Mostly lemon based

Category: General

  • Discovery of the day

    I’m much less good at grouting than I remember. After an experimental hour in which I challenged the concepts of standard grouting I can now safely say I suck at grouting. I hope Kathryn doesn’t mind doing the rest, and fixing up the hash I made in the shower; I’ve cleaned it up but I just couldn’t get it right. So I think I’ll do prepping for grouting ahead of her, and she can grout, if that seems reasonable to her.

    I’m gonna start stripping the radiator (more) after I’ve had my tea though. In other news the tiles are all attached to the walls. Apart from the area I’ve left (because if I need to get to any of the pipes I thought it’d be easier if there weren’t great chunks of tile to have to remove first.There’s no ‘user servicable’ bits behind the boxing, apart from the two valves that came as part of the flexi-hoses for the sink (which you can’t get them without, at least, they didn’t have any without) and since there’ll be hot/cold valves for the entire upstairs, downstairs, then I’m not worried about hiding it all behind tiling.

    But until I know it’s all sealed okay I’d like to have some access available.

    Hopefully, if we can get the ‘areas’ done today, I can put the shower in today. Maybe tomorrow’ll be bath day :)

    Ra.

  • Another day another visitor…

    It appears that we have visitors in our house. Well, at least one visitor who I have to say is not welcome. We’ve gained a small brown furry thing of the mouse variety who (unfortunately for him or her) crossed the kitchen last night while I could still see (him or her). Small and brown and moving swiftly. So this evening we shall be off out to purchase some humane traps, and our unwelcome’d guest will be taken on a free tour out to the local countryside.

    I spent some of last night sticking flour/sugar/etc into boxes, and have some concerns about the rice (which is open, and I didn’t think to seal). I have an idea where they’re coming from though – it came from the larder and sprinted all fuzzy like towards the fridge (bloody food orientated creatures), but on thinking about it I recalled a hole, a hole located behind the washing machine. When they took out the wall the floor there was a bit lower than the floor in the rest of the room, and there’s a small gap where what was once the hearth has crumbled. I’m not afraid of mice, but I don’t like them in the house for a variety of reasons, one of which is their tendancy to get in all your food (and make you have to throw it away), another is their tendancy to urinate and defacate everywhere. So, catching the buggers is high up on the priorities list; and sealing that hole (and checking the larder, which is more of a dog than you might believe, since the new boiler’s being stored in there and it’s not light) is also very high up.

    The problem is, with the building work there’s boxes and things stacked everywhere, which makes life a little more difficult.

    Anyhow, progress: yesterday I finished painting the ceiling above the shower, not a huge thing I realise, but it meant that the missing light could go into it’s snuggly little hole, which means that the room is now much warmer again. The tiles are done bar 8, which I’ll have to cut and do today, and maybe a nasty little shimmy-tile because of a wall that’s not straight.

    So then it’s on with the grouting and the painting. I may clear the area in front of the radiator-space so I can paint that today. Then it’ll be top-coat-able by tomorrow. Yes. So. That’s basically the plan for the day.

    In other news, this talk by Larry Lessig is very good / interesting… And Brick still lurketh at the garage.

  • Again with the cold, aren’t we done now?

    So, yes. Another day of tiling ahead, and then some grouting – and stripping the old radiator down. There’s four more days in this week and in those four days I’m hoping to achieve:

    – Tiling and grouting complete around sink, bath, shower, toilet and radiator’s locale.
    – Woodwork (behind radiator) painted.
    – Radiator stripped and repainted.
    – Radiator pipework completed and radiator connected.
    – Temporary kitchen surfaces up in the…kitchen.
    – Pipework run under the floor in the kitchen to connect up lounge radiator, with take off fitted but switched off for kitchen radiator.

    With that little lot completed we can call in the gas engineer and get the new boiler fitted; which would mean actually having heating. A blessing of unimaginable proportions. I’m lucky in so far as I don’t have to get up *every* morning at 5ish, which Kathryn does. At least some days I can wait until the weak sunlight has started to filter down; and also I can just sit and wait for the heater to warm up the bathroom (speaking of which…) and for hot water that is truly hot.

    So having heating that can take the house up to a reasonable temperature would be really rather nice.

    At the moment, the fire in the lounge isn’t really able to make the lounge warm by itself, probably ‘cos that back door doesn’t shut, which is another job that should be (and is) on my list.

    So that’s my day planned out, when the shower’s warm I’ll be heading in there. But there’s a trifling issue which is occupying my mind – that of my laptop. A while back firefox became such a pain to use (pausing every page load or scroll or on change of focus for up to 10 seconds) that I switched (albeit temporarily in my head) to IE. IE is awful, it’s stayed awful, and I still think it sucks. However, it does to a greater or lesser extent, work on here. However, now in the list of oddities has arrisen another; the laptop’s started to crash. With fair but not incredible frequency it’ll just lock up completely. Not ctrl-alt-del-able, not power-button-hold-for-offable but solid dead crash. Out with the battery and power cable crashes.

    Following this last one we had failed services on startup and Control Panel wouldn’t open… It seems to have ‘settled down again’, but I suspect it’s coming time for a mighty reinstall. I want to try Linux again on here, since I can’t have OS X; which means getting the linux install disk onto a machine with a burner. Since the PC in the lounge is *also* waiting for a reinstall (house has priority!), then that’ll be the Mac (which is currently somewhat of a blank slate, since I got the install to work but it’s not yet got any actual software on there, really. I’ve got Toast, just not installed). So I’m thinking I best get sorting things, and get all the data off here pretty soon otherwise things are likely to suck, in all reality.

    Still, that’s where we’re at. Cold, mostly….

  • Morning update (‘cos you need more than one in a day)

    So, plan for the morning was:

    Ring BeThere and order the new ADSL
    Collect car, collect packages, buy more adhesive, paint stripper, stanley blades.
    Drop off car

    And y’know what, it’s all been done (well, sorta. I rang BT to get my MAC Code, which they can’t actually produce at the moment; I await a call back with the same expectation as I have that the world will freeze over tomorrow). I tested the adhesive I’d got on the wood, and no, it still won’t bloody stick; so I’ve got a different brand of adhesive which, according to the man in the tile shop will adhere tiles to wood. I collected Kathryn’s prezzie and my MP3 player (but the batteries are flat and it’s not quite clever enough to charge from the USB cable, which is slightly distressing). I then dropped off the car, and walked back pausing only to pick up more Nitromors (mmm, volatile organic compounds) and stanley blades (I’ll actually use up the old ones stripping paint now I’ve got some replacements!). I’ve found who I think will be our VoIP provider – mostly because they offer in their basic price plan free and unlimited UK and International calls (to certain countries). Given that we’ve a penchant for calling Kathryn’s family in the US then that’s quite handy.I just have to get everyone I know to keep national geographic numbers. Or join the same company for VoIP ;)

    And in other news… I’m intrigued by this. If only I could find a trailer for it… It’s still fracking cold here, incidentally. My feet are wondering how it’s got to be so cold…

    Annnyhow. Off I go, it’s tiling time now I’m fed and watered.

     

     

     

  • Brrr.

    It’s chilly and foggy here today, much with the chilly and much with the foggy. Theoretically I get to collect Brick from the motor engineer today; sadly the oil leak persists; it’s not a failed seal of any sort. The sump (which for those not in the know is the reservoir for oil) has a crack in it, apparently. How it gained this crack I don’t know, although I have a sneaking suspicion that it had a crack before I bought it that had been sealed using glue, or pixie dust, because it started leaking pretty badly as soon as it was home. Unfortunately despite people fairly frequently chucking entire engines, without getting a whole and entire engine (which seems ‘excessive’ to me) I can’t easily lay my hands on a sump. People’ve suggested waiting ’til I go to sort out the welding and then have the engine out / sump off / clean / weld / replace. But there’s a fair amount of welding, and it’s leaking oil at a frantic rate of knots, which makes me unhappy.

    Another thing which makes me a little unhappy is this. See, I want to run all my vehicles on E85. I can’t afford an (adequate) EV conversion, I can’t do biodiesel, and I can’t not commute to work. Even working in the hospital in the town where I live is far enough that I’d have to commute by car; so I’d be stuffed anyhow. So Morrisons starting to sell E85 is great, except that the nearest station is so far from me that I’d use half a tank getting there and back, and given that I’d have to adjust the timing and possibly the mixture once I’d filled up with E-85 I’d be a bit stuffed. Come on guys (specifically, Esso, Jet, Tesco and Murco ‘cos they’re the ones I actually go near every week), let’s have E85 at all the stations, then I can have a selection of much cleaner vehicles. Infact, they’d be heading for carbon neutral, which would rock. Well, theoretically at least. When E85 production methods improve there’s a good chance for carbon neutrality.

    Anyhow, so I had a really fantastic weekend. Which is odd, because I spent the second half of it (i.e. most of Sunday) tiling. I’m 3/4ths done in the shower cubicle though, I’d be tiling now before heading off to collect brick were it not, well, too early for diamond-saw noises. I misjudged the remaining number of tiles though. I thought I was down to about 200, but I’d neglected the ones that went in the spare room to use as a table when we had lauril staying (ah, the magic of a throw). At any rate, I don’t know if the tiles are adhereing to the wood yet (or if they need *another* coat of paint) – if they are then I can commence that final section of tiling and the plan that we should be done and dusted by the end of the week could actually be true. I am not looking forward to grouting though. Kathryn’s done a wall and a half, and between us we should get the rest done without too much pain. But it’s still the most tedious thing in the world.

    So, what else did I get up to this weekend; well, mostly I just spent time with Kathryn – which is a pleasure unsurpassed in my book. We went for a little wander down to what we thought was an abandoned abbey, but turned out to be an active abbey, and met a nun in purple. Apparently they’re an Augustinian community; at any rate, the nun in question seemed nice :)

    On the way back we stopped to disassemble a skip full of parts of an alarm. A shop’d been stripped out and there was a large amount of depressingly useful wood there, all of it being dumped, and also a significant quantity of electronics. It’s always rather sad, I feel, when people strip out shops throwing away stuff that’s potentially useful. We came away with two small plastic FixSystem bins (of which there are some more at my mum’s house, somewhere (little plastic bins you put on the wall to store things in)), and some small piece of the alarm system. Then we headed home stopping at the local supermarket for provisions, ‘cos Brick not being here, and us living where we do means that shopping on foot would be an activity unsupassed in it’s tediousness.

    Sunday was tiling day, although come the evening I took Kathryn’s advice and actually had a break. I’d been tiling pretty much solidly from 1130 to 1700, which to be fair got 100 tiles on the wall, but did take it’s toll on me. So, today I collect Kathryn’s Xmas Prezzie which handily has arrived same time as my new nipod. This time I actually got a branded one though, the nipod’s awful interface, and the fact that they don’t show any shots of the interfaces on the adverts put me off getting another – although it was very small and cute.

    And it did play video.

    This one however is just a music player, and possibly not quite so robust being hard disk based (like the ipod) but hey, we’ll see. Anyhow, shower, phone BeThere and then head off to collect the car, if it’s ready (it bloody ought to be since they opted not to take the engine out and just to switch it to unleaded; I can do a head swap on an A+ in a few hours…. and I’m paying them for a few hours work). Anyhow, enough whining.

    Hi ho, Hi ho, it’s off to tile I go…

     

     

  • Meh

    So, Brick’s at the engine place, who’ve now said that they won’t do the crankshaft oil seal (I suspect that they wanted lots more money to do that), so if Brick’s leaking from there then I’m stuck. He thought that the seal was replaceable from the back, but apparently he’s remembered now that you have to take the crankshaft off to do that seal (which I knew, which is why I was impressed with the quote!); and he doesn’t fancy that. I debated asking him how much he’d want, but I don’t really want to spend that sort of money on the engine unless it’s going for a full recondition.

    And I’m not going to do that…

    So I walked back, healthy soul that I am; stopping briefly at B&Q. The oil leak related puddle outside the house has been attacked with driveway cleaner, and I’m now waiting to see how improved it is (not very, I suspect). There’s still a lot more driveway cleaner left, so I suspect I’ll be having a go at the oil every few days for a while. It was somewhat like skating though, the road’s really slippery outside. So that brings up my total of ‘things I’ve cleaned this week’ to the bathroom, the road, the inside of the car (a little). It’s not exactly house-work, but hey.

    I also had a look at that tyre and now have formed a hypothesis about what happened: got a nail (or somesuch) in the tyre; this gave me a slow puncture. Hence the tyre was a bit but not completely flat when I left work. Hence the slightly squiffy but not awful handling. Having got to the motorway, the increased speed / heat / pressure managed to force whatever it was back out (providing the bang of something hitting the underside of the car) and the tyre rapidly deflated.

    Which all adds up to me needing a new tyre.

    Pooh.

    Anyway, I must now finish my tea and then set to on the tiling.

  • Bugger

    So, last night I stayed late. A patient arrived at ‘just the wrong moment’ (as they are wont to do, not that I minded, he was soooo cute (a baby, incidentally, before you think I’ve gone odd)); so I ended up leaving about 20 minutes late. When I got to Brick I was knackered, dead on my feet as it were, so when the car handled a little oddly I presumed I’d just run through my patch of oil from the leaking engine. It settled down fine and I was happily trundling down the motorway when suddenly I heard a *BANG*, presuming I’d hit a bit of debris I scanned the road hard checking for more…

    …and then things went a bit weavey. Not terribly so, but not right… unfortuntely I was next to a set of roadworks with concrete barriers…

    …having made it past them with the car definately handlying a little strangely, I pulled over and hopped out. The rear nearside tyre was flat, completely dead flat. I don’t know if it came off the rim, or has a puncture… but it wasn’t right. It was also dark, and cold, and I’ve no torch in Brick. So I stood there with my Neuro obs torch trying to get my pint-pump jack under the car. It does fine on Rebecca, but on Brick there’s no where to put it. Eventually, cursing, I got back in Brick (still idling) and called the RAC. Thankfully, being as I was woman-alone parked on unlit-motorway next to woodland, they did the ‘urgent assist’ and I got help within 30 minutes.

    Less fortunately I stopped the engine just before he arrived and Brick let-go his coolant again. He arrived to find the car suffused in a gentle glow from self-produced mist. I felt a right twit having to have my tyre changed for me; but I had a nice chat with the guy who seemed deeply concerned about brick’s coolant leak. The tyre on the car is a rather dubious one, it’s got enough tread but it’s more than 10 years old. In fact, I suspect it dates from when the car was last in regular use.

    So on the way to the engine place, I shall be stopping to get two new tyres.

    Bah.

    Still, it could have been a lot nastier….

  • With thanks to Royal Mail

    So, in the past few months the Royal Mail appear to have consumed around 30 quid of my stuff. A CD I’ve been waiting months for, and a tee-shirt I’ve been waiting rather less long for remain MIA. This high quality service is something I’ve come to expect, but it does make me start to worry about sending anything by mail. This whine came to you courtesy of me deciding to listen to the MP3s for the CD that I’ve not got. It sounds awesome, even on my crappy laptop speakers (one of which sometimes gets bored).

    I thought I might post something about work; basically as time filler because it’s so fracking cold here this morning (I feel very sorry for my poor beloved who was up at 5 freezing her arse off); and I’m waiting hopefully for the bathroom to heat up. ‘cos I’m going to work ‘early’ I’m thinking I can’t be bothered to tile; but I may change my mind when I’ve had my shower… Yesterday I made it as far as the faux wall which makes up one end of the shower cubicle. I’ve got another few tiles to go on the real wall (I only did about half height); and then I should be able to, well, tile the shower. I also did a ‘test’ tile on the painted wood, so we’ll see how that’s stuck. If that’s okay I can tile that; which can then be grouted, and the bath can go up against the wall and be finally locked into position. I can see the bathroom being finished in a few days. It’s going to be tedious and seriously hard work, but it’s possible.

    So, work. I said before I’m settling in; which is definately true. Most people are fairly used to the fact that I talk to myself a not insignificant amount. It’s more that I think aloud almost continuously if I’m not “thinking” about being quiet. I would ascribe this to working from home, and my childhood spent mostly on my own. I got used to my voice being the main one that I’d hear; and without hearing it I’d not hear anything. I’m unlikely to stop talking to myself, even though one of the returning-to-work people I’ve met finds it a little, well, odd. Some people seem to be getting my sense of humour more, and I’m more and more comfortable joking with people.

    But with nearly 100 people working with, there are still days I’m with people who have barely worked with me before, and those days can be a little more tiring.

    Despite that number of people working there; there are few days where we’re not short staffed, and those days are just way more tiring. Even yesterday when we were theoretically fully staffed in Majors, because of confusion when we started we never got on top of the influx. That and there were almost always one or two people queueing. I did have two good moments though; there was getting a new doctor I’d not met to see a patient who I was concerned about; there’s an art to getting doctors to see people and I think it’s the fact that I’m now much less fazed by sick people that does it. I just say things like ‘well, she’s a little blue around the edges’… and they get the impression that I know what I’m talking about :)

    Which is quite nice, previously it’s been a bit of a struggle. That and I got blood (not, sadly, enough, because she yanked her hand away) from a woman with the worlds tiniest wobblyest veins. I more and more have a go at the hard people, because if I don’t do the hard ones, then I’ll never be any good at them. And I succeeded, at least more or less. I didn’t get the Biochem (which she really did need) – but it took a Dr 4 attempts to get the biochem.

    Basically, that’s my update. Incredibly I’m not that tired today; but I don’t have a great deal of enthusiasm for the whole sitting in the cold bath and showering with the feeblespray.

    I’m also suffering temptation to replace my stolen MP3 player. I’ve got a little bored of my CD collection in the car, and I miss having the nice smallness that was my nipod. Meh.

  • What to say?

    Well, I felt like I should do an update; in fact, I’ve been positively intending to do an update for several days now. The only problem is I don’t really know what to say…

    I’ve been working, for the most part. Work continues to produce a strange bounty consisting of a mixture of really sick people who desperately need to be there, and after a day of work you come home and though you may be exhausted beyond words and tired beyond anything you can imagine, you know (vaguely and somewhere in your heart) that you helped people. And some days you just get endless dross; “I’ve stubbed my toe and it hurts”, and “i’ve had this niggley ache for 5 months and I saw the A&E sign and I thought, you know what, I should get that checked”.

    I’ve actually been tempted to film a snarky ‘Do you really need to visit’ advert, in the vein of the old war time ‘do you need to travel’ posters. Of course, for every tale there is something which you need to watch out for. We had someone in who’d had moderate (not severe) chest pain for some time – and it appears they really were ill (to be fair, I assumed she actually was, she seemed sensible).

    Today was not really a latter or a former day, but it wasn’t a very impressively doing things day. I kinda limped through my day at work, not achieving a great deal, indeed, disturbingly when I left the situation was much as it was when I arrived. Still, I tried my best.

    Things in the house continue to be continuing. The bathroom now looks like a bathroom. White tiles adorn most of the walls, I can’t remember where I was at when I last posted; nor can I be bothered to check, but now there’s basically about a metre, and the entire of the shower stall to do. And that’s it. I’ll be done with tiling, until we do the kitchen. Of course; we’ll be tiling a lot less of the kitchen!

    Kathryn’s drawn up some neat sketches for the back bedroom come office, which is cool. I must admit though, the two weeks off (approaching) are going to be much appreciated by me. I’m needing a break from work; my sympathy levels need restocking, and my patience is all but exhausted. But they’ll also be much appreciated for another reason. Hopefully (and I know I’ve said this many times), but really; hopefully we can get the central heating in. And the bathroom finished to the extent of actually having a proper shower. I ache so much and so often, and the idea of being able to come home and have a hot bath or a hot shower without having to wait hours, and without having to crouch. Lord it seems like such a luxury. I guess it *is* such a luxury.

    Also, to have a reduced cost of heating would be really rather nice. Anyhow, there are pictures of the current state of play in the bathroom. They are, in fact, here. Complete with snarky comments and tags, as usual.

    So, anyway, I promised a picture of us, and that is here:

    I note that flickr have been Yahoo!’d , I’m not entirely happy about that; indeed, I’m debating whether to renew my pro account. For I love Flickr, but Yahoo just drive me fracking nuts. Every experience I’ve ever had with their techincal support has lead me to want to rip the cables out from all Yahoo’s connections to the internet and ban them from ever touching a computer of ever sort ever again. Yahoo messenger is awful, Yahoo groups ruined a great e-groups system and Yahoo’s search has remained awful since the very first day that they set it up. Oh, and they associated themselves with BT; and BT to me is the kiss of the dead. Inviting BT into your home is like having a Zombie come to stay. Sure, it’s a talking point, but the shambolic mess is going to piss you off eventually.

    Anyhow, enough ranting. (Hah)

    So I’m relaxing and spending my evening attempting to increase the ratio of working to not working computers. Currently it stands at 0:4 (None fully functional, 4 working to some extent). The Mac is going back to 10.4.6, which worked. 10.4.10 and 10.4.9 are determined that the network card doesn’t work. A frustrating problem. Of course, all this will likely be immaterial when the real-mac arrives, and this machine is relegated to being a video editor.

    Technically it’s only firefox that doesn’t work on the laptop; but I daren’t fiddle, ‘cos the laptop’s the only machine that’s ‘working’ to any extent. Although the crack in the case continues to widen. And I can’t say I’ve got any great ideas for fixing it. But so long it works, fiddling with it is kinda out of the window.

    At least the Mac is now network capable… :) Ra.

  • Anyone used Be?

    Was considering Be Broadband – anyone got any experiences?