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  • Bother

    So, this was going to be a happy clappy selfcongratulatory post. I was going to glee about my desk a bit more (and I’ve managed to find the phono adaptor, so I just need to actually make the record deck work and get it a stylus), and I was going to glee a bit about the path:

    Pathing

    I’ve also found the Mic, which means that once the record deck’s working there’s a possibility that I might, just might, do a new Dead Bug Jumping in the not so distant future.

    And all that glee was shiny.

    And then I lent back in my 1900s office chair. I lent back, the spring took the weight happily, and… I looked up.

    We had the ceiling replaced in this room because it had water damage. Despite weeks and weeks of rain, the plaster on the old ceiling had remained dry. There was no evidence that it was still leaking, and every suggestion that it’d been repaired. I looked up at the white strip of the wall above the picture rail.

    I looked up and there is a streak of dirty brown dried water-related evidence. It means getting up in the attic and grovelling around in the newly laid glass fibre. It means trying to work out where the water’s coming in. It means expense getting someone in to fix a roof*, because that is beyond my skillbase.

    Arse.

    * I’m presuming. But I want to know what’s wrong before some lying shite tries to tell me the whole roof needs replacing. Irritatingly it’s near enough to a valley on the roof that it might be that… feh.

  • Quick desk trial

    So, the desk is built. It took me most of the morning to shift the boxes in the spare room over to the other side of the spare room; pausing en route to extract a few random bits of desk ephemera. I now need to go down to the garage and extract one of the surge-protection extension leads so that I can actually power the desk top stuffs.

    Office.Space

    The stuff laid out is mostly for show only at the moment. The RiscPC’s keyboard has had keyboard storage death, and a few of the keys don’t work now. I also have yet to find the box that contains it’s wireless network adaptor (which should also be connected to the printer lurking under the desk).

    The record deck is not (a) working or (b) connected to the phono input box. This is because the phono input box is also in an unknown box, somewhere in the room. However, as a desk it does appear to work. I’m typing this on my ergonomic keyboard which, despite needing a clean, is still working. Sadly the trackball appears to have largely died. I’m not sure why, if any bit was expected to die it’d’ve been the buttons which may have been accidentally pressed whilst in storage. But no, ironically it’s the actual trackball sensor which appears to have bitten the dust. So I can click but not move. It’s more upsetting because they’re fricking expensive compared to mice.

    Anyhow, onwards to cable-finding. And I might go play in the garden for an hour, since it’s a pretty day and doing the desk has pretty much cost me all of it…

  • Post nights productivity

    So, 2 nights at my new hospital trust. The second night ended on that special kind of high available only when a drunk/high patient attempts to assault you. You’ve got to be quick to work in the ED, and thankfully, last night I was quick. Their kicks and punches (for there were two of the delightful souls) never connected.

    I then cycled home. Two 12 hour ED night shifts, and I’m proud to say I did not shirk my cyclingsponsibilities. I cycled to and both of them, and after a couple of weeks of use the brakes are finally starting to work fairly well and I’m not needing to adjust them after every ride. This is because the wheels are starting to look somewhat smoother, although the small amount of chrome that the rear wheel was sporting has started to flake off in some areas (other areas are disconcertingly shiny). The one frustrating thing is that a company in the states sells the ‘salmon’ Kool-stop brakes on rod-brake shoes, which is not something I’ve seen over here. And I remember the Salmon coloured Kool-Stops for their effectiveness on my old mountain bike. However, I will say that the Fibrax brake shoes are a hell of a step up from the unbranded ones I picked up first.

    Anyhow, so I cycled home, cut the two final chunks of scaffold pole for my desk and painted them (I decided on the same 1829 Antique White of the skirting, rather than Bachelor Pad Black), and tided the kitchen. Then I chilled out, had a bath, and then wandered down and applied the second coat of paint. Then I started laying the path down the garden. This is a depressingly massive undertaking, the path not being a simple straight run down of about 40ft, oh no. No it curves down the garden and has a split off to a path that will run parallel for part of the stretch. Fortunately for me, I’m not a big fan of perfectly flat and smooth brick paths. Uneven is something I rather like, so I don’t have to get it all perfectly flat before laying the bricks. Nor am I terribly hassled about pulling weeds up from the path now and then, so it’s basically cutting a roughly flat channel through the grass and getting the bricks bedded down roughly flat. Curves though, now they’re an unthought-of evil.

    Anyhow, Kathryn then got home and we headed out to Riverside Garden Centre, where several plants wanted to come home with us. Quite a few of them. As did a big pile of earth. The reason for this was that we’ve been intending to turn one of the pallets on which ‘something’ arrived into a vertical planter. And after much delay today we did that. Photos to come. Then Kathryn planted more plants, I dug a big hole and we planted the Gooseberry (which has been stuck in a pot for an entire year). Kathryn weeded, I laid more path.

    Then we started digging over another bed-area.

    Then tiredness struck, and now it’s time for bed :) Still, 30 hours awake and still vaguely coherent, that’s quite impressive :)

  • Err, oops?

    So I finally got around to putting down the plastic sheeting, digging out the steam stripper and set to on the final downstairs wall. Well, apart from the teeny one next to the kitchen door. Now, prior to this job, on every wall (I think) the sockets had not been refitted when I was steam stripping. Whilst they were attached, they hung from the walls like alien eyes on stalks. This time, however, having had children and animals in the house, the sockets were neatly up against the wall. This is important. It is, as we shall see, Chekhov’s gun.

    When steam stripping, water often runs down the wall. To avoid it pooling on our nice new floor I ran plastic along the floor and taped it to the skirting (base) boards. I did nothing about the socket. I merrily set to with the stripper (uh, err, the steam stripper) and scraped the grotty yellow paint/glue mix from the walls. Mostly it’s been done, this is a final run past before I start liberally throwing filler on the walls and sanding them smooth(ish).

    The water ran merrily down the wall and onto the plastic sheet. Yay, I did say, as it pooled there.

    I danced my way along the wall (as I’m prone to, when working on the house) and stripped the paint until… Click.

    Oh arse, I thought, as I looked down at the socket and across at the RCD*. The water had indeed merrily run into the socket, which, positioned as it was, properly against the wall, meant that the water had actually run into the socket.

    I unscrewed the wall plate and dried it off externally, blowing air through it. No dice. After some more rounds of cursing my idiocy and wafting hot air at it from the hair drier (connected to the ultra-long 15A extension lead I made a while ago), I decided to just stuff it and finish stripping the wall. I did so. I wafted more air at it. I blew in it. I waited. I tried again. And again. And finally spent even longer heating it with the hair drier and blowing in it.

    It worked. Yay.

    Only I actually spent more time on the bloody switch than I did on the actual stripping. Still, that said, the wall is ready to be filled. And sanded. And filled. And painted!

    The last wall.

    * Residual current device (trip switch, earth/ground leakage switch)

  • Getting back into the swing, err, a bit.

    So, the house is actually progressing. And I did, with some effort, persuade myself to do work on Chester.

    Chester, as you may recall, had a failed water pump. I fitted a new one, however, I made a pig’s ear of it. Indeed, possibly more of a dog’s breakfast of multiple pig’s ears. It leaked, not a lot, but a bit after installation. This annoyed me because it was, in essence, a fairly simple job. However, not to be defeated I took the damn thing off again this morning and found that I’d made a hash (of that dog’s breakfast of pig’s ears) of installing the gasket. Somehow, despite my care and attention, I’d managed to ruck the gasket up making a gap (which I’m astonished sealed as well as it did). So, I took the whole lot off, cleaned up the mating surfaces and replaced the gasket with instant silicone gasket. Not best practice but it saved me trying to find the stanley knives* and going to buy some gasket paper to cut a new gasket.

    At the moment it appears to have worked. We’ll see, though. I’ve less faith in myself than normal, because I’m waaaay out of practice with this**. Anyhow, it didn’t leak when I refilled it. I will now spend the next two weeks checking coolant.

    And then, thanks to a quick tweet to @aminorjourney I found out the height of her desk, which whilst I was dogsitting I noticed was almost exactly 1cm to high for me, which allowed me to do lots of complex calculations about how high my desk legs should be***, then to cut them (I didn’t have the energy to cut the desk supports to the right length). Having done this I sanded and primed them. I’m torn now, because I was originally going to spray them white (or blue to match the walls), but I’ve got a can of black paint sat there, which is a bit bachelor pad, but at the same time, is ‘free’.

    Meh.

    Posthaste.

    And now I’m going on a quest to find plastic sheeting (which I know we had somewhere), so I can strip the final section of wall and start filling and sanding in preparation for painting.****

    * All of which had disappeared, again, until I finished.
    ** But if I’m going to build this soon, and since I’ve made a deal to buy a whopping great motor and controller, I suppose I better had, then I best get back into practice.
    *** Simple calculations, but a surprising number of them, because it’s made from scaffolding and I needed to work out how much height the joints add.
    **** You may be asking about my uni course. Me too. It says my module started on monday but there’s nothing on the course site, there’s no discussion from other students. I have, however, I think got clearance from my work to do the audit; so yay.

  • Lifestyle change

    So, despite the hideous weather and a real inclination to light the fire, sit inside and let the rain fall all day I’ve not done that. I’ll grant I was slow to get going, but once I was moving I’ve been productive, useful and frankly, good.

    Having done a little favour for my friends I stopped en-route home to buy some more smoke-free logs for the fire (these are made of compressed wood waste). While they appear to produce an awful lot of carbon low down (the fireplace is really black), I have to say, looking at the top of our chimney, you’d be hard pressed to tell that the fire was going. While it’s a bit of a bugger having a fire going and the upstairs does start to smell a bit smokey, it’s very nice to be heating the house with a CO2 neutral form of heating. Although it’s only really the lounge that it affects…

    Then I got home and inertia set in. I sat and planned an afternoon of activity whilst watching the world go by (in the wet). I poked at my dissertation and e-mailed a person at work that I think is the right person to pass audit requests to. I sat some more. Thankfully, then, Kathryn rang with a task. A sad task, but a task none-the-less. Our 1950s iron has been, forever, tripping the breaker. My response to this having checked it over was to decide to slap a trip-switch in the way of the main RCD which meant at least, in general, it wasn’t throwing the house circuits off.

    I also hunted for a new baseplate, on the basis that the rest of it is adequately insulated, and I suspected that it was the heating element that was on its way out. Well, this morning it passed from on its way, to out. It didn’t collect £200.

    Plugging it in now leads reliably to instant trippage, and a brief examination of it (having stripped it down) shows nothing untoward that’s visible. I was going to dig out my multimeter and test it more, but then realised it doesn’t really matter which bit is faulty. The only spare you can get for it is the thermostat (it astonishes me that you can still get that), and so pretty as it is, the iron is dead.

    I texted my beloved with this sad truth, ate lunch and wandered to the garage to continue progress on the desk. The desktop has been sat irritatingly close to finished for ages. The difficulty being that I needed to sand it some more and hadn’t, well, found the energy to do so. And I was wary of sanding it so far as to lose the “story” of the bits that make it. They are ex-scaffold planks, and despite the weird looks I got for saying I wanted to keep the reinforcing metal strips on them, I wanted to keep the metal strips on them, and the end tags that state the max loading / distance of supports. All of that was stuff I wanted, and I didn’t want to clean them up so far that they just looked like hunks of wood. What’d be the point?

    So with some trepidation, and having measured the rough size of the record deck that’s got to sit on top of the desk, I headed down to the garage (in the rain), stuck on the gas heater, and started work. Having attached the three scaffold planks together I then hacked most of the third one off (really, I needed about 2 inches of it). I then set to with the various sanders, before finally cleaning and varnishing the beast:

    Back to the drawing board...or desk... as it were

    That’s just after the first coat, I’ve popped a second coat of varnish on now…. but first, the good.

    See, we needed a new iron. That much was clear, normally this would be the cue for me to hop into the car and burn rubber. Well, okay, gently warm some rubber. Instead, since the rain had stopped (for the minute at least), I adjusted the brakes on Molly, grabbed my bag and helmet and headed off to Gardiner Haskins. Now, I was debating getting a second hand iron, but I’m not that fit and riding to the second hand places was a bit more of a treck than I really wanted. But I did cycle to the store, fought (thankfully successfully) with the box of the new iron and rode back.

    I’m quite proud of myself. I know it’s only a little thing, but I’m hoping it’s the start of me being more healthy.

    I also managed to squeeze in 2 loads of laundry, so I’m really feeling like I’ve been very, very good. Sadly the sun’s now gone in, but I think I’ve done my bit for today :)

  • Back Online

    So, for the past week and a bit I’ve been suffering from absence of laptop. My much loved MacBook (not a Pro, just a plain MacBook) had a teensy bit of a screen problem. In that about a 1.5″ wide strip of the screen was intermittently not working. I did, unintentionally sit on it ages ago, which may have had something to do with it. Otoh, the problem didn’t show up until a long time after the sitting episode, so I’ve no idea if they were connected.

    At any rate, it was out of warranty. Which meant that I put off the repair as long as possible. I took the main body apart and reseated the display connectors in the hope that this was, in fact, a display connector problem. It wasn’t. And having looked at the instructions for stripping down the display (HEAT GUN! HEAT GUN POINTED AT MY LAPTOP SCREEN! ARE YOU BATSHIT INSANE?) I decided that discretion was the very much better part of valour (if it was my old, 8 year old, tatty and battered laptop, then sure. My barely 3 year old computer? Jeeze, no).

    I struggled with wiggling, twisting, pressing and poking the screen into working to finish my essay and dissertation proposal before taking it for a bankingly painful trip to the Apple store in Brizzle. And now she has a shiny, shiny new screen. Sadly they didn’t clean the rest of the computer, which I’d’ve rather liked them to do, but I’ll give it a good blow out with an air duster when I replace the HDD, and upgrade the memory, which is the next task.

    Unfortunately, the day after the laptop went to be fixerated, I decided to become super-viral-woman. I don’t know what caused it, but I’m going to bet it was a combination of not quite clearing the last virus, working a ridiculous number of hours, switching from nights to days, stress about my course, stress about work (starting a new job) and switching from a very sedentary lifestyle to cycling ~30 miles in a week (normally I’m expecting to cycle about 22 miles… it would have been 38 miles had I have made it through without falling ill).

    Oh, and it rained. Rained a lot. I got quite wet, got to work where I worked a full on shift (no, really, it was more full on than I was expecting. It was like they took my imaginings and went “Yeah, the ED would be more exciting if it was like that, only MORE”), got on my bike and cycled home, where after some sleep I discovered I had a temperature of 40 degrees C (104F). I didn’t enjoy it.

    I then didn’t enjoy the next 4 days at all. Most of them involved temperatures which are not wont to make you feel good. I couldn’t really eat. I felt constantly nauseous, hot, tired and unwell.

    I haven’t watched so much telly for a loooong time. I vaguely wanted to read stuff, but any attempt was met with my brain slothing about the place telling me that if I wanted it to do anything it’d damn well better get cooler in here. My poor beloved put up with me whinging constantly (and complaining, and whining). I don’t do ill, at least, not in any way that makes me reasonable to be around.

    Thankfully after a lot of resting I’m now back up to…more or less full strength. I’m a bit tired today – but I think that was me angsting about my course – not having my laptop with all the papers on it meant that, well, there’s not a lot of point me looking at the course website because I can’t comment on / achieve much. And despite picking up my laptop yesterday (mmm, shiny new screen) I didn’t quite get the nerve to look. I did a lot of cleaning yesterday though, which was good… :)

    I looked today. It appears to be a 2-week hiatus in between modules. Had I known that I might have tackled building my desk today, well, doing a bit of work on it. But in all honesty? I should be resting which is kinda what I’ve ended up doing.

    I did my errands, I went to the supermarket*, I dropped off my Doctor’s letter at my old job and my time sheet, and gave my old uniforms to someone who asked for ’em. I went to lunch with a good friend…

    So Sunday? Sunday might be desk day, and it might also be a day for recommencing work on the house, which has got a bit, well, it’s stopped.

    * It’s BULK shopping day! We now have 22 packets of fruit juice and about 12 packets of cereal.

  • Sucky birthday gift…

    My poor car managed to ferry me to work and back for a week despite an increasingly sickly diff. I was aiming for breakfast this morning with Nikki & family. As I pulled away from a set of lights there was a noise. Well, more a succession of noises. If you imagine putting grit and metal into a blender and a mangle simultaneously, and then simultaneously taking a scaffolding pole and hitting an old metal rubbish bin every 10 seconds or so then you’ve pretty much got the sound that the diff is now making.

    I limped home at about 10-15 miles an hour. Thankfully, early on a Sunday’s not a bad time to crawl slowly down even fairly major roads.

    Also, fortunately, it was this side of the stretch of motorway between ours and Nikki’s house.

    So, we are currently without a car. I’ve got the parts to fix Chester (but I need some sealant and some not sleep deprived time). The bits to fix Rebecca are a bit more of a problem. I’m just waiting to hear if it’s still under warranty – milage wise we should be fine, but most recon parts don’t have a warranty of more than 6 months :(

    We’ll find out…

  • The stress seems to have found its way back in.

    So, *BREATHE*. I’ve not been this stressed for a while.

    The 3000 word literature review I’m deeply unhappy with. The underlying research is…not appropriate. I should have spotted it when I started reviewing it, but honestly, I reviewed it in between shifts and on trains and didn’t quite twig that it was such utter shite and that I should extend my review to find more primary research. I kept finding papers and going ‘oh, that doesn’t quite fit’ and discarding Randomised Controlled Trials or Cohort studies and didn’t realise that all I had left was reviews and meta-analyses. It’s a bit of an all round disaster, really, but I’ll attempt to make it as good as I can and we’ll see if I can scrape a pass.

    Kathryn’s kindly read through it and given me lots of cuddles to try and help me find my calm centre* as opposed to my beating the crap out of myself for moronicism** centre, which I find startlingly easy to locate.

    My dissertation proposal is progressing somewhat better. This is the 10 minute break between sitting down and ‘appraising’ all the papers I’ve got (I’m still short two, but I can’t really help that) and actually writing the review of them. I usually like a few days for it to slosh around in my brain and allow my subconscious to connect dots (it works surprisingly well). However, I’ve not got that freedom, so I’m having ten minutes, a cup of tea, and attempting to put some of the stress I’m feeling far away.

    It’s not really working. I’d forgotten how stress feels. No, really. I mean, stress that’s not job*** related. Job related stress I can deal with with a motorbike, or a run down the river, or a chat with my beloved. This stress lurks in the pit of my stomach and runs around inside my head screaming unhelpfully. It makes me clean the kitchen, do laundry, have an urge to do anything to distract me from it. It brings out my worst prevaracatory tendencies, and then shouts at me internally for not working.

    Anyhow. Wish me luck, I’ve an essay to write and then a 16 day stretch of shifts****.

    * Ha. Like I have one. :)
    ** moronisism? Meh.
    *** Not as in ‘sick patients make me stressed’ because they don’t. I get an adrenaline hit when I’m preparing to look after someone sick, and run round inside my head mentally trying to collect all the things I should be doing, but the actual work, no. What makes me stressed is not being able to do my job properly (when it’s uber busy) or staff-relation stuff. That makes me quite stressy.
    **** Well, I finish at 7:45am from a night shift then start my induction the next day, so I’ve kind of got a day off, ish, at day 8. I don’t really count it as a day off though.

  • Bonus prevarication (getting the stress out)

    So. I’ve got 1500 words to write through this next week (in which I’m on nights). Those 1500 words? They are on a subject that I know about in loose, nursey, I know how to treat it and roughly what the guidelines say* way, but not in a deep ‘I know what the papers say and where they are strong / weak’, so…uh, yeah, I need to read them. Now. Fast. Also, I need to know about audit. I know approximately >< that much about audit processes. I mean, I know what it is and roughly how to carry one out, but I don’t know how to pick one audit method over another. And the book I need? In the post. Maybe. *WAIL*

    On top of which, I start a new job in 11 days time****, to get to which I need to ride my bike (to get it out of the garage, I need to go through a gate that currently has no handle). So it would be useful if (a) My bike had a reflector on it (being as it’s legally required ‘n all) and (b) the gate had a handle on it, so as I can open the gate in the morning to get to work.

    Also, I need to proof read and improve (it definitely needs some improvement) the 3000 word literature review that I’ve written (on a different topic to the 1500 word one, obviously).

    And…our illustrious Volvo has, having destroyed its radiator and been fitted with a new one, decided that at 100,000 miles he’d rather like a new water pump. So the expensive nice coolant I bought to fill the brand new radiator is now slowly gracing the road surface outside our house as it drip-drip-drips its way out of the car. The new pump was only 12 quid (including delivery) – and wasn’t difficult to source – but is, I suspect, going to be an arse to fit and will, I suspect, require a chunk of time that I don’t currently feel I really have available to install.

    On top of all that…my beloved minor’s rebuilt differential, which has always been a little whiney, has decided (I suspect) to shred at least one of its bearings. She’s very, very whiney now and I changed the oil a few days ago wondering if I’d cooked it or it’d leaked out or somesuch. Normally diff oil is pretty much the same colour as it went in, but more runny**. It’s normally yellow (and smells pretty foul, EP90 does). It came out opaque grey. Opaque grey is not a suitable colour for oil coming out of a diff. Nor is the noise it’s making. All that grey used to be ball bearings.

    I’m waiting to find out if it’s still under warranty or if I’m going to have the fun and excitement of getting it re-rebuilt locally (we won’t think about that).

    Oh, and I *was* planning to have my GT550 up and running so that I could use that to get to work in a pinch. Have I done that…? No.

    As the final little set of stressors, I still have no desk, my laptop’s screen is getting flakier and flakier (once I’ve done these two essays I’m going to bite the bullet and take it down to Apple), and the house is no further along than it was a month ago. I am, as it were, ready for the world to chill out a bit.

    Right at this moment I’m feeling a teeeeensy tiny bit stressed.

    * Although, having just read the most recent Cochrane review I’ve just discovered, as with so many things in medicine, we’ve been doing it wrong. See, we (as in the medical profession) largely seem to have assumed that when people are sick sick (Looky here) we should throw all the antibiotics in the universe at them to make them not be sick. New research says, uh, don’t. It says yay to antibiotics but boo to the kitchen sink approach. I need to read it more thoroughly, but my glance at it says giving people multi-antibiotic therapy (which is what, I think, all the protocols I’ve ever seen say) is worse than just giving them one specific kind of broad-spectrum antibug. Basically, you roger their kidneys***. Like with oxygen, and so many other things that seem sensible, when you actually test it turns out you’re wrong, wrong, wrong. Arse. Also, the Number Needed to Harm is 4-5 patients. So of the many, many people I’ve given that to over the years….oh lord. This is the problem with doing research, it’s depressing.

    ** This is because the long-long-long chains that make up the thick goopy stuff that goes into a 1960s differential slowly gets chopped into teeny, tiny, shorter chains. But there’s no soot (which is what turns the oil black in an engine).

    *** As in screw them, permanently. This is bad.

    **** While it’s the same job, at the same pay, in the same kind of department I now get ‘Senior’ in my job title. Wahey!