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  • The cool and the uncool.

    Well, I did some tidying, when I’ve finished my tea I’ll throw a second coat on the wall around the window in the kitchen. Looking at coat 1 I’d say two more and we should be there. It should look smooth enough to paint with real paint :-/

    So, via primitivepeople comes Caffenol film developing, a concept which is terribly interesting. We have no dark-room here, though, which makes it more difficult. We don’t even have, as my parents had, a cupboard under the stairs in which you could fairly easily block out nearly all the light (and thereby load and unload film). However, the awesomeness of it, as a concept, entertains me and it’s something I definately want to try.

    Uncool is how I’d describe this police campaign. I’m totally with Boingboing on this, it undermines society, it makes people unnecessecarily scared and is a snooper’s charter. Jeeze, if this had been around when I was a kid my parents house would have been raided weekly. My dad’s stock of interesting electrical components and the vast number of chemicals from a youth and adulthood of scientific interest would have caused our neighbours no-end of fear.

    What we need instead is a run of this poster (yeah, you know which one) and we need to slather the UK in it. We need to stop these creeps. These people who want you to be scared. They are dragging us all into their police state. When I was young the IRA periodically blew up bits of the UK, there were regular bomb scares, and y’know what, we didn’t go peering into our neighbours bins*, and cow-towing to each and every request to dispose of the privacy we had. The world went along as it always had and we dealt. But now, now the government instead wants us to fear, because then we’ll hand them control over every last bit of our lives…

    …How much d’y’think it’d cost to run off enough Keep Calm and Carry On’s to cover the UK’s major cities?

    *Unless there was something interesting I wanted, like, say a BBC Micro…

  • Slack

    So I’ve sat here all morning, more or less, though to be fair I didn’t get home until after midnight. Interestingly the Late Late wasn’t quite as bad as I’d imagined, although it was more thanks to being a ‘floater’ (charming term ;) ), which means that basically you go where you’re needed. So while it was manically busy, none of it was my responsibility, and I just pottered about doing jobs in majors, minors, and a bit in resus. Popped some stitches in, did a plaster. It was actually quite fun.

    Sometimes it can be lousy not being in a specific ‘team’ (Minors/Majors/Resus), but yesterday I was in a cheerfully good mood, and didn’t really mind.

    I checked on my nights roster too; I’ve been moved from my night group and was hoping to get back into it; but they’ve redrafted it since and now I’m the most ‘skilled’ person in my night group. In-so-far as I stitch ‘most everything, I plaster some stuff, and I ‘triage’. I’ve also noticed people keep asking me questions.

    People keep leaving and lots of new people have arrived since I joined, so there are times when you’re the one who’s been there longest, and that’s a freaky-deaky. I don’t feel like I know enough to answer these questions.

    Sometimes I do.

    But most of the time I still feel like a kid who’s been put in charge of all this stuff.

    It’s scary!

    Anyhow.

    So this morning I’ve been slack. Not getting up ’til 9, not doing anything much since I’ve got up, other than eating breakfast. I’ll have another little dink at the office, I suspect; try and see if I can find the sofa-bed under all the stuff; hang my bike gear up; that kind of thing.

    I’m waiting for the bits to arrive for Vixy and Jejy. It’s like waiting for a taxi. I don’t want to get deeply involved in anything because as soon as those bits arrive I want to be out of the door and working on the cars. On the other hand, I doubt that they’ll be here that quickly. I hope they will, but it seems unlikely.

    Anyway. Movement is the order of the day I feel. Comfy though the sofa is.

  • ‘m okay!

    So, my good friend Nikki rang me up after the last post, concerned that I sounded very down and wanting to check I was okay. She’s kind and thoughtful like that.

    So I thought I’d just say, I’m okay. It’s perhaps a healthy dose of realism time. I’ve been sticking solidly to the “the house will sell for enough and we’ll go to Canada” belief because of the options we’ve got it’s my favourite. To use the house metaphore, it’s the one I’ve built foundations for, I’d been looking at the plans and preparing to get contractors. It worked thusly:

    Buy house
    Fix house
    Sell house, use funds thus obtained to enable us to
    1) Go to Canada
    2) Me to pay off *all* my debts
    3) Have some savings to live off in Canada if it all goes pearshaped
    And I’d added:
    4) Hopefully have enough that some of those savings can be scooped off for our notional world trip in a few years time.

    There wasn’t really a plan B. I knew that the housing market was going to plummet in just the way that bricks do, I just hoped it did it after I’d (now) we’d sold. Unfortunately, my hopes lacked the strong foundations of reality.

    The new ‘plan’, for want of a better word, is to finish the house (because whether we’re living in it, or selling it, I’d rather like it not to niggle like a splinter. The unfinished floor in the lounge, the dirty old door* in our shiny new kitchen), get it valued and make the rest of the plan based on the outcome of that.

    – Sell and get to Canada ASAP
    – Sell and move somewhere else in the UK (I don’t need to clear my debts to do that**)
    – Enjoy the lovely environs of Slough.

    I’m rooting for A, hoping that at worst B comes off and trying to think about ways to make C more bearable. Ironically, the house is coming together to be a really lovely place. The garden should be beautiful this year, and even more so next; there should be fruit and fresh veg, herbs and gorgeous flowers…

    If it weren’t for the builder’s yard right behind it would be glorious*** .

    Anyway, so I’m okay. I’m just…. disappointed.

    In other news, I just realised that I’ve owned Rebecca 17 years. That was quite a shock. And in another quirky thing I’ve never noticed before; she was first registered on my mum’s birthday. How bizzare is that? It’s funny how coincidence pops up on you.

    Now, What shall I do with this last hour before I go to work? I’ve swept the bedroom (and put clothes away), and looked depressingly at my Student Loan deferment thing (I think I may finally have to actually start paying back the loans****). Hrm, maybe I’ll watch some Holmes on Holmes.

    Tomorrow is another day, and I’m hoping a day when bits of DAF might turn up.

    * Needs the 1960s hardboard overcoat taking off, then it needs stripping and painting.
    ** I don’t, I suppose, technically need to clear my debts to move to Canada, but it really makes everything a lot more complicated if I don’t. And it makes living much harder to do. It’s bad enough here where I can go and chat and shuffle my lack of money around. There… well…
    *** It *was*, when I moved in, a wild untended lot. It was pretty.
    **** Confusingly my loans are owned by two separate companies. I’m not sure if I’ll get two separate student-loan-deferment letters, and need to make payments to two separate companies. That would be distressing. But only one of them has been flagged as ‘needing payment’ in this letter. It appears I won’t make my dream of never paying them back by remaining a poorly paid wage-slave.

  • Nights, without the benefit

    So, tonight I’m on what I laughingly call a novelty shift. Novelty shifts were invented by our department to cover times when we’re exceptionally busy. Mostly they cover evenings and nights. There used to be one novelty shift to cover the fact our long days weren’t quite as long as doing an early and a late (a so called ‘long-long day’). Now there’s about 200.

    I have little idea when they start or finish. But today’s novelty one is a faux nightshift. It starts in the afternoon and runs on, depressingly, into the night… when you feel like you should be going home you’ve actually got another 4 hours.

    I’ve so-far managed to avoid them, but today, no. Today I leave home an hour before Kathryn gets here, and get home after she’s gone to bed.

    This, as far as I’m concerned, is less than ideal. Especially since after a conversation at the weekend with Paramito it looks possible that the houseprices we’re seeing are far-enough inflated that we may not be able to sell the house; in-so-far-as I can’t afford to actually loose money. Whilst selling it and moving somewhere that needs a bit of decorating (but nothing so extreme as here) seems feasible if we can at least recoup sale+cost of purchase price, if we can’t recoup that…

    …. :(

    My mum reminded us to be positive, and that looking at [Slough and being stuck staying in Slough] in such a negative way would not make us feel more positive. But it’s hard to feel positive.

    I’ll be doubly frustrated if we’re stuck here because I didn’t apply to do the Critical Care course at work on the basis that we wouldn’t be stuck here, and if we are, then I really should have done it :(

    Ach. Well, anyway. No point in looking back.

  • BSG Finale

    So, BSG has been, without doubt, my favourite series, probably ever. Well, perhaps tied with Firefly, but firefly never had the chance to grow and develop the complexity that BSG had. Firefly it was all in the back story, BSG was able to take the back story and develop it while you watched. And bring you more bits of back story as it went along.

    BSG has been a regular component of my TV viewing since 2003, and with the odd uneven episode it’s been the most incredible show to watch unfold.

    The characters are complex and flawed. Their interrelationships difficult. And I suppose having just seen the disaster that was the L word finale, I was worried that I would watch the BSG finale and be left disappointed and frustrated.

    That isn’t what happened. I cried, I felt elated, I was engaged and completely involved in what happened. The whole episode was incredibly well written, the endings touching and appropriate and perfect.

    I can’t really do it any more justice than to link to Howlsthunder’s post (spoilers) which says all I want to say.

    I look forward to The Plan and Caprica. And it’s one of the few things I’d want in HD to watch on a really big screen, because it is beautifully shot.

  • Another day in the dirt

    Not all car stuff today; to skip the car stuff just scroll down to where it proclaims that car stuff endeth. :)

    So, today I shuffled the cars to get the Minor on the drive, and whipped off the ill-fitting exhaust, separated the 45 degree segment at the base of the downpipe (which I spent about 40 minutes attacking last time with ‘penetrating oil’, this time I got the Plus-Gas on it, and the thing just came apart. Simple as that). Then, with Kathryn’s help, we reattached the exhaust.

    Only took from 11am to 3pm. I’m not very good at exhaust fitting, and having done it we drove into town and… it’s rattling against something at the back. Usually this is the exhaust hitting the fuel tank; not a soothing noise at the best of times; so that’s something to attack later.

    Then I spent about half an hour adjusting the mixture. She’s been running rich and idling too high. A bit of a tweak to that and she’s now idling at a much more sensible speed and lord knows what the mixture’s doing. I suck at setting carbs up, I keep meaning to buy a colortune to aid in my attrociousness. The DAFs have a much more ‘relaxed’ carb than the HiF44 in the Minor, which is slightly worn (not terribly so, she doesn’t hunt horribly at idle) and which has proper mixture adjustment.

    Still, she’s running okay, so I’m going to presume it’s alright for the minute.

    Next week will be more car stuff, hopefully, in so far as I’m hoping that the brake bits will arrive for Jejy and Vixy and we can get them assembled.

    Then comes the difficult decision, which of the cars to take on holiday with us. We’re looking at around 1000 miles plus whatever motoring we do while we’re there. The minor’s swivel pins are worn, but I don’t know how badly. Jejy’s a big no-no, without the new clutch drum she’s not going anywhere far (so that’s easy), but Vixy? Vixy’s kind of an unknown quantity. Unknown quantities aren’t good for holiday relaxing, I find, but on the other hand she’s been recently serviced by a garage, she’ll have new brakes, she’s got a spare pair of belts in the boot…

    …and only 21k on the clock.

    We’ll see.

    Anyway, hopefully we’ll have less car-posts for y’all once this is done. Then we can return to the ‘house posts’

    car stuff endeth here

    Mind you, I ought to do a garden post because the garden is *awesome*. Kathryn spent time today breaking up soil and prepping it, then planted some of our wild-flower seeds; she’s hacked down pruned the buddleia, out the front, which officially needs to be dug up and moved into the raised bed at the front, but since the builders haven’t quoted (or contacted me) then, uh, that’s not quite happening yet. The back garden is looking really very nice; when she takes the photos off her camera and flickr’s them I’ll linky.

    It is just amazing to look at the ground and go ‘my god, they’re beans. They are our beans, that we planted and they’re growing. I could get quite into gardening, I fear. It’s really lovely though, to go out there, in the nice weather we’ve been having and see plants we planted growing, and indeed growing well. It’s not like either of us is particularly ‘green fingered’, but we’ve got good soil, and my mum’s around to help and advise us (and Kathryn’s mom is available for advice too :) ) and it’s come together to be a really restful place, potentially.

    And the lie and deception which is the gravel-over-concrete path appears to be working.

    Anyhow, now it’s time to make dinner. So I shall scoot.

  • I have this terrible problem

    If I don’t get what I want done, and I imagine that it’s a reasonable amount of work that I’ve set myself, I feel very negative about the things I did achieve. I feel like I should have worked on the Minor, but I know, logically, that I’ve never managed to get a decent seal on the LCB manifold without help. And therefore, what would have been the point? And had Jagdev have said ‘yes, I can get the parts’ when I rang then I’d’ve been stuck. On the other hand, when we hit mid-day I should have realised I’d not get the brake parts in time to fit and bleed them, so I should, maybe, have started work on the Minor.

    At any rate, tomorrow I’ll have to get up early and do the Minor. I can douse the connections on Jejy and Vixy in plusgas too, in the hope that when I come to try and remove them I’ll actually manage to get them off in one piece.

    Looking at the positives: While the radio is tatty, it is fitted. The parts I need are ordered and possibly even winging their way here. And I painted the kitchen window aperture (whatever it’s called) with basecoat to cover the shite layer of paint and flakey plaster up at the top of the window and the not-great plastering I did on the left hand edge. Ready to paint, my arse.

    As a side point, I’ve not heard back from the builders about the quote for new work or fixing the old work since their ‘I’ll ask such-and-such’. See, negative.

  • Angst ridden noises

    So, Danny rang me back shortly after I sent the e-mail to confirm the parts list, and I just ordered them. I thought I’d been exceptionally lucky getting Jejy back on the road, that’s now been retracted. 2 painfully expensive new cylinders have been ordered for her. And just the one for Vixy, who’s had one done already. Tyres will have to wait. They’re legal, and I’ll swap two of the new tyres (the rears) from Jejy, so they’ll both have good front tyres. The back ones will just have to be not as nice as I’d like. They’re legal, and that’ll have to be good enough.

    Later, later I shall get decent tyres for both cars.

    Perhaps by then 145/80 R14s will have been produced at a price I can afford.

    Anyhow, now, I know that voltage-depression is the correct term for what I think of as Memory Effect, but voltage depresson or memory effect or whatever you want to call it, clearly my NiMH’s have got it up the wazoo, or indeed up to any stupidly named place. Now variously people say ‘discharge them completely’ or ‘Do not, under any circumstances, discharge them completely’. But the ‘do not dischargers’ appear to have no real fix for voltage depression, and since my batteries are completely useless in their current state (I got 6 photos out of the camera with them in), then I thought I might as well try discharging them completely. The cost of building a discharger is about £1 (my dad used to have one of a similar design (i.e. some bulb holders and some battery holders and some 1.2v bulbs)) and it did help the NiCds, but I’m not sure if it’ll help the NiMHs, being completely different chemistry’n’all. If it works then the occasional discharge cycle can be appied to all my dying NiMH, if it doesn’t, I’ve wasted a quid. Darn.

    At any rate, this was all just a long intro to some pictures of Vixy.

  • Progress, but not in a very useful direction

    So, I spent some time fitting the radio ‘properly’ to the car (there’s a bit of a limitation to how neat it was going to be without damaging the dash, and I didn’t want to do that*). The Rover cassette radio (with presets no less, thanks John!) has been fitted into the ‘standard ISO’ holder -attrocious quality as it was, the wiring held out the way with tie-wraps, and all of it neatly crimped with my new crimping tool (nowt exciting, just a plain ordinary press as hard as you can crimper).

    I bought a stick-on glass mount aerial (yes, I know they’re not great, but I really didn’t fancy drilling holes in the bodywork to fit an aerial; and quite frankly, unless it’s roof mounted I think people like to snap them.

    The total cost of that little toy? 10 quid.

    I need to fix down the speakers at the back – I ‘fitted’ them yesterday but as I said, they’re just resting on the parcel shelf at the moment.

    I’m still waiting for the elusive call back from the auto-factor. I’m now 99% certain the parts won’t be arriving today, if he can order them, and in a few minutes I’m going to declare that time’s up and order the bits from Danny in Holland.

    It’s frustrating because I could have ordered them this morning and spent the day sorting out the Minor, but instead the whole morning’s been spent doing footling little jobs and watching TV waiting for a phonecall…

    …’I can’t get them anywhere’
    [thinks: “well why the frack did you not actually call and tell me that?!]
    “Oh, that’s okay, I’ll order them from Holland”.

    *sighs*

    Customer service here sometimes sucks. But at least we can do maths…

    * In the end I opted to drill two very small holes (2.5mm) under the dash. Everything else is run through existing holes. Should anyone ever want to make her standard again they just have to weld up two tiny holes and paint over it with black.

  • Impatient

    I hate not doing anything when there’s stuff to do. I’ve got a minor that needs the exhaust ripping off, separating the 45degree angle from the downpipe. I’ve got a DAF which has poured it’s brakefluid out from one wheel cylinder. I’ve got another DAF which is weeping fluid out of one cylinder and pulls dramatically towards that side. I also need to double check that I got sent the right cylinder on the other side, only…the only explanation for the other cylinder pulling with fresh shoes is…that the new cylinder’s smaller*. People make mistakes, eh. It looked *much* smaller than the spare cylinder (which is definately the right size).

    Anyway, there’s jobs.

    And I’m sat watching TV. Because I don’t want to start the Minor if he can get the bits for the DAF. I don’t want to start the DAF if I can’t get the bits for it.

    So I’m waiting. Impatiently. For a phonecall.

    Gah.

    * Actually, talking to the DOC it may be tyre related too, people have had bizzare pullings rectified by new tyres. I need to know the cost of the cylinders so I can order tyres…