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  • It turns out it really is a rollercoaster ride.

    So, I had a friend a while back who was going through IVF treatment. She’d had trouble having kids, and I understand now from a distance of many miles and little contact that eventually it was successful. It always seemed like an incredibly fraught process, one with infinite possibilities to make one suffer and a required the provision of a cornucopia of hugs from friends and colleagues.

    But as we start out down this pathway to child-having, I am in awe of how quickly we have entered the phase of emotions swinging from wildly positive to wildly negative.

    We went, tonight, to an open evening at a Fertility Clinic. Whyfor? We’ve already been to another clinic, indeed have handed over piles of cash to them. Well, when we first turned up we were already set on the most basic course of treatment we can get in the UK, and we were upsold, as it were, to a low-drug-dose form of IVI. On Monday we’d girded our loins, and prepared ourselves for the ‘big moment’ (phone) appointment, with a phone call to say “Yes, that’s what we’d like to do”. My card was prepped for payment, just in case, and we were all set for action.

    And before it started it went downhill. Yet again, they were late ringing us, and failed to tell us that they’d be late. The person we spoke to when we rang them didn’t apologise. Bear in mind that last time they forgot to ring us at all, and failed to apologise at all for not ringing us. This time, however, they said ‘Oh, she’s been on another call, and is just about to ring you’. 15 minutes later they rang us back. Well, okay… but our notes are not so long and complicated as to take 15 minutes to read. So, not an ideal note to start on. I mean, it’s stressful, right? This whole experience is actually stressful. ‘Just about to ring’ and ’15 minutes’ are not the same thing. Especially not when I’ve woken up early from sleeping for a night shift to be awake for this call, and now, with us being about 35 minutes behind where we should have been I’m going to spend the entire call clock-watching because I need to shower/eat/dress/go. Definitely not ideal.

    Then the doctor informs us that the previous doctor shouldn’t have suggested low-dose IVF treatment, because she doesn’t think it’s what they would recommend. Well, actually, they artfully avoid specifically stating we should be doing full IVF, going on about ‘slightly higher dose’ until finally Kathryn manages to get them to understand the question ‘is that full dose IVF?’ And not get back the answer ‘Well, they’re both IVF’. We gathered that, thanks. The hint’s in the name. And it turns out that yes, it’s not some odd-mid-way point they don’t mention in their literature. ‘Slightly higher dose’ means ‘pay the full whack for full-dose’.

    However, we have done all our sums, based all of our calculations, prepared everything for this sum of money that you recommended. Now you’re saying it’ll be £2k extra, thanks, and you’re probably still going to suck in terms of your ‘bedside manner’.

    Riiight.

    Of course, when we start using phrases like “can’t” and “won’t be able to” the doctor backpedals and suggests that they could do low dose IVF… at which point we start to feel a bit like ‘are you just trying to extract every last god-damn penny from us’.

    And suddenly we’re cast adrift. We don’t have £2k extra kicking around spare. I’ve checked in the piano stool, there were some french francs and a ball of fluff. That do? No? Well, maybe you should have said this earlier then.

    Of course, having had an insanely stressful phonecall I then have to head off to work, leaving poor Kathryn at home with this bombshell, and me at work feeling lousy as I gradually come down with a cold.

    Which brings us to today, when we tried another clinic, who based on what we said suggested that Egg Donation might well still be a possibility*, and who’s staff seemed far more genuinely concerned about us, and more that the money was a frustrating inconvenience.

    Of course, it is the NHS clinic, which reminds me why the NHS is ace. And of course, we still have to pay, although the clinic team seemed fairly sympathetic to the unfairness of NHS rules which say you have to have had 10 cycles of IUI through a clinic before they’ll give you NHS-free-IVF (unless you have some documented health problem that will prevent conception). Of course, you might well not know about a documentable health problem until you’d tried to get pregnant…

    …which brings us back to the endless cycle of self justification.

    My general opinion on IVF is that either no-one should get it free, or everyone should. If that means everyone only gets 2 cycles instead of 3, or one and then graduated payments kick in, then so be it. But the current guidelines are unfair because getting sperm in the UK is hideously difficult, and making the process for lesbians cost in the region of £10k, when a hetrosexual couple could rock up and say ‘oh, we’ve been trying for 10 months and it hasn’t worked’ when they’d only had a few months of trying and get accepted is, well, unfair. Anyhow. Enough late-night grr. I’m having a little bout of insomnia courtesy of my cold, and was hoping this might make me feel more tired. It’s now 1am, and I still feel awake. *le-sigh*.

    Not entirely sure what to do about that. P’raps go and lie in bed some more.

    * And were having a handily placed lesbian open evening.

  • Serving out your time

    So, our media server is, hopefully, back from the brink of extinction. It was pretty close to being replaced with a pile of removable hard drives, a Pi and a USB hub. However, given the application of various sticks, the help of John and Nikki and these blog posts:

    Ubuntu login takes you back to login screen
    Broken .gvfs file

    I’m hoping that I can log in as myself again. It seems a succession of foolish actions lead me to a path of minor disaster where my own user login was broken, although now we’ve got VNC up and running and I’ve managed to persuade it to let me boot headless we’re on the path to joy.

    The guy in the shop managed to annoy me, because whilst I’m sure he’s very pleased that his fans are ‘ultra quiet’ my gentle explanation that I didn’t really need them to be as the server lives in a cupboard met a long explanation from him about how everyone else cares.

    I’m supporting your shop already. I’m paying over the odds for parts to support a local business and not buying the bits on ebay. P’raps now is not the moment to make me debate whether I should say sod it and go and spend 2 quid on it on ebay for a cheaper, noiser fan, than 6 quid from you. *feh*.

    Still, it’s handy having a PC shop around, for those ‘oh hell’ moments.

    Although I’m increasingly realising that the server is getting a little long in the tooth. But does that warrant replacing it? Not at the moment, since it’s just had nearly 20 quids worth of low-noise fans in it. But when we go to the States, I think it’ll be time.

    Oh, on ‘The States’, we’ve now got a new possibility. Astoria, OR. It looks like our kind of town, it says it’s queer friendly, so that’s all good. It’ll be a while yet, but we’ve been watching houses go past, and looking at some of the sites as a ‘we could buy that outright’ (we’ll have to build our own house on it, but hey). Anyhow. It’s a possibility.

    In other news, I’ve splashed out a few quid on some crappy clip-on lenses for the iPhone, just to see how they pan out. This is because I want to do some filming for The Electric Minor Project, and thought I might want to do something with alternate camera angles. The quality will undoubtably be poor, but if I want to take really good quality video I’ve got my Micro 4/3s camera. I looked at the nicer ones, but they mostly seem to be phone specific, and since I’m hoping to trade the iPhone for something less… appley… well.

    Anyhow, not much else has happened, it’s that quiet postchristmas getting back in to the year kind of time.

    I did, however, walk 10.25 miles yesterday, just on a whim. None of it was particularly pleasant or exciting, but it was interesting and I saw bits of Bristol I don’t know that well, which is always interesting :)

  • Concept, briefly stated

    Scene: London street, small deal table with well dressed chap performing the shell game (three card monte with cups) but the patter is based around ‘finding/watching the benefits scrounger’ represented by a small statuette under the cup.

    Entranced crowd watching and betting (and losing).

    The camera pulls back and slowly reveals, sliding in and through the crowd a variety of well dressed bankers, politicians, business men are picking the pockets of everyone there.

    ….

    End.

    Creative Commons License
    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

  • Oh hai, it’s January

    So, it is traditional this time of year to look back on the past year and think ‘what did I achieve’ and discern whether it was ‘a good year’ or not. My vague notions about last year is that I didn’t really make much progress on the house, and that it was a quiet but not unpleasant year, for the most part. However, as with my friend’s recollections, thousands of miles away my general opinion wasn’t exactly the whole story.

    It started well enough, with the discovery of Rise, the music store in Bristol, where I make infrequent pilgrimages and fawn hopelessly over the ranks and ranks of records. The fresh stacks of vinyl make me want to spend all the money. Every time I head in there I find my bank account substantially lighter on leaving, and frequently seem to pass from not knowing of a thing’s existence, to utter total desire without pause. It’s both terrible and wonderful simultaneously.

    Not only that but I took my aged BBC Master around to my friend John’s, and he applied his L337 soldering skills and replaced the dodgy capacitors before they could expire. It functioned exactly as it should, lending hope to the possibility that I can inflict it on our child, when s/he is old enough to want a computer. Heh. Actually, I think our child will get something akin to the Pi. When I got my computer the deal was “here are some basic games, if you want more you’ll have to write ’em” which I think is a fair way to do things :)

    Anyhow, so it was an auspicious start. Flicking through blog entries made me finally take stock of what I’d achieved on the house over the year, and perhaps I’d been unduly harsh on myself. Perhaps, when you look at it, I’ve actually achieved a fair amount. In the last year I:

    – Finished decorating the bathroom (which was essentially decorating the bathroom and plumbing in the new shower)
    – Painted the downstairs half of the hallway
    – Built and installed the understairs storage
    – Insulated under the house
    – Designed and made the kitchen lighting
    – Built the top surface of the deck, including sinking 4 posts in to the ground
    – Completely decorated Kathryn’s office

    Amongst that there were a number of smaller jobs like installing the telephone, adding a radiator to the central heating, adding in bits of trim, repairing other bits and bobs that broke throughout the house.

    Y’know, given that I’m working full time and had various other projects ongoing last year, I don’t think that’s a bad list.

    As I say I had a number of other projects ongoing, my beloved Minor’s disintegrated differential was finally replaced after months sat at the front of the house being sad. I’m still working on the Electric Minor Project, and have a potential sponsor to contact, which has led me to fawn hopelessly over Adobe In-Design. My background with Ovation Pro (which, assuming it still works in modern versions of Windows I highly recommend to anyone needing a cheaper DTP package for Windows) came in handy because it had many of the features of In-Design and works in fundamentally the same way. Playing with layout and design is quite delightful, and one of the few things in IT that I think I could get quite into if my career in nursing ever went south.

    Anyhow, so the Minor is [touch wood] back on the road.

    However, it wasn’t all sunshine and bunnies. Last year witnessed the death of our plan to move to Canada. Nova Scotia telling me in the politest way possible that I would need to spend thousands of Canadian Dollars if we wanted to land up there. The difference between UK and Canadian nursing registration was simply too great. However, the good news is that we plan to move to the States, which will put us closer to Kathryn’s family and some of the awesome people (Kathryn’s friends that I’ve met too) over in the USA. We’re maybe looking at San Francisco, although it’ll be a while.

    We also found out that we can’t have the free solar panels installed. A fact which makes me very sad, because in all honesty, if the UK was like Germany our roof would be well within the benefit side of the cost-benefit analysis; solar panels in the UK being way more expensive than in Germany. This is because UK has decided that we’d like to pollute the planet and our local environment as rapidly and depressingly as possible, by fracking every last bit of this once green and pleasant land. Indeed, politically this has been one of the most heartrendingly awful periods I can recall. The Conservatives and their political lackeys, the Lib Dems, for whom, shamefully, I voted, have destroyed the few bits of Britain of which I was proud. The’ve pushed our xenophobic streak and also made this country hateful for it’s treatment of the poor, those with disabilities, the sick. They’ve divisively separated every minority group and demonised everyone who’s not rich.

    I recently saw a quote from Aneurin Bevan, the awesome angry Welshman who rounded up the Doctors and Nurses and said ‘Fix the people’.

    “Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune, the cost of which should be shared by the community.”

    Which I think is a perfect way of describing illness. Mr Bevan rocked. Incidentally, he also said of the tories, this, which seems pretty accurate at the moment:

    So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation. Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through. (1945)

    Anyhow, enough depressing, because all in all it was actually a pretty good year.

    So, other projects are the ongoing attempt to re-rip music and video. That’s sort of fallen into stasis, but I really should get that going again. There are still massively large stacks of stuff that need to be re-ripped. All the DVDs/Blu-Rays, and still stacks and stacks of music. Actually, that’s pretty depressing to think about. It was a good starter project but maybe I need one of those lego diskchangers. Unfortunately so many of our disks fail to pull down art, or fail to get listings… which completely screws up the rapid disk ripping.

    Oh, actually, whilst we’re on depressing, I sold my motorbike. I, for the first time in many years, am without motorcycle for the long term. The thing is though, I’ve no excuse to ride them. And not enough money to just ‘have’ a motorbike kicking around. Nor the space. So… Yeah. But I do miss it. It’s like not having a bit of me. One day I’ll have a Zero or somesuch.

    We also, on a more cheery note, sold Chester. We ran all over France, toured the place, and having pushed him really hard travelling down to the base of the Alps and back we sold him and switched to our much loved iMiEV. You gotta love an electric car, they’re just flipping awesome. Not only that, but it’s also managed to get me a little bit of fame writing as a guest writer on the Transport Evolved website. I need to have a ponder about more things to write about because I’ve enjoyed writing them. I also got featured, briefly, on the Kyocera blog. Not my writing, but a brief bit about our aged Kyocera FS-1030D which continues to provide sterling service and provides endless glee when it prints wirelessly.

    And on the writing front, I also did NaNoWriMo. Didn’t finish it, but I’m still working on the book, which is interesting. I’ve never written a novel before, it may be awful, but it’ll be my bit of awful. I need to find some people to look at it, so if anyone wants to read a not very good first-half of a detective novel (be my Beta testers!) then let me know :)

    I also, for the first year ever (I think) managed to push out a full year of Dead Bug Jumping. Something I’m quite proud of, because it’s actually a fair amount of work to produce new episodes.

    Oh, and there were a few other minor achievements. I finished and passed my MSc. And I got a permanent Senior Staff Nurse position… so, job wise, that’s pretty good.

    I think all in all I achieved a fair bit in 2013. Some things didn’t go at all the way I’d hoped. Some things went very well, and y’know, screw my sense of ‘I didn’t work hard enough’. I clearly bloody did. Stupid brain.

    So here’s to 2014. Let’s hope it’s a good one.

  • Overwintering

    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).

    (more…)

  • Impressively coordinated failure

    So, a little while back I noticed that one of the case-fans on the media server was in the process of failing. It was a shonky-ass glowing fan that I’d only connected a couple of years ago, because the server was running quite hot in the summer. I may have had it connected years ago when the machine was new, but I’ve not used it continuously…

    Anyhow, despite its relatively low usage, it’d started making graunchy noises. I wasn’t too worried. It’d fallen in to the ‘replace when it starts getting really noisy’ category because it’s winter, and the machine runs pretty damn cold in there. That room’s only heated to around 15 degrees or so, just to keep the washing machine happy, so I wasn’t too stressed.

    However, I got home today and eventually, having had my (nearly 3 hours) of sleep-deprivation prevention treatment (a nap after my night shift :) ) and sloped downstairs with the intention of, wait for it, painting my nails. Yes. Seriously. I know!?!*.

    Anyhow, I sat down, fresh tea on the table, flicked on the TV and asked the XBMC machine to connect to the media server. Failure ensued.

    I pulled up my laptop and said ‘Oh hey, laptop, what’s up with the server’ and my laptop replied ‘what server is that then?’. And so I sloped out to the server room and was met with the silence of a machine that is most definitely off.

    This is worrying, I thought, and then recalled that the server is set to power-off on all fan-failures. I poked the power button.

    *GRAAAAUNCH* went…several things. The known-sickly case fan appeared to sort-of spin up, then stalled, then started again. But while it was doing that there were other…nasty…failed fan noises.
    *THWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE* went the self-test before I plunked it back to its happy-off-state.

    I pulled the server into the house. A little research revealed that:

    – The case fan is dead
    – The power-supply duct fan is dying (and making some very sad noises)
    – The power-supply’s own fan is dead.

    This is very upsetting, because the power-supply is only just over a year old (September last year it was replaced) – and I didn’t get the very cheapest piece of crap supply. Fortunately, I thought, I’d fixed the power supply that’d failed with shiny new capacitors.

    Throwing that in and whipping out the two sickly case fans, I thought, would produce a server that would at least work until the new fans arrived.

    Only no.

    Because turning it on with the shiny new supply led to the discovery that (I suspect) the somewhat rapid ‘FAN’S DEAD TURNING OFF NOW’ failure has done badness to the boot drive.

    Turning the PC on leads to the ‘I’m going to boot now, oh’ failure. And so I’m waiting for the Ubuntu LiveCD to come down so I can break out the FSCK on the disk and pray that it’s just that that’s died.

    So, my peaceful post nights reverie (watching Lost Girl and drinking nice things) has been destroyed. And. And. And my nail polish needs to come back off :(

    * It’s my Xmas work do tomorrow, I thought I’d stun them with actually painted nails. Although in all honesty, my nail-painting-skills are not what they once were, and I think it’s probably time to buy some new nail polish, because the stuff I just applied has roughly the consistency of porridge. Unfortunately, I can’t be arsed to go down to the chemist and get some more. It’s a shame, because I really like the colour.

  • Stop: Tea break.

    I continue to maintain my feeling of pride.

    My mum’s coming to visit tomorrow; so I’ve spent today tidying and cleaning the office/library/spare-room in which our spare double bed* is located. I’ve emptied, sorted, and prep’d for disposal the contents of our first aid box, which largely consisted of tablets that expired in 2010. I’ve hoovered, recycled, and sorted some books for charity-shop-homes. I’ve finally given in and accepted that I’m unlikely ever to actually read the Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister trilogy, despite having picked it up in hardback years ago. I’ve actually been harsher than I’ve been for a while.

    I sense I could get rid of more books if I really tried. Indeed, I think Long Way Round and Long Way Down will go, while I loved the show, the books weren’t that well written.

    I even gave in and chopped the cable off my alarm clock that I bought aged 15, and put it in to be recycled. It still worked, but the cassette player door’s been broken for years, and frankly, I don’t use it. I’ve not used it for years. I had it plugged in for a few months occupying space on my bedside table, but I never actually used it as an alarm clock, and eventually decided it was just sucking power for no good reason.

    Anyhow, that aside I’ve also moved all the tools back to the garage (±a few odds and sods). I’ve painted the bit of the doorframe to Kathryn’s office that needed painting – so that’s now had two coats and looks pretty respectable. Washed the brush’n all. And removed that final bit of masking tape. There’s a couple of spots up on the ceiling that want touching up, where I managed to get blue over the white (grr).

    Kathryn is pleased with the office, which feels much bigger than it did, ‘n I think it’s looking pretty nice, so yay, generally on that front.

    I also ran the strip of caulking under the shelves in the hall:

    Untitled

    The trim there’s nearly ready to be painted too, so that should come together pretty well. It now matches the rest of the wall (in terms of paint colour) and the whole house is starting to feel more whole. I wasn’t originally planning to caulk under it, but it turned out that there was a fair breeze coming in from under the house (despite being insulated under there); so I decided to throw a strip of caulk down and make it look pretty at the same time.

    I also did something which isn’t on the list (well, it is now, just so I could enjoy crossing it off) – I hung the lamp shade in the entryway. Granted it makes the house look a bit like a brothel (it’s red and yellow, to go with the stained glass) but hey, we barely ever switch it on.

    Untitled

    I do, at some point, need to install an earth on it, because it’s actually a candle-holder that I’ve modified somewhat. I’d actually like it to have three-core cable, with an earth to the metal of the shade, but I’ve not got any appropriate cable kicking around, so for the moment it’ll have to wait.

    Whilst I’ve been dinking at lunch time, I also discovered something I didn’t know existed, and decided I want it. Sadly, I can’t find it for sale anywhere:

    Meh, so that’s my news. Now I’m going to go hide in the kitchen and washup.

    * A fold-out twin-single-mattress double. I’m amazed it works, but it does :)

  • Pride comes after a reasonable degree of success in decorating

    So, it’s not quite finished. As usual, time has got the better of me, and my mother’s coming to visit on Wednesday, which means that Tuesday is to be spent tidying. It also meant that we needed to clear out the library-cum-my-office-cum-spare-bedroom (not ‘beadroom’, as I first wrote. Awesomely over-spec though our house is for our needs, it does not have a specific room entirely devoted to beads).

    This meant that for the past few days every waking moment not at work has been spent toiling in Kathryn’s office. I kind of wanted it to be finished before Christmas, anyway, as a kind of mini-Christmas present. It’s been left ’til last, just by dint of being full of stuff, and me thinking ‘it won’t take long’. And in all honesty, it hasn’t really. I’d’ve liked to have done some stuff to a better standard. The filling of the gap between the floorboards and the skirting is not terribly neat, but it’s ‘okay’. There are bits of wall I’d’ve liked to have spent much longer on. There’s the hole by the window which I’d love to have filled better, but which just kept disintegrating, so ended up being stabilised with ‘smoothover’ and just left, because I’d run out of filler.

    But incredibly, the smoothover did work. It took a lot of sanding, and I was awesomely thankful that I’d bought more sanding sheets for the electric sander which did most of the grunt work. I was also very thankful that I’d bought a massive roll of cheap-ass wide masking tape which I used to tape the plastic sheeting back down multiple times, and which I used to seal around the door. Anyway, after several tedious hours of sanding, it was done. The wall was smooth, or at least, acceptably close to smooth. Good enough that after several coats of paint I reckoned it’d look okay.

    Granted, afterwards, I was a mere ghost of my former self. Mainly because I was entirely covered in filler dust.

    Untitled

    Whilst the room was a state I also took the opportunity to uncover the original panel door. Thankfully, the 1950’s hardboard’s just nailed, not glued, so a few deft slices with the stanley knife, some brute force, and ten minutes with a claw hammer, and the door was nail-free and, err, brown, in this case.

    It also revealed how awesome the original doorhandles were.

    Untitled

    If only someone’d saved them.

    They were probably bakelite. I wish I could lay my hands on a set to fit to the entire house. But I’ve never seen more than the odd random one, and I’d rather like them all to match. They now make a chrome version but at 25 quid a handle I’m inclined to think that’s a bit much (with 6 doors to rehandle).

    Err, I digress.

    So, anyhow, I slathered layer after layer of paint on. Two coats of ‘white’* on the walls, two coats of basecoat on the sections above the picture rail where the artex hides under many layers of evil. Then two coats of lumitec white over that and the ceiling, two coats of the ‘eco’ paint on the walls. And finally, today, three coats of paint on the trim.

    We headed down to see if our local independent department store had shelving timber, but they did not. Which is a shame, because if they had it would have meant that I wouldn’t have had to, essentially, hurl the un-unpacked boxes of stuff back into Kathryn’s office. We’ve also had to put the bookcase back in to her office to hold things that should have been unpacked on to the new shelves that aren’t there yet.

    But I’ve mounted Kathryn’s EmergenTea case on the wall:

    Untitled

    And the room is looking pretty lovely, if I do say so myself:

    Untitled

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    Untitled

    All in all, I’m quite happy with progress on that front. I also finally connected the radiator up, bled it, and lo, the room has heating for the first time ever.

    Beyond the shelves, I still need to paint some of the door frame, attach the sockets to the walls (but the screws seem to have gone walkies), hodge the wires back up into the ceiling and screw the light-fitting to the ceiling, cut-and-fit the blanking plate for the air-brick that opens directly into the room (which was blanked off rather crudely when we moved in).

    Anyhow, it means that I can cross some stuff off the jobs list. Which is good. And I feel a damn sight better about the house progressing.

    * We had some of a ‘value pack’ of Dulux white, which looks nothing like the Dulux ‘lumitec white’ topcoat we use on the ceilings. It sort of looked vaguely brown. Although, to be fair, it was pretty old.

  • Oh, the Horror.

    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.

    IMG_0020

    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…

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  • Holidays, minor progress and sickness.

    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.

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    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.

    Quintessential English countryside village

    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).

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

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    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.