been very generous which meant that prezzies actually took quite a while.

Kathryn and I then did each other’s prezzies. Kathryn got me the Morris Minor Biography, which I’d spotted only weeks before and lusted after; she ordered it way before though…

But the best gift, is the one she made:

She made me a mini Kate Monster!

She’s so cute! And awesome! (applicable to both Kate Monster and Kathryn).

I want to take her to work and ‘assess’ patients with her. It would both be awesome and hilariously amusing (for me).

Sorry, two awesome’s in one sentence. We relaxed the rest of the day, with a little break to cook a Xmas dinner (Parmesan Chicken, veggies, Yorkshires). We watched White Christmas and the Doctor Who Xmas Special (with scary Cybermen)! It was one of the most beautiful Xmases I remember.

Yesterday, we repeated the Xmas experience with the visit to my Mum’s; getting yummy prezzie from her and her partner, fluffy prezzies from my sister and her husband and sharing our hand-made gifts with them.

And tomorrow, before my nights, we shall have a mini spending spree, since everyone rather handily gave us vouchers for the same store (John Lewis), although we’re planning a little trip to Peter Jones, in Chelsea, as befits our double-barrelled name :)

The only other news over the Xmas period that occurs to me to share is that my laptop is not, well, great. We’ve had days without some of the keys, days when we’ve decided not to start, and the screen’s clearly on it’s way out again :(

I’m watching a few G4 Powerbooks on ebay, and may pick up one of them to replace the aged Dell… Oh, and ‘beccamogs shaken one of the exhaust clamps loose, so I need to do that up tomorrow, or Tuesday. :)

So, for the last 5 years the venerable Philips Hugeatron Widescreen has been providing entertainment; coming from freecycle with an alledged ‘dead tube’ and being fixed with a 21p capacitor it has provided good service. It is getting on for 15 years old now, the set having been about 10 when I got it.

Today, however, it showed signs that all isn’t well within it’s HT circuitry. The picture did that which my mum’s set used to do. Varying brightness and lines across the screen.

At 15 years of service and knowing that the there are only 1 or 2 boards inside that case and therefore replacement isn’t going to be cheap – if they’re even still available – I am vaguely concerned about the future of the TV set. Most TV shops looked in horror at my old set because it had discrete components, as opposed to whole entire whop-out-and-replace-boards. I fear that my 15 year old Philips set may get the same ‘you want that fixed?!’ treatment.

…I can’t recall seeing a TV repair shop in Slough…come to think of it….do they even exist?*

If it dies, however, then it either needs fixing or replacing because…

Well, I don’t actually watch that much TV*** so you might think not, but a more accurate statement is that I don’t sit and gaze at it in it’s mind-numbing glory – instead being selective and watching only the shows I actually like (House, BSG, Big Bang Theory, Dr Who), but I do like to watch those shows. And films. I like films. And thus there is a requirement for a decent TV set. I don’t actually care for a TV Tuner, between iPlayer and the internet one can find virtually all the shows one might want to watch, but the screen bit, that’s kinda important. I’ve been quite happy living in my low-def glory, 625 lines has been quite sufficient. But they’ve been 625 lines of 15 year old top-of-the-range widescreen-flatscreen-CRT-glory. It has great colour, it has a really nice smart-widescreen-mode which is so lovely that Lauren wanted it; and it’s not too clever for it’s own good (i.e. it doesn’t switch itself off just to wind you up).

But I must consider the possibility that it’s passing is nigh, and plans must be made for it’s repair or replacement. The annoying thing is I’d got myself all ready, conceptually, for replacing the shonky Technics amplifier which lurketh underneath the TV. It has started producing audio with the left channel much quieter than the right. No Dolby Digital 5.1 shinyness for me, oh no. I was thinking about a nice, understated Cambridge Audio A1. Simple, to the point, and moderately cheap.

The most annoying thing is, stepping up from Lauren’s god-awful Beco? Bush? 22″ goldfishbowl TV (which was equal to my 1970 Ferguson Colourstar but without the high-pitched-whistle that she could hear) to the Philips 32″ Widescreen was, to put it bluntly, lovely. Going back (when I moved in here) to using the Digital 19″ CRT as my TV for a while was painful, and so the idea of going down in screen size is a bit of a difficulty for me. But I look at the prices of TVs and think ‘do I really, really need 32 inches’?

Bah. Still, if it is going to expire and allow out it’s magic smoke then I guess just before the New Year sales is a pretty good time for it to do so. Tell you something though, you know life’s not that bad when the worst thing**** in itis the near death experience of a telly.

As a non-related-tangential-sidepoint (involke tangent:repair places:non-tv:lack-of-money:lack-of-time=car) I dropped off the gearbox to be reconditioned yesterday. The owner of the workshop where I dropped it off, currently battling failure of heating, is a little (i.e. he is little) Indian/Sri Lankan chap of an age where he possibly was, many years ago, an immigrant to the country, and is, quite frankly, awesome. It’s that kind of shop where you drop off something the age of the minor’s gearbox and you know this guy is going to take care of it appropriately. Shelves stocked with piles of bits-of-engine. The guy was wearing a proper (green) overall/coverall/labcoat thing (who’s name I can’t think of at the moment; like the chap in Open all hours, but in green), closed with *string*.

There were parts manuals around that almost certainly date from the time of the minor. It was fantastic. I am hoping that once the Diff arrives and goes off to him, and the gearbox is done, he’ll allow me to take some photos of him working, because it’s an awesome environment, and while I suck at portraiture, I’d love to shoot some shots in his workshop (of him, and the space).

As if to prove my point, they don’t take cards and the invoices appear to be prepared on a manual typewriter.

* Apparently there are quite a few**, but most of them seem to start LCD repair; it may be worth checking it out, but I suspect that we’re into the area of spending lots to get very little.
** One of which goes by the intriguing name of Audiorama Vintage Radio.
*** I say that a lot, I’m not sure who I’m trying to convince
**** Apart, obviously, from the near terminal lack of money and time.