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So, unsurprisingly with the lots-of-DIY and lots-of-gardening and rental-of-storage unit, fund have hit an appauling new low. Irritatingly, this has occurred at the same time as I’m unable to top them up with agency shifts :(

This is distressing, because really we want to get the house ready to sell – there’s not a lot more that we need to buy, which is fortunate, but any bits and pieces may have to wait. But it’s going to be tight this month, and probably next too. I keep wishing and hoping that the rest of the inheritance would arrive – but obviously, it’ll arrive in it’s own time. Although I am beginning to wonder what the tax people are up to.

Anyway, I should get on. I just thought I’d update with the financial crisis in my bank account.

So, I looked in the tank on the ‘zed before setting off from work. Meh, I thought, just about enough to get me home and back to the petrol station on the way tomorrow. I didn’t count on the massive headwind and the boxes I’d got strapped to the back of the bike…

…about 7 miles from home (on the motorway) the bike died – and I flipped to where I think ‘Reserve’ is. Only it’s not, because it’s a new fuel tap – and it turns out I’ve been using Reserve the whole time. Cue quick dash for the hard-shoulder. Thankfully, though the old trick of tipping the bike right over on it’s side to get the dregs of the fuel over the hump in the tank worked like a dream. I had to do it twice, but she had enough fuel to get me to the petrol station 2 miles away – a nice friendly Highway Office in tow…

I celebrated by stamping the footpeg back into roughly the right position and telling her she’s an ace bike. I might even check the chain tension on Saturday. Hell, I might *even* give her a wash.

So, another house that we liked has sold. I’m not as attached as I was to the house in Rudgeway (which incidentally, still shows up as ‘under offer’) – but it was a good potential. So, poot.

Still, we’re working towards selling – we’ve been packing up stuff with the thought that it’ll make decorating and dressing the house easier – and we got a quote for carpeting the upstairs and the stairs… Painful.

We’ve also continued to plant things out and attempt to keep the slugs from destroying our plants. This has involved giving in and buying bottled water; not because we want bottled water, but because we want the bottles. These bottles are then placed happily over the plants protecting them from the ravages of the sluggybeasts, one of which had found it’s way onto a Tomato that was out being hardened out.

Frustratingly it’d lopped of a big leaf and was working it’s way through the poor thing’s main stem – but Kathryn caught it in time.

Anyhow. Today is a work day, so I need to go and shower.

Look, you don’t need two houses. Well, not to own two houses. If you *want* to, and you’re paid enough then fine – that’s all hunky dory. Out of your *salary* it comes.

But we, the people, shouldn’t be paying for that. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have some accommodation in London, that’s totally appropriate (for MPs who live outside of London). That’s why we should supply MPs with accommodation – not to own, not to furnish with antiques and duckponds and moats at the public’s expense. Just nice, simple apartments.

A block or two of nice, simple apartments in London for the MPs. We the public build it, we stop paying any kind of allowance. They don’t have to pay council tax on it – unless it’s their only property. End of story.

No more figures to fiddle, no more complex rules. You get a flat, if you’ve got a family you get a flat with an adequate number of rooms, it’s furnished with your basic white-goods, and the MP supplies the rest (or maybe gets a single allowance for purchasing beds/sofas/etc – which are donated to charity at the end of the MP’s occupancy).

Et voila. It’s solved.

So, the garden is looking beautiful, and apart from continued lettuce disasters (seriously, we can’t win with that darn plant) and my accidental destruction of a plant (dropped my back protector on it by accident) things appear to be growing well. It is, in fact, beautiful out there.

But there is one thing causing torment. Aphids. We were hoping that ‘natural pest control’ (i.e. bugs and birds eating other bugs) would limit their destruction. Last year they unleashed themselves on a variety of plants an caused them to look rather sad and not fruit well, and so on. This year, we hoped, this would be overcome by the sheer number of birds and buzzythings that hop/fly around the garden. Well, I hoped that. That and just thought it might not be so bad.

We are also much less tolerant of weeds, have removed the Swiss Chard they seemed to delight in living on and have been meaner to the ants*.

But no.

All the fruit bushes and a couple of other plants have succumbed to the Aphid terror. And nothing much that we do really seems to clear them. And so I admit to being a weak human, I’ve sprayed a few of the plants. We’ve got some organic aphid/whitefly killer – which appears to consist of some sort of weak acid with plant lipids around. It says that it’s safe to spray on fruits and won’t hurt other things and all the feeble promises which I assuage some of my guilt with. But seriously, the entire of the blackcurrant, raspberry, gooseberry and other blackcurrant bushes were curled up leaves wrapping aphid egg colonies.

I’m doing my best to be really ‘strict’ about where this stuff goes. And spraying it fairly infrequently, and I’m pleased to see that the bees are buzzing around the other plants quite happily (the Angelica is, apparently, very popular with them and is handily at the other end of the garden). The rest of the garden seems fairly unaffected, and birds and bees and other bugs seem to wander around quite happily.

But I have the guilt about the aphids.

As a side point, we also appear to have something which is munching down on the young-fresh-tender leaves. This is distressing too, but since we don’t know what it is it’s much harder to stop it. What we really need is some empty plastic bottles so we can put little mini greenhouses over the plants until they get big enough to tolerate such damage. Sadly, much of the Purple Sprouting Broccoli that went out (12 plants) has been eaten, as have nearly all of the beetroot, which was going to make for nice tasty salad leaves. I’m beginning to think that salad may not, in fact, be our thing.

In house news, the quotes vary a fair bit – I think everyone’s quoted including doing the dormer – certainly the one person who specified said ‘first list – £X, dormer/loft £Y-Z depending’. The first figure from that person is incredibly low, and I don’t think they read the list very carefully. Not that they need to, this is finger in the air hand-waving-price-guessing, not some accurate quote.

I’ve poked the other two who quoted, because if they’re all saying ‘yeah this includes doing the dormer’ then the house becomes *way* more affordable, and if we *can* do the dormer as well – I’m quite tempted to e-mail the appropriate council and find out whether it’s a ‘planning permission’ or a ‘building regulations permission’ because the latter is much easier to deal with – and would make the house an enormously better buy.

No jobs yet, though. If I’d trained as a doctor there’d be several jobs, and nothing, upsettingly from the Ambulance Service I e-mailed. Anyhow. Hopefully something will come up for Kathryn and I, because we’re both feeling a bit down about it all. The difficulty and complexity of achieving escape velocity to get out of Slough is proving to be fairly demanding.

* Although I can’t help but wonder if they’ve not made a little anty nest somewhere under the gravel.

So, I seem to still have a cold. I think I have. Normally when I have hayfever it’s just clear gunk – at the moment it’s kinda yellow – so I’m assuming that my body’s not yet decided to be rid of the cold. Which is annoying, because on top of the cold – or the cold on top of the hayfever, well, it’s pretty tedious.

In news, no jobs yet. I’ve e-mailed an ambulance service to see if they’re doing the ‘Ambulance Nurse’ thing yet. That would be fun – especially if I could do it 3/7 and then do A&E agency 2/7. Keeping my toe in, as it were. Work on the house is slow, because I’m on lates. I keep contemplating it, but the desire to work all morning and *then* do a shift at work, when it’s so bloody awful at work at the moment, well let’s say the desire is lacking. I have, however done more in-head thinking about it.

I’ve also been doing stuff for the Court Case. I’ve got to carry on in a moment digging out all the letters, but I’m quite pleased with what I’ve got so far [snip, ‘cos I’m probably not meant to talk about it so much]. The report from JLH is pretty damning, and the metalwork cluttering up the bedroom is pretty incontrovertible evidence. Combined with the nice diagram they sent of the work they did… :)

On the house front, the estate agent’s been vaguely positive about the house we’re considering, and I’ve posted a ‘Renovation’ job on ‘My Builder’ to see if I can get a few quotes – hopefully if they’re okay we can keep the house on the list. It’s an exciting possibility – frustratingly very little garage potential, but hey – something had to give in the budget, and I think it’s the same thing that gave here.

Anyhow, I have to get back to planning my court case.

But before I go, don’t forget tomorrow is a new Dead Bug Jumping Day! http://bit.ly/b2c625 (subscribe with itunes) or http://bit.ly/aYkJgE (subscribe with anything else).

So, those of you in the know are aware that we spent the weekend looking at houses. Lots of them. 3 we had proper estate-agent viewings of, and we also went on a massive tour of Bristol during which we eliminated a vast number of neighbourhoods from our ‘possibilities’ list – a huge number of houses – and I discovered that projects are all that thrill me.

In the end we narrowed it down to a couple of areas – one of which we’d really like to live in, several of which we wish we could live in but are totally ridiculously unaffordable and from our selection of three houses, only one emerged as a possibility. It’s an exciting possibility, but it needs such vast utterly incomprehensible amounts of work that the only way to think about it is as ‘buying a shell’. The house is appaulingly filthy, the plaster is unsalvagable, and the layout of the house as it currently stands lacks finesse.

But it’s got a lot of potential.

But only if the owner will take vastly less than it’s on the market for. Frankly, it’s hugely overpriced considering it’s condition, and depressingly it doesn’t have a garage. There’s faint hope of a ‘sheltered area’ that could be organised, if the neighbours would allow occasional access – but it won’t ever be a proper garage. Anyhow, it lurks as a possibility, and we have a couple of others that are worthy of consideration.

It’s not like we’re in a hurry, neither of us has a job and the house isn’t on the market yet (tbh, seeing the perfect house would have been quite depressing – indeed we drove past the house I wanted (in Rudgeway) and that was a bit sad, because it is awesome). Anyhow, it’s all progress.

One problem with the house being a complete bloody tip (which it is, and that’s mostly my fault, because it’s full in every last corner with stuff that my mum wanted to bin that I thought ‘hey, I should e-bay that’) is that I can’t fracking find *anything*. I’m meant to be shooting shots of the stuff to sell, but I can’t find the fracking tripod *anywhere*. And it must be here somewhere, but I’ve no flipping idea where. I have looked everywhere sensible, and now I’m off to look dumb places.

I have three current projects and a couple of other bits going on, the first of which is finishing the house, the second is selling vast quantities of ‘stuff’ on e-bay, and the third is DBJ. DBJ is the only one that’s enjoyable, really, and so gets more me-time than I probably should devote to it.

I have recently picked up a Goldring Lenco GL-68 which need a bit of a service (I think the idler wheel isn’t worn, but the mechanism that moves it is either not moving as freely as it should or isn’t quite positioned right – so I’ll be taking it apart a bit to service it). It also needs a cartridge and a stylus, unfortunately.

I’ve narrowed that down to a choice of three, I think:

The most expensive is the Chuo Denki: CN234 Cartridge, then there’s the Sonotone: 3509 Stereo Cartridge and then there’s the Tetrad: TC12 (51) Cartridge. I don’t think any of them are particularly inspiring – but they all have the requisite 78 needle and all have a standard ½ inch mounting. The Chuo Denki one doesn’t necessarily incorporate a stylus at that price, which means it’d be another £25 for the stylus on top of that price – which definately pushes it into the pricey bracket. But I can’t help but feel it’d probably be better quality than the old needle on a stick ones that go into the Sonotone and Tetrad cartridges.

Anyhow, the other projects have not had enough time as they should, so today, now having finished throwing paint at the end of the door (not the whole door, you understand, just the end) I shall be taking me, myself and I into the kitchen for a massive photoshoot of many, many e-bayable things.

Wish me luck, for boredom shall soon be my partner.

So, we’re starting to get on with the completion of the renovation of the house, and have set ourselves the onto market date of end of June. Not that we’ve got jobs or anything, but hey, what do such trifling issues have to do with moving?

We’ve also started to discuss the potential issues around ‘we have jobs but the house hasn’t sold’ – not so much the ‘we have no jobs and the house has sold’. How does anyone do this? It seems painfully complicated and terribly difficult. The bugger of it is because the NHS is completely and improbably dysfunctional (and entirely made of completely separate entities) it’s not like I can apply for ‘internal jobs’ because they’re only open within the specific trust. Not that I’ve even seen any ‘internally open only’ jobs. I’ve not seen ANY ED jobs in Bristol for staff nurses, which is painfully depressing.

Anyhow, positive thoughts and all (difficult with the annoying sinus headache which has decided to lurk, irritatingly above my right eye).

Today and yesterday have been positive steps in bringing the house to market. Having spent much of yesterday cleaning up (it didn’t feel that successful, but some of it was sorting the vast piles for e-bay-age) I also primed some of the wood that needs painting. Today I’ve finally relaid that bit of floor that I needlessly took up in the bathroom when the valve was leaking. Should have realised – constant drip means constant water supply; unlikely to be waste water if it’s a constant drip. Bah. Anyhow it’s relaid and I then spent a few minutes fixing down some squeaky floor boards, unfortunately this then revealed more floor boards that squeak and after brief consideration I decided an endless task wasn’t what I wanted.

Now, however I’m sitting out in the garden enjoying a restful break while I boil an egg for lunch. Then it’s the home-made rosemary bread and cheese sandwich, egg, and even some crisps before I head off to B&Q. Whyfor to B&Q? Because I need change. I bought a 78 playing record deck for Dead Bug Jumping (which does, much to my surprise, seem to be developing a solid listener base. Either I’m not that badder presenter, the shows interesting, or someone’s paying people to listen…). Unfortunately, it’s cash on collection and oddly while I thought I had the odd fiver lying around, it turns out I don’t. So I need to go and get change, and the easiest way to do that is to head to B&Q and buy something we’ll need at some point during the redecoration process, such as, say, the colour matched paint of which we have run out for the kitchen. We would not have run out, obviously, if the arsehole builders at the Trade Trust had bothered to put joist hangers in, and we hadn’t had to have a huge section of ceiling lopped out, joist hangers put in, and the ceiling and wall repaired and repainted. But because they didn’t bother with such trifles, now I need to go and get more paint.

Anyhow, my egg should be ready, so lunch :)

Ooh, ooh, before I go we have a Robin who has decided to pop in and out of the garden and clearly has no concerns about humans. He hopped around us, so long as we were fairly still, in a manner that was most cute.