Vinyl albums that come with digital downloads.
Gatefold ‘limited’ editions, with high quality ‘audiophile’ vinyl and a free download that I can stick on the media server for casual listening.
They’re everywhere.
I keep seeing them.
And then my bank account runs and hides.
And I whimper, and try and restrain myself from buying things that I really, really, really shouldn’t buy.
So I checked, and there’s a bunch of CDs I ripped which have, for whatever reason, not made it onto the server. Actually, I think there’s a few that had not made it across and some which have got mixed in with the “ripped” pile. I just spent a chunk of time going through two of the stacks of ‘ripped’ CDs and have a veritable music of CDs (or whatever a pile of CDs is called) which weren’t ripped. And so need to be ripped. Feh.
I need to go through the rest of the pile, and I need to double check that they’re not in the directory of just-ripped stuff (because I rip stuff on my mac, then transfer it to the linux server which has but one non-locally writable directory for reasons which were clear to me when I set them up – and then they get moved to the music directory in big batches). But I suspect they’re simply not there.
The reason I know there was some sort of copying issue at some point is a few of the CDs have empty directories on the music server. I don’t know why though. Augh, really.
Well, I’m not sure. I collected Chester yesterday, and he’s clearly much better. The handbrake’s no longer sticking (fitted with new cylinders, new handbrake cable and new shoes. Thankfully the drums survived) and so pulling away doesn’t feel like the car’s dragging it’s feet.
However, tbh, despite it being almost a year since the last service he’s actually been running fairly well the last few weeks, so there wasn’t an awesome change in running which I have encountered after abusing cars in this way before. But normally our garage warn us when we’re nearing the 400 quid mark. Unfortunately, I think they’ve got used to the fact that we will keep Chester on the road, pretty much against the odds. That I’ll source parts for even expensive repairs (like a new front strut), because I’d much rather keep a solid old car on the road than buy a scabby but just as expensive to maintain modern car where parts are cheaper.
So when they wandered past 400 quid they didn’t tell us this time. And the fact that their basic service is now just shy of 200 quid….didn’t help – and that it was a 12k service, not a 6k service (last time the service bit of the job was just over 50 quid +VAT).
And then…they forgot to actually bill us for the service, so as I was quietly in pain from the £450 quid ‘service’, shortly after I pulled up to the house they rang and said ‘oh, we forgot to bill you for the actual service’. I said that my invoice said ‘service’ on it, because I thought it did and had been looking through old invoices to decide how much whimpering I should do…
…and offered to go check. And got in the car, instantly apologised, and then when he said it was 200 quid extra I believe the words out of my mouth were ‘How much?! On top of the £400?!’. I may have said ‘Are you serious!’, although I’m not sure. I paid it though, obviously. But I’ve really got to get back to servicing the car myself. Doing the brakes would have been hassley, but it’s definitely within my sphere of competence. The service itself is pretty easy stuff, and probably would have been no problem.
It’s just adjusting those vario-belts that gets me.
Anyhow. I just have to remind myself that in general he’s cheaper to run than a modern car, unless we did the evil ‘run it until it dies and replace’ model of car ownership. And that our insurance is “insanely low” because he’s old enough to be covered under a multi-car classic policy.
But I’m still holding out slightly on buying the replacement parts that he still needs, there are two tie bar bushes (currently hard rubber, will be replaced with polybushes because sports stuff is much more easily sourced) and similarly there’s a brake hose that needs replacing. P’raps once the minor’s out of the garage I’ll force myself down there and work on Chester.
…
On the Minor front, one of the two packages of ‘stuff’ I ordered for her have arrived. I might consider going down there once I’ve done my day’s cleaning duties to p’raps get one of the seats into usable condition. I was having temptation to fit a heated seat, but having considered it I think if I were to do that I should have got new flame-retardant seat foam (which I have not) and thus it should probably wait.
When the other package of ‘stuff’ arrives, the ‘new’ diff can go in, and the car should be mobile. Although she may need a new battery, I think I’ve somewhat hurt that one. She does need a wash, and she needs a polish too…
Then I can get back to cutting up wood for the house.
…
My main plan for today was to work on the garden, but it’s raining, which is upsetting. If it stops I may go and force chunks of wood thorough our chipper.
So, we’ve had some awesome days recently.
Today for example, I spent part of the day living in the 1940/50s. I dropped off Chester for his very belated service (which has resulted in a phone call saying ‘you need a few bits’, were ‘a few bits’ actually is ‘a few bits’. I’m terribly happy about that, and the parts he can’t get – I’ve located on the internet in just a few seconds and he says they’re not deeply urgent).
Having done this not very 1940s task, I wandered back home utilising Shanks’ Pony, stopping en-route at the gramophone shop (in this case a Charity shop who really don’t know how to treat gramophone records, more than half of them were broken) and walked out with some new gramophones including a Bill Haley record and the somewhat oddly titled ‘When you hear Fritz play twiddley bits’ (sadly not as entertainingly chipper as that version – it’s some bloke singing).
Having come home, I set to making lunch (sandwiches) whilst listening to my rather entertaining new gramophones and, of course, wearing my Moskva, in our kitchen with the Bush VHF61. Mind you, I did get our nice local cheese from the modern refrigerator, which is either not very period or a sign of incredible wealth ;)
At any rate, it was rather nice. Then we spent 40 minutes cleaning (well, I spent 40 because I only do my 20-minutes on days off, which means that I do 40 on most days off, theoretically*) before heading out to the garden. We’ve started working on our garden again with the hope of getting it ship shape (and indeed Bristol Fashion) before the summer. Kathryn cleared beds today whilst I made good on a promise to one of our neighbours to go and fell the tree that’s growing out by their foundations. I can’t cut it too near to the ground because it’s got far too big, but I hacked it off, down to about 30cm, and spent a large chunk of time denuding the ground of brambles. I also felled more of the sycamore which have sprung up all over next door (and our garden). We’re hoping to use some of the felled thinner bits like willow to make raised beds (Kathryn’s made one already, which looks pretty nifty). Not sure what to do with some of the bigger bits though, which are blatantly too big for our little shredder and not large enough to give to my mum to season and burn.
Feh, something will occur.
I dug out the roots of the bush that I cut down a few days ago – when Kathryn and I had a bit of time in the garden after our other delightful day in which we had Pancakes, went to Ashton Court for a wander and a picnic, headed to the Bristol museum to look at their No Borders exhibit, then up to Lahloo for tea and cake before heading back home for Rustic Greek Pie (oh so good) and gardening.
Anyhow, half of the bed is clear, I am wrecked as it turns out that gardening is hard work (I’d forgotten), half of the bed still has the massive variegated bush which needs to come down and then be dug out, and the whole thing needs *lots* of compost dug in, but once that’s all done, we should have a home for our peas.
Other jobs we need to do are building the greenshed, dealing with last years pile of clippings, digging out and prepping more beds, and building the deck from pallets. The few days of delightful sun, and the quiet crisp evening have reminded me just how much I love being outside, and understanding that we’re stuck here for at least another year, most likely, means that we ought to have a garden we enjoy.
I did just look at creating an adobe pizza oven. Apparently you need to dig a 5 foot deep, 3 foot wide hole and fill it with gravel as the base. This seems… more work than I was intending. We may just skip that for a while. I’m assuming this is to act as some kind of air-flow thing, although thinking back, I think it had a solid base of adobe. Meh, I dunno. Need to look more.
* We’re trying this – well, a subtly modified version of it, because we both work shifts and so saying ‘On tuesdays I’ll spent 20 minutes cleaning the bathroom’ doesn’t work… Shift work really does screw with lots of things.
Arse.
No, seriously, arse.
So, for my gleeful hope yesterday that CRNNS would get back to me promptly with an assessment of my qualifications and experience, now they have I kinda wish they hadn’t. Or that I’d’ve had more than half an idea about what they’d’ve grumped about so I could fix it before hand. At least this is a more fixed assessment that they want than BC did.
See, BC said “We’re not happy with your surgical or medical nursing, we’d like you to take an assessment that will take between one and five days, and we’d like you to take it just far enough outside Vancouver that you will have no decent way to use any remaining time you might have over here that isn’t part of the assessment as a holiday. It will cost an amount that varies according to how many days of assessment we decide you need after the first day. After that assessment we’ll decide whether you can sit an exam, or whether you have to do some courses, taught in Canada, that you’ll have to personally attend to be considered good enough to sit an exam to decide if you can register as a nurse”.
Which was painful and unclear, and led to the thought process of ‘this may end up costing an infinite amount of money and there is no guarantee that I can afford it or actually ever meet their requirements’.
Which led to the painful abandonment of the several hundred pounds that it’d cost to get that far, and us deciding to stay here for a few years, get Kathryn permanent residence, and try again either there or somewhere else when we were more ready and had no massive upcoming expenses (Permanent Residence in the UK isn’t cheap).
I was pretty grumpy about that, because I’ve done enough medical and surgical nursing in my opinion. I’m not a specialist in either of those areas, but could adequately look after someone, and flag deterioration, and apply my critical care knowledge to that sort of potentially unwell person. But that’s what they wanted.
This time around, CRNNS have decided that it’s my obstetric nursing that’s not up to scratch and they’d like me to please do a general assessment of my nursing skills. Before they decide if I can take an exam to decide whether I can register as a nurse.
Let me just pause for a minute to say that Nova Scotia says they’d like nurses. And that they’re short of nurses. I don’t for a moment think that means they should just accept anyone, but I’ve 7 years experience working in a reasonably respected healthcare organisation with a MSc in Critical Care and am a specialist in my field. I think, perhaps, they should consider that my obstetrics may not be perfect, and I’m quite willing for them to say ‘come do a refresher course and exam on obstetrics and take the CRNE’ at the same time but no.
No, like the CRNBC they seem to forget that flying to Canada to do these things is not cheap and requires annual leave to be taken of which I do, in fact, have a limited time.
Let’s just pause to remind ourselves of the costs of going to Nova Scotia (where they would like nurses).
($ are all Canadian)
$575 to apply for the assessment.
$310 to get WES to do an assessment of my qualifications.
So that’s basically $900 so far.
To do the in-person assessment of my skills* (on which they decide if I need remedial courses or can just go on to do my exam) will cost a minimum of $900 in airfare. The very cheapest return flight I’ve found is $901 dollars, and rises substantially from there depending on when I go. I’ve no idea how much the assessment costs (I’ve asked yesterday, not yet had an answer) but given the cost of a four hour multiple choice exam I’m not expecting less than $500 – which basically puts the cost of this assessment at nearly $2000 (including hotels, food, etc). And that’s if just I go. If Kathryn goes as well, we’re well into $3000 territory).
Did I mention Nova Scotia would like nurses, they’re short on them.
If I pass that exam, then we get into ‘you can take the CRNE’ which is a mere $600 (at the moment, we’ll be getting on for a year at this point so it may well have gone up). Plus obviously the flight cost – so another $900, plus obviously the hotels and food at around another $5-600. So we’re looking at another minimum $2000.
Which brings us to a minimum grand total of $4,900, or for those of you keeping track in British money, £3,200 at the current exchange rate.
After which, since they provide no sponsorship, we just need to apply for a visa, get a job (possibly vice versa) – Kathryn (while I was grumping about the house yesterday) pointed out that the Provincial Nominee programme appears to be open (it was ‘closed’ last time I looked at it). I’m not sure if I can apply for a visa under that, which I could do now, which would speed things along a bit. Oh, and then we just have to move. *sigh*.
I have to say I’m frustrated (if you’d not gathered). I’d hoped that NS might be a bit more sane, look at my experience and at least give me the opportunity to sit the damn exam without this faffing about before hand.
And it comes down to how committed are we to NS.
Do we want to throw a minimum of another £2700 at a problem that’s taken £600 so far and has no guarantee of success?
Our options boil down to:
– Stay here. As far as I’m concerned that’s not an option. It breaks my heart reading the news about the destruction and privatisation of the NHS, and I, at least, can see where it’s heading. Excellent healthcare for the 1% and the rest of us can get stuffed. A sign saying “Welcome to WonderHealth Bristol – an NHS Franchise, ask us about our deluxe care options”; you know, the options where you get the care you used to get for free. So no. No, I can’t stay here to watch that.
– Knuckle down and spend the £2700 on getting to NS. NS is (well, looks) beautiful, and we can get the kind of property we’d like to have, and the space we’d like our kid/s to grow up in. The main thing attracting us there is the lifestyle and land. At least, that’s what it is for me.
– Go somewhere else. This is restricted by neither of us actually speaking a foreign language, and is such a vague notion that neither of us have particularly explored it…
– Wait and go to the U.S.A. if / when they repeal DOMA, potentially work over there doing non-nursing stuff and I can do the NCLEX there (I think that’s what it’s called) or do the NCLEX over here. Whilst I despise for-profit healthcare, since it’s coming to the UK then perhaps I should just suck it up. There’s quite a few non-profit hospitals in Washington State, so that is a possibility. Of course that does mean waiting – but my understanding from a quick look at the world is that if DOMA is repealed, then we nip across to the US and remarry a third time (If Brandi Carlile can do it, so can we), then I can go in as Kathryn’s spouse.
It’s all very complicated at the moment. I think the NS and USA options are the winners at the moment. I’ve been dreaming of Canada so long that it seems very odd to me to abandon it, especially for the sake of a mere £3000, but a mere £3000 is not a mere anything to us. We don’t have £3000 lying around under the couch cushions. It’s a lot of extra shifts, even at agency rates. But to have the carrot of an easier route out of the UK and the depressing mess it’s making of itself is very tempting. And to be near the awesome friends-of-Kathryn who do seem (every time I’ve met them) to be utterly lovely is also a tempting prospect – especially given my general ineptitude at making new friends.
I’m trying not to feel deeply negative about the whole thing (I did that for several hours yesterday and awoke this morning continuing the negativity), but it’s hard…
…on the plus side, by the time that we can actually make a decision about it (because it’s going to take a while to sort out costs and when I could take the CRNNS tests) the DOMA decision might well be ‘in’ and that will at least let us make a decision with ‘more material facts’.
* Which given that it’s a focussed assessment of my obstetric and midwifery I’ll probably need to do a refresher course on, in which case I’ll do one here before I go, which will cost around £350, potentially, if I do it. This is because in 7 years I’ve been present for 2 births. At both births midwives have been present and really my most important job was doing observations, my second most important job was ‘holding the ultrasound so they can listen for the fetal heartbeat’. The next of these courses is not until November…
So, we are waiting. I’d say patiently, but I’m not feeling terribly patient. We’re waiting for the answer from the Nova Scotia nurse’s board about whether I can take the Canadian Registered Nurses Exam. Now, we’ve not actually been waiting that long. But I’m not generally a patient soul (that’s why I work in the ED). However, it has come to the attention of the Nurse’s Board that my training, at UWE, was theoretical in some areas in which they like practical experience.
Now I’ve got post-qualifying practical experience, and I’ve got self-directed learning that I’ve done. See, looking after kids is terrifying if you’re trained in adults. So I took my (I think several hundred hours) of ‘Child’ training in an EU theoretical pack, and my knowledge gleaned from looking after kids in the ED when I trained, and I ran with that to more study and a child-pack from my workplace, and then looked after kids a lot. I looked after kids who were injured, I looked after kids who were a bit ill, and I looked after kids who were truly sick. Truly, terrifyingly sick. I looked after big kids and babies you could scoop up and hold in one hand.
But I’ve never bothered with a great deal of evidence on this. I’ve done enough training in my life to keep well above the ‘minimum standard’ for continuous training in the UK (Nurses have do do some fairly small number of hours to maintain their registration, given that I just completed a Masters I’m well over that minimum). Now the nurses board would like to know how I’ve addressed my largely theoretical obstetric, pediatric (argh, I hate spelling it with no a) and mental health nursing. And I’m not sure I can produce anything that will make them happy.
Which makes waiting more painful.
And of course, I sent back the e-mail on Thursday night, and it seems that Canada has the same Easter Bank Holiday (or just Holiday, who knows about the Bank-Holiday equivalency for Canada. I know the US doesn’t call them bank-holidays). So I’ve had 4 days of waiting to hear what they think. And there may well be more. I want to know gods-damnit. I’m not a patient soul. Bah.
So, today, despite the sun shining (yes, really) and blue skys (I know, I should have taken advantage) I continued in the quest for compaction. Yes, the photos really are compressed down almost as small as I can make them. Negatives, contrary to best practice, are ensconced in (usually) one-entire-roll in one slot of the album’s negative holder. Either that or they’re in one-film-per-slot of the kinds of cheap-ass negative holders that came free in the dying days of film.
I’ve filled up the album that once held photos of my school trip to Budapest with random assorted photos of my entire life. I’ve got one other pack of photos to save. The rest have been painfully sorted into ‘people’ (in the bin) and ‘not people’ (offered on Freecycle, but I fear probably going to join the ‘people’ in the bin). Having completed that task (and feeling somewhat better for it) I then pulled down two boxes of CDs and started the minimise packaging plan that we agreed on for CDs. Whilst in the long term I continue to lust after a library filled with music (as well as a library filled with books), in the short term that’s not going to happen, and also, we’re moving to Canada.
So lugging half a ton of plastic cases across the atlantic seems foolish.
Instead we devised the cunning plan, pull the CDs out – and put them in my DJ cases (which is what I’ve been doing for years because there’s not enough space for all the CDs on any reasonable shelving system in any house we’ve lived in for a looong time). This part is just extending it so that some of my best-beloved bits of music ended up finally succumbing to the ‘strip the CD’ process such that all disks are separated from their jewel cases. Enroute to the box they need to be re-ripped, I’ll get to that…
The second phase is to use Delicious Library to catalogue them (so that I can have a catalogue of disks I own on my phone, so I don’t go getting duplicate copies of excellent albums because I can’t recall if I own it, or just a single, or have one track on a compilation). For this the bar codes on the CD boxes are teh handyness.
The third phase is to then yank the artwork and booklets from the cases, and give away the jewel cases, packing the artwork into a box such that when the time comes, and the house is ready, a giant bulk pack of CD jewel cases can be bought and I can spend a happy day or two reassembling the original CD and artwork. And then putting them on shelves. Nicely in order. So our kid/s will go ‘what the hell are they mum?’ and ‘What, they only hold an hour?’ And so on. Just wait until they encounter gramophones… Heh.
So that’s what I spent much of today doing. I catalogued and stripped down 160 odd CDs.
Then I offered the cases up on Freecycle (much more popular than my photos)
Then I settled down to the painful task of re-ripping the CDs. Which I’ve mentioned before, many times, I’m sure. I’ve done lots of CDs. CDs that have sat on the shelf, mainly, and which need to be stripped down as I described above and are sat waiting to begin that process because whilst they have been ripped I’ve not re-ripped all the CDs in the DJ box. And I don’t want to confuse matters by mixing ripped and unripped material.
So they sit, cluttering up the lounge, and I’m slowly working my way through the ripping process. A process made infinitely more painful by the fact that a disconcertingly large number of disks aren’t in the MusicBrainz database that Max uses to identify CDs. And very few CDs come up with artwork in Max. Why do I use Max? It’s reliable, it produces good quality audio and most desirably, it will rip into multiple formats simultaneously. Thus I can rip my CDs to FLAC and MP3 in one fell swoop.
In other news, I’ve been reading Louise Werner’s autobiography. It’s really good and very funny, but you didn’t come here for my erudite reviews. What’s really interesting about it to me, beyond the background to a musician I respect and who’s music and writing I enjoy a great deal. No, it’s the strange nostalgia invoked. She is a few years older than my sister, but so much of what she writes about is recognisably parts of my own childhood. And parts of my sister’s that I heard about in great detail because we were incredibly close once I got old enough to be less irritating to her.
So it’s kind of interesting to me to read it in that sense.
Also, obviously, I desperately wanted to be her (which is funny, because apparently the comment (advice might be pushing it) from Damon Albarn to her was that, in essence, she needed to make girls want to be her and boys want to… well… – and it certainly worked on me)). Anyhow, so it’s been an interesting read.
Anyhow, I am off to bed, because I’ve the excitement of work tomorrow, and that means getting up at 5:15… Also, I’ve now ripped another bunch of CDs, and deserve the reward of going to bed and reading more of the book :)
So I spent yesterday and this morning sorting though 80 billion photos. I’ve been a prolific (if not great) photographer for pretty much all of my life, and until today still had nearly all the photos I’d ever taken past my teens.
As in stacks of them.
As in boxes full of photographs I’d never got out.
I’d looked at them when I took them, sure, and I’d put some of them in albums. But the very-similar-to-another, the blurred (lots), the out-of-focus (many, particularly as I got used to my AE-1), the landscape shots of the lake-district year after year after year. The school photos that make me remember how much I hated school? They sat in their little ‘Kwik Photo’ or ‘Bonusprint’ envelopes with negatives and haven’t seen the light of day for years.
My first round of university, which shows off a past I generally don’t share, where alcohol fuelled my ability to cope with self loathing. The round of photos I took of myself a year before I came out, disheveled and at 5am, trying to come to terms with my self and by body. All of them have sat in a ‘Fun Size Mars’ box (marked ‘best before 1984’).
Today I ripped the few I want to keep from the pages of the albums, I took my past and I said no-fucking-more will this hang over me.
I took the photos of my school time and took a few photos of the few people who were decent and nice, the few flashes of moments where the bullying stopped, where I wasn’t any longer sent to Coventry, where I started to actually make friends and they are now stuck, higgledy piggledy in an album.
I still have the negatives, for all those random shots of University – the first time in my life I had friends who really stuck by me, and coped with all my random depressive shite as I worked myself out into a person rather than a selection of fragments fronted by a mask. I still have those negatives from childhood, and I shall spend some time today sorting them into the photo album that happens to have negative holders in it.
I still have the letters my sister sent me when she was going by the name Milly and started letters ‘Vienna Cheesecake’ for reasons that now escape me.
But the boxes of photos are now less than a box. The albums are pruned. And I can look at them and feel nostalgia rather than thinking ‘god, I hated school’. I still can’t quite look myself in the eye at University, I can see the pain, I can see the waiting and trying to work out how to be me. But my friends helped me become whole, and for that I am endlessly grateful.
So we’re well into the time of year when we should have little tomato shoots sprouting and growing up towards the sky. Only we’ve not. We’ve got packets all out and sorted ready – and once I’ve warmed up again I’ll start working on planting, but as usual we did the dumb-ass thing we normally do. We left the propagator bases outside. And some of them seem to have gone missing. I’m not sure where they are, which is somewhat upsetting. We appear to have most of them though…
I’ve just been trailing round the garden, which was quite fun when the sun was out (despite the layer of ice on the water out there – can I point out that it’s march, and I don’t really expect to see a layer of ice on water). But it became distinctly less fun when the sun went in and the clouds rolled over (as they are wont to do at the moment).
Having located them, then comes the job of getting them clean enough to be in the house. This is one of the things you’d think we’d learn. After a few years of our version of gardening (largely plant many things, see what survives) you’d think that we’d have worked out that leaving the propagators outside leads to them getting covered in dirt, and the little clear plastic covers getting broken. We did better this year, just the bases were outside, and one cover (that I think we couldn’t find last year) was lurking under a pile of scrap wood. Yes, our garden is a disaster area, thank you for asking.
Also, on the plus side, I found our missing trowel. It went missing at some point during planting last year, which was obviously upsetting, and it appears to have been covered by ‘a lot’ of dirt. However, the miserable rain we’ve had washed off enough that I went ‘hang on a minute, that looks like a trowel’ today, and lo, there it was.
So yay.
Unfortunately, being out there for even the half hour or so that I was has demonstrated that my cough is not better, however much I might hope. I have come back in to sit in the relative warmth of the house, and having settled back in my cough has settled back down, but it was tedious for a little while. My nose, also, seems to have decided to spend today running. I’m not sure where it’s trying to get, but it seems to want to get there fast. Feh.
Anyhow, today we shall try for planting tomatoes, and anything else which proclaims “Plant in march”. Although a lot of things say “Plant in late march, after the threat of frost has passed” which, given that it’s April in a couple of days, and that there’s still a good layer of ice on the bucket of water outside (no, there’s no good reason for us having a large bucket of water outside), I’d say that threat’s not quite passed yet.
I’ve also made a list/shopping basket on our favoured mud suppliers, this is because we need more mud. Lots more mud. Mud and gravel. And they have 10% off this weekend, so when my beloved arrives home I’m inclined to consider ordering a big pile of mud and gravel. I suspect, actually, we need much more than is in my ‘shopping basket’ at the moment, but as the order already comes to 300 quid, I think I best stop there.
So that is task one for the day. I also used the ‘searching for the garden stuff in the garage’ opportunity to hook Rebecca back up to the slow-charger, so that when the ‘new’ differential arrives (winging its way from Berkshire, it is) I can install it, and she will be able to move. Of course, this means that I also need to place the scary big order from Bull Motif – because frankly I’m fed up of my arse nearly touching the floor from the failed seat-straps. Also, I’m fed up of water dripping on me from the roof, I’d rather it ran down the inside of the roof-lining and disappeared down the water runs. I’d no idea there was so much condensation on the inside of the roof. Also, one of the sound-deadening panels has dripped something manky down the door (glue, I imagine) which needs cleaning. Oh, and I’d quite like the radio to work, rather than just being ornamental, which means fitting the kick panels where the speakers are meant to live. On top of this list of minor (ha) list of parts, she also needs new seals and I think I should fit new bearings to the axle, given that the old ones were subject to the fine-fine grit of a disintegrated differential.
I’m hoping that someone’ll buy the old diff on E-bay for ‘money’, although I imagine not.
So, the other job I’m working towards tackling whilst I’m laid low with this cough (I don’t really want to be sanding stuff and faffing about on ladders when I’m hacking up a lung) is The Horror. This is The Horror:
See, when I moved out of my parents house I boxed up a lot of stuff. And when my dad died, I boxed up some of his stuff. And when I moved to Slough, I boxed up a bunch of stuff. And when Kathryn moved in, we left some of her stuff boxed up.
A couple of those boxes are CD and DVD boxes. They’re easy: Strip artwork out, plastic for freecycle or recycle, artwork into a much smaller box (when we settle finally, I’d like a music library with all the albums out and nicely shelved). DVD’s I’m not so sure I’ll want out – because with film I’m not so bothered about the medium. Purely digital media doesn’t bother me at all for film – although I would like a more reliable method of backing it up (really that’s just a case of sucking it up and paying for a decent RAID array). Some of the boxes are books. Many, many photos. It’s just a case with them of sucking it up, sorting through them – keeping a few that might want to be album’d, chucking most and storing the negatives. Some of the boxes are assorted ornaments and desk stuff – which are largely going to be an awful nightmare to sort. I’m trying to build up the willpower to get a box down and start. The idea is, if I can do one or two boxes a day, then I should be through the pile in not very long and meet our requirement that nothing goes up in the attic except, possibly, my dad’s prototype computer hardware which I want to display but have yet to obtain the means to do so. I suppose one of those 1930’s glass / bow fronted cabinets would be the best bet :)
No where to put one in this house though! I quite like the idea of that, in my final office space though. A little miniature museum of old tech. Hrm.
Then there’s the job. See, I applied for a Senior Staff Nurse position, and I came second. This in itself is not unusual. I’ve come second a lot in job interviews. I came second in a position with the BBC (they said “if the person turns it down or their references don’t work out, we’d like to contact you”… they never did though). I have come second in lots of SSN positions – which has meant that I’ve been offered senior positions later, without interview. This time, I’m actually in a position to take the rather nice and suddenly offered second place prize – which is 2 months of the job that I applied for. For the person who’s got the job can’t start for 2 and a half months, so the plan is that in half-a-month I’ll do the job for 2 months. Which is both scary and exciting, and mentally leaves me thinking “Oh god it’ll be a disaster”. Which just goes to show I should have more faith in myself, because I did the role when I was working in Reading.
Incidentally, the reason I came second? I didn’t ‘sell myself’. This does not come as a huge surprise.
Uh, so, that’s my ramble for the day.