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So, the government are attempting to freeze nurse’s (and other healthcare workers) pay increments. On top of a pay freeze.

So, for those of you who don’t know about this, here’s a brief summary, as I understand it (which is at a pretty basic level, anyhow). Nurses (and lots of other healthcare workers) are paid a crap low wage; this is because it’s traditionally a women’s job, and women’s jobs are traditionally paid badly. If you think Nurses pay isn’t that bad, try working 3 out of 4 weekends, nights, and other shifts in such a way as to very rarely see your friends or partner, then see how much you think your life (because I have no life outside work) is worth.

I know my pay sucks because I come from the private sector where I worked about 1/4 as hard and got paid the same amount. In fact, I would be on about 2.5-3 times my current salary by now had I carried on, and I’d be working a nice 9-5 job, Monday to Friday. I’d hate my job, but I’d be paid well. Now I love (well, some of the time) my job, but I’m paid lousily.

Anyhow, to sweeten the pill a bit, each year we get an increment, until we reach a ‘gateway’. This is in return for doing lots of skill development in our copious free time. This is reflecting on our work, studying to learn extra skills, all sorts of bits and pieces to develop our portfolios. Then we reach a ‘gateway’ at which point we’re expected to produce evidence that we’ve met a specific list of skills and developed our communication skills, etc, to such a level as warrant more pay. When we get to a Gateway we present the evidence and get a bit more pay, if we’ve not got the evidence you stop getting increments.

The Government have decided that since Nurses trashed the economy, we should help fix it by having our pay frozen. Given that inflation is at about 3%, so that’s a handy pay-cut each year. Thanks for that. Now they’re trying to persuade us to accept that the agreement that our pay goes up with increasing skills should disappear. They want to fix us at a roughly 5% pay decrease for the next 2 years.

Mmm, that sounds fair. Yeah.

Of course, this is unlikely to affect morale* in an already demoralised workforce.

I’m also really glad that they let Vodafone off 6 BILLION in taxes, and are happy that those lovely bankers who have helped so many people in the UK are getting lovely bonuses. Not pissed off at all. Oh no.

* “So why bother with my portfolio then? There’s no point if I don’t get anything for it”. “Why do we do this job? Because we’re idiots”. Two nice little quotes from yesterday.

A big range cooker that’s a joy to use, good quality pans, nice cooking utensils, good quality ingredients…

Or a trangia. Take your pick.

Well, sorta. We’re in an otherwise empty house, in which the gas heaters have been condemned and disconnected (although thankfully the hot-water heater hasn’t been condemned/disconnected!), with a pile of fan/electric heaters (and our illustrious 70’s Agni), with the permission of the owner. So we’re not actually squatting, and we have some furniture here (and a fridge). We don’t, however, have a cooker… Thus yesterday I discovered the Trangia gets a bit enthusiastic when used inside. There’re no breezes to reduce the heat from the flame, so we had somewhat charcoal’d eggs for breakfast as I flailed when I realised I had nowhere to put the hot pan while I popped the regulator on… We are, thanks to the generosity of the owners not paying rent – just the utilities and council tax.

Impressively, despite not quite following how to set up the timer on the electric radiator in the lounge it managed to stay a reported 14 degrees in the lounge (where we’re sleeping) overnight. We’ve moved in the minimum amount of stuff (well, marginally more than the minimum; we put our garden chairs / table in the back room to use as a dining room-come-study.

This, however, is a reasonably comfortable place to be, the lounge is *massive* (at least to us, compared to our old address). Hopefully we’ll soon have a completion date, and we can finish this silly game :)

Today the plan is to ring Andy’s Gas (to get a new gas bottle), to ring Be Internet and see if I can hold off their fee-to-be-paid-to-rejoin thing (‘cos we had the BT line disconnected and didn’t tell them – they want £10 to reconnect if it takes more than 1 month!), ring the solicitors and poke them, and I think I might have to tell the post office we need more redirection time.

Why this has been so overcomplicated and difficult I don’t really know. I am looking forward to having our stuff again, and to feeling settled. The stress has been seriously getting to me – yesterday I had to take the day (night) off sick, because I had serious IBS symptoms and spent most of the day running to the loo. Today I’m feeling faintly tense (I don’t really know why), I suppose after the last few days I feel like I’m waiting for the next disaster to befall us. Which is unfair really, because it’s not uncopeable with, it’s all stupid little stuff, frankly, given what other people deal with. I think I just don’t like the massive level of uncertainty.

In other topics, I’m intrigued by the fact that I’m not a big fan of rap (with the exception, perhaps, of this) I really like some of the stuff in the Best of Bootie 2010 which is very definately rap based. Is it that I don’t like rap, or is it that I’ve some sort of bias against rap, and when you hide it with music I know that I actually like it. Mrr.

What I do know is that I miss the amplifier and record deck and *MUSIC*. While the MacBook is doing it’s best, it’s hardly room-filling-music. And the selection of music I have on it is ‘limited’. *Sigh*.

So, last night Kathryn got home and had a ‘Discussion’ with the Landlord in which he listed an apparent catalogue of failures. When I got home we had a similar discussion, in which I avoided shouting at him, or hurling abuse, or screaming, or anything too bad on my side.

The failures boil down to the fact he’d have liked us to put our washing up away more promptly in the morning, don’t help with the recycling, and that he feels we are insular and don’t trust him (he went into our room without asking, when we weren’t there, which was why the discussion started today, so no, now we don’t trust him), and apparently we lack ’empathy’ for his ‘needs’ with his son (which it appear mean that he can traipse through our room whenever he fancies because of his son being home and him wanting to put the Xmas decorations away yesterday).

It was one of those discussions where one side is like teflon. I accept we’ve not been in the main house that much – but we indicated early on that we were *cold* and he said he didn’t want the heating on. Our solution was to supply our own heater, with our own fuel, which made it liveable. But also that meant we spent very little time elsewhere in the house (seriously, he turned the heating off because it was +6 C outside). Which leads to us spending time in the only warm room in the house. I didn’t have a diagnosis of Asthma before I moved in, because my symptoms never lasted long enough to be noticeable. After a month of living in his house my quietly background asthma has a persistant appearance long enough to be diagnosed.

I accept that we’ve not taken the recycling to the supermarket. This is because he, at no point, indicated that he’d like us to*. Nor did he tell us where it went. In Slough it went on the kerbside, all of it (except Tetrapak cartons), in Bristol this is apparently not the case. His mum mentioned that he took some of it to a recycling place, in passing a few weeks ago when I was chatting to her. Neither I, nor Kathryn is telepathic, you actually have to tell us if you want something done, not turn up after 3 months pissed off that we didn’t mysteriously grasp your requirements.

Anyhow, it ended with me saying that I’d do my best to get us out as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, that means us being in a hotel for a few days. Whilst having a Spa Bath is nice, and the full English in the morning is convenient (especially because I don’t think I’ll be having another hot meal today), even with the fairly huge discount it’s still painfully expensive and we still don’t know when the house is going to be available to us.

I’m feeling completely lost right now. I’m meant to be working, but I keep coming back to Russ damning us, and feeling lousy. I feel like crying, moving to Bristol was meant to improve things not make them 20 times more challenging. And it scares me, because we want to move to Canada, and suddenly that seems infinitely more challenging than it did before. While I’m still pleased we’re making the move, it’s wonderful to be around friends**, at the moment life is hard and tiring and I want to cry.

* However we do empty the bins, put out the food-waste-recycling, collect the bins and put them back inside the property boundary, sweep up in the kitchen, wash the surfaces and the cooker, do his washing up, dry up his stuff, put it away…
** Nikki and Kate bloody rock.

For-the-lose.

Run in with landlord, we suddenly need to live somewhere else.

Good news, I passed my first module.

So, apparently petrol went up 15% last year, roughly. That’s pretty painful, really, for those of us who’s incomes is a bit marginal at times. So, examining our possibilities we’ve come up with the following plan, which we hope to initiate on change-of-house.

1) Borrow / Fix my mum’s G-Wiz. If we can fix it, we buy it. Otherwise we sells-it for her for cash monies (for her).
2) Electrify the Minor. This requires planning, forethought, advice and research.
3) Keep the Volvo for long trips.
4) Podcast/Videocast/Zine (FTW!).
(more…)

Behind a cut, to save you all my whining. (more…)

Today, it seems, for me at least, is determined to suck. I had a nice simple plan for the day. Simple, but it seems, overambitious. The plan was: spend morning reading MSc stuff, eat lunch, do some more MSc stuff, take a break and head to ‘The Mall’ at Cribbs Causeway and complete the Vodafone phone purchase I started at the beginning of December. Come home, read more MSc stuff. Relax in the evening with a film.

Things I have achieved today: Reading some MSc stuff. Watching a film.

The day kinda went like this: Dink on internet, move car for Landlord, put off working. Start working. Realise after an hour of poking at the paper that however much I read it it’s like trying to decipher complex Egyptian hieroglyphics using a Ladybird book of Ancient Egypt. Come to grasp that an in-depth study of apoptosis is, perhaps, a challenging place to start. Decide to listen to the rest of the lectures and hope that my basic knowledge (essentially I understood the introduction, and while I *could* understand much of the contents, what it meant in any specific instance clinically – and remembering it any any meaningful way? That was kind of beyond where I’m at right now*) will allow me to grasp what I need and top up the rest later.

Anyhow, having ploughed through about 2 more hours of lecture I decided to have a break – I wasn’t particularly hungry and Nikki needed to run to the Mall, so… I collected Nikki for her errand and we pulled up at Cribbs Causeway. I shan’t regale you all with Nikki’s tale of woe, that’s for her to do.

I, for my part, went back to Vodafone who explained that they needed to run the credit check *again*, because it didn’t go through back when I visited them at the beginning of December. Okay, fair enough. Only it *did* go through on their first attempt – they just didn’t *realise it*. It got ‘referred’. This happens a lot because I’ve got married and my name on some things hasn’t caught up with my name for real. My bank have more than one name for me, and seem to accept both, according to what kind of documentation I happen to have on me at the time.

Then they added that they couldn’t *guarantee* the trade in on my phone. Apparently their scheme works thus: You send them your phone, they *might* send you money, or they might not, depending on the condition of the phone. If they don’t send you money you don’t get the phone back.

Let me just repeat that – if they aren’t happy with your phone they keep it and give you nothing. Well, that sounds reasonable…

So, I said, I’d go and see what everyone else could do. There’s T-Mobile, Orange, and O2 within a few tens of yards of Vodafone, and a ‘Phones 4U’. Sadly, it seemed that everyone could do, essentially, exactly the same as Vodafone and no better. And for the sake of keeping my 8 year old mobile number, I decided to stick with Voda.

Ye-eah.

So, I went back and they…reran the credit check. Which was referred, because… there’s an outstanding credit check in my name for Vodafone. Okay. Which they can’t fix until tomorrow.

Okay, I said, this is your mistake, you’ve now made me treck across Bristol twice to get a phone. Everyone else can offer me exactly the same deal – persuade me to stay. Give me *something* to make it worthwhile me sticking with Vodafone and not walking over there to O2 or Orange. I can walk into any of those stores and out with the phone I want right now. I was polite, but clearly somewhat peeved.

Here’s what they offered me:

NOTHING.

Fuck all.

He would offer *nothing* that would work with an iPhone. He could, he (the assistant manager) declared, offer me (and this was awesome) stuff that won’t work with an iPhone. He, he said, is not allowed to discount any iPhone compatible stuff.

I’m about to sign for a 2 year contract and pay for a phone and he…can’t offer me *anything*?

I gently pointed out that *he* was there with the person at my last visit, at the beginning of December who said “Leave it with me, I’ll sort it for you”. He stood his ground and said nope, he couldn’t do anything. At which point I said ‘Okay, I’ll go elsewhere’.

Which would have been great, but Orange were out of iPhone 4s, O2, also, out of iPhone 4s. O2, though, to their credit said ‘Go to the Apple store, you can sign up there… it’s just the same contract as here, and you can get your phone today’. Well, woot! I thought.

Uh. Yeah.

Apple store, very friendly, helpful and… their Credit Checking agency? Closed today. 3 hours and a considerable amount of frustration later we left Cribbs Causeway to their suckage. Still, all I need to do is develop a complete and total understanding of Critical Care and find enough spare time to ‘pop’ to Cabot Circus to collect my phone. The advantage being I can, at least, trade in my old iPhone at CeX when I’m in town.

* Which is reasonable, I’m not at that level, but saying ‘Oh read this little paper’, as an aside in course notes? Not helpful.

So, the plan was simple. Drop Kathryn off at work, get materials for eggnog and cookies, pop to bocabar for a nice cup of tea / coffee (and a cake) and some warm-not-in-our-room-time, head home, chill out for a bit, collect Kathryn, make stuff, bed.

The plan didn’t quite work out:
Drop Kathryn off at work (this went okay), get to Sainsbury’s – struggle because it’s not the store I ‘know’ and everything is in a different place. Eventually discover they have neither the right containers for eggnog travel holdation, nor full-fat-lactose-free-milk. Put back stuff I’d collected, and basket, make way out to car. Fight way out of car park.

Drive to Tesco, say ‘sod it’ and buy best available containers. Walk up-and-down the aisles looking for things because the big overhead banner things that say 18: Cheese, Goats, Alchemy Supplies don’t actually tally into the shelves, and it takes me a while to notice that in fact, baking ingredients are under ‘Cat Scratchers’ or some equally helpful marker. Find eggs. This takes some time, because they are – as usual – in their own special ‘egg zone’ far away from anything which might be considered related to egg usage. Assemble, from the many broken shards, a box that’s not covered in leaked egg, and a set of eggs which aren’t broken. Make way to tills, woman can’t get the ‘collar’ off the Rum bottle. She resorts to hitting it on the desk. Thankfully, the clip gives up before the bottle does.

Queue for petrol.

As usual when attempting to ‘fill’ the minor, get petrol over the back of Rebecca, and have to then wipe the car down*. Then I had the genius idea that I’d reconnect the fresh air hose – having covered her grille with cardboard she’s now actually almost, but not quite, reaching operating temperature (seriously, there’s a 4″ wide gap of radiator visible, and that keeps the engine temperature down to 75-80ish, the thermostat’s never opening**). This does, actually, appear to have had the desired effect that the air forced through the heater’s rattled along between the radiator and the air-dam (or cardboard sheet) first and so is pre-warmed a bit before hitting the heater, thus producing a warmer car interior. Putting it on ‘recirculate’ (or disconnecting the fresh air hose) has resulted, so far, in a car that’s quite warm right next to the heater, and cold everywhere else.

So, I think to myself, might as well give the Bocabar a go. Drive past, the place is visibly rammed full of people. Don’t think my social skills are up to it***, go home hoping that our landlord might have lit the fire and I could sit down there being a bit sociable and working on my course.

Get home, it’s the usual frigid temperature. Go and hide in room.

I’d never really understood the phrase ‘stir crazy’ but I’m beginning to get it. I can’t stand the sight of these 4 (well, 8) walls anymore. My moods have been insanely labile recently****, and right now I’m tired and want to quietly curl up for a bit. But I really should do some more course work, because I’ve done very little so far today.

So yeah. Best laid plans. etc.

* Modern pumps and Rebecca’s straight fuel filler neck don’t mix. Allowing it to ‘autostop’ normally involves a large amount of petrol on the floor, the back of the car and me. I normally just guestimate the amount I need and don’t fill her right up – but due to the multiple bank-holiday thing approaching and my need to get to work I felt it might be sensible to start with a *really* full tank.
** 90 Degree stat, y’know.
*** Shy+++, Tired and not feeling my best – a bar full of people? Meh, wish I could but unless I have to I’m not going to try and face that :-/
**** Despite things at work being better, I think the house and such is still getting the best of me.

So, yesterday was Kathmas! Or somesuch. Yesterday we celebrated Christmas, because as is often the case I’m working Christmas day (and boxing day), and this year, Kathryn’s working Christmas Eve (and boxing day). Not quite our traditional level of relaxation, sadly, due to a mistake on the shopping front we lacked a few bits for Christmas dinner.

Thankfully, being Kathmas, all the shops were open and we toddled down to the supermarket to get a few bits and bobs. We also meandered past the house that we should be in. I’d been vaguely wanting to trundle past for a while. I’m not quite sure why – a bit of persuading myself it’s worth it, a bit of making sure it’s not exploded/collapsed/being squatted in/a huge mistake. It’s dragged on so long and been such a desperate and stressful drag on us that I just needed a reminder that at the end of this stupid hassle, there is actually a nice house waiting.

Thankfully, ringing my mum yesterday, she commented (with marked delight) on the house (although I think the garden may well have been a significant factor in her opinion) having just seen the . On the plus side, I think it may be favourably placed for free Solar panels, which’d be cool, and I’ve found some stuff about external insulation for solid-walled buildings, which would also be good. Hopefully we can drag its energy efficiency up a fair bit.

Anyhow, so, Kathmas – awesome presents, and lovely just to spend the day curled up with my love. We’ve got our little habitat christmas tree (with it’s little white lights) glowing away in the corner of the room. It feels lovely and and christmassy, and adds some much needed cheer to our room. Tomorrow, is of course, everyone else’s Christmas – so Happy Christmas everyone, hope you have a great day.