This should, by rights, be my review of last year. But it’s not. That is coming (so hold your metaphorical horses), but instead I bring you breaking news from the family. My mother’s got engaged.
And a happy new year to you all.
There endeth this broadcast.
So, this year has for the most part been a good one, my mother’s continuing depression not withstanding. But, apparently I was feeling too good about it, because it’s opted to remind me of the worst bits just as I’m leaving. I know I’m tired, and this is the worst time to deal with money issues, and with BT. BT have *again* screwed up my leaving. So, let’s run through trying to depart from BT Broadband. Infact, to avoid me going through it in an angry hissy fit when I’m doing my year review, let’s do it all now:
– BT Got the start date wrong
– Supplied faulty equipment that they refused to replace, including a phone which they appear to know is faulty but appear to continue to supply.
– Promised they’d ring me, but didn’t.
– Eventually after many broken promises supplied equipment that worked badly, but adequately for me to ‘deal with it’
– On cancellation of the BT Broadband put a ‘Stop’ on the ADSL line making it impossible to transfer to another supplier without a long break in service despite giving me a MAC code.
– Promised they’d ring me back, because they’re system was down, but didn’t.
– ‘Fixed’ the ‘Stop’ by cancelling my BT Broadband cancellation and recancelling it as a ‘transfer’, supplying a new MAC code.
– Have now billed me because “you cancelled with less than one month warning”.
– Have now put me through to 3 separate departments, each of which goes ‘ah, not our problem’, and seem surprised that I’m becoming somewhat terse.
– Alledge that they have refunded the incorrectly billed amount. I have had, again, to appolgise for being somewhat terse (which isn’t something I enjoy), and on this occasion have remembered to take the person’s name, so that I can quote it if there are future problems.
Argh.
I don’t need this right now, not when I’ve got the bill through for Rebecca. It means that at new year I’m going to have to prod one of my close friends for paperwork so we can get back money owed to us. I know it’s not a big deal for her, but for me that money was meant to pay off a big chunk of my credit card and is now going to have to pay back a big chunk of my car’s work. I hate having to push about money, but it’s been a long old time, and I’m really stressed about my finances at this point. I’m just going to have to work all the hours I can; other people manage multiple long days a week, and it’s the only way I’m going to be able to afford to do anything – I’ll try and mainly make them days when Kathryn’s on a full day at work.
The sad thing is, this is an interim invoice. This is basically getting the structure (which I thought was what my father paid another company to repair) repaired to make her sound.
This is nearly 2,000 pounds of remedial work that I should not have had to get done, because it wasn’t done properly the first time around. Worse than that, they’ve spent over 50 hours on her, that’s a week and a half. I’m paid approximately 1/3rd, per hour, as they charge. So I have to work 3 and a half solid weeks to make that money back – and I still won’t have a driveable car. After that the engine needs around a further grand (hopefully less) of work to get it to the state I want it to be for Canada. I wanted turreted rear shock absorbers, because the standard (reconditioned) ones wear out so quickly; and I wanted it done by experts, but I don’t think I can afford it. And having seen how bodged the rear of my car was, I’m scared for what a mess they might have made of the front. She handles well, really well for a 40 year old car. But, if they’ve bodged the alignment of the front chassis legs?
And under all that waxoyl they sprayed around; there’s no paint. There’s probably nothing in the A posts that support the doors. Any concealed metal work I can’t assume they’ve painted, and I don’t know what to do with it. JLH’s only suggestions are way out of my budget, we’re talking into the thousands, just to rectify the damage that the other restoration place have done. How can they do that? I shall make a priority this coming year of getting some of this money back. I shall go and see solicitors; frankly, I want all the money back. Because that might be enough to strip and dip the car, and then repaint it, and if they do that then hopefully they won’t find too many other bodges lurking in the dark and we can save the metal that’s there before it rusts out completely (the depressing photoset is here).
One thing that saddens me, also, is I suspect that the EV concept will have to be ditched, because I’m going to almost certainly have to sell Brick to get the money to pay for Rebecca. I’m not concerned about selling Brick in the long run, but it was a fun concept and I was quite looking forward to it. I still think it’s the right concept, in general terms. Classic UK cars are light and big enough to contain the batteries to carry them. The classic EV would be a great and clean way to have a Zero Emissions at Vehicle, uh, vehicle and a classic. Most of these classics were powered by engines that, by modern standards, are insanely small. The Viva weighs in at just over 3/4 ton, and yet is dragged around by an engine that produces maybe 50bhp. Simple bodies that are easily repariable give you the potential for a long life vehicle. Retrim the interior, rebuild the suspension and you’ve got yourself a new car… more or less… for far less resources than building a new car’d take.
But I don’t have the money for that spare. I don’t have money spare. I guess 2008 is expecting me to put up a fight, and although right now I don’t feel much able to do that; I reckon that with a little love and support I’ll survive. Anyhow, I really ought to go shower, I’m on a ridiculously horrible shift today, so I’m gonna be kicking round the house a while longer.
As another side point, the Men In Trees kick has filled up my harddisk. This is not good. I need to get that Mac up and running for the purposes of making space on the music pc to check out Gentoo.
Well, okay… maybe just the once* (hell, I’m giving my neighbours a couple of days peace before I attack the walls and start making with the dust monster; I’ve done my ‘bit’ of DIY today – silicone sealed the last segment of the shower, and I’m off to work in a little under 2 hours).
Happy Christmas everyone! I’m relaxing by watching more Men In Trees**. How’re you spending it?
*Unless I decide to try and ruin Christmas for you all by describing my day at work when I get home. Stranger things have happened.
** Until right this second I’d not noticed how dubious that sounds. I’m watching the series Men In Trees, not actual men in trees, which’d be a little odd.
You can probably expect more updates as Kathryn’s gone back to the states for Xmas; more on that in a bit. I thought I’d give you all a quick update on our early Solstice. So, Kathryn and I have already had our Solstice/Xmas celebration; we had a very chilled morning (and not just because the house was cold), slept in really late and when we finally got up we had a relaxed day mostly chilling. I had an argument with Windows on the lounge PC – having set up a temporary wired network I set it copying files. It did what appears to be a random selection of them, didn’t report any errors though, and foolishly I didn’t check that they’d all come across. I then deleted a bunch of stuff off the laptop and have spent several days finding all the things which went missing during the copy.Anyhow, we opened prezzies, Kathryn got me a gorgoeous Retro Computing book; arty geekery! She’s also got me something unknown, which is still floating in the aether of the Post Office. As, apparently (and frustratingly) is our VOIP adaptor. Anyhow, we then cooked a very nice (and veggie) Christmas Dinner – complete with Yorkshire pud, brussel sprouts, parsnips (although these were way underdone; in future I know to cook them for much longer), and a not very Christmassy Thanksgiving Sweet Potato Casserole (what can I say, it’s gorgeous!). It was a lovely day; despite the technology that wouldn’t play (we were meant to watch Miracle on 34th Street, but instead watched that on our boxing day). Anyhow, this is our Solstice feast:
Yesterday was spent trying to work out why Brick’s starter motor remains somewhat recalcitrant. I’ve tried using a jumper cable as a temporary replacement earth (didn’t help), and it does seem a bit odd. Sometimes it works well, other times it’ll struggle to turn the engine over. Still, it got us to Heathrow which it turned out was a world of pain. It turned out (we forgot to check before hand) that the reservation didn’t say which terminal to go to, and unfortunately, we landed up at T2 and asked – and the chap said Terminal 1. So we parked up and we headed in to terminal 1. I’m glad I stayed with Kathryn, because frankly if you wanted a stressful pre-travel experience, terminal 1 was it. British airways, along with every other airline, appeared to have totally been overwhelmed. Yesterday’s cancellations and the (apparently normal) Xmas travelfest meant that there was a world of chaos behind those shiny doors. We found out fairly quickly that we were, in fact, in the wrong place and had to go to T4. Having got to T4, the online check-in desk failed, and we ended up queuing. Which was a shame, really; because I’d hoped to spend that last hour or so with Kathryn having a nice relaxed and over priced lunch; but instead we spent it stood in a queue. At least we got to spend it together, that’s the main thing :)
So, she’ll be back in just under two weeks, and whilst I can’t promise anything I’m going to do my best to try and get the house heated for her return. On which basis I spent about 20 minutes today hunting round the bathroom for a 90 degree 15mm yorkshire elbow joint. A pack of them, actually. Because I was convinced I had one. Whilst I knew that I’d used up my T joints, I was certain (in my slightly hopeless memory’d way) that there was a pack of 90s lurking. It was only when I’d (in an amazingly good mood) managed to search the bathroom and I looked at the toilet cistern and remembered where the last of my 90s went, well… that I realised that I needed some new ones.
A quick trip to B&Q was had, and lo, we have a radiator.
I sometimes forget that it’s not the days when you achieve something visible when you’ve done a lot. Actually getting the radiator in, it took about an hour and a half; much of which was spent cleaning the floor where the radiator stands. It actually, imho, looks quite neat too. The paint is, unfortunately, still not perfect; but the back of it looks pretty good, and it’s all accessible bits that could do with more coats. So that’s okay so.
I’m also down to one strip of silicone sealant, I’d be down to none, but I’ve obviously disturbed enough dust in there that some of it managed to coat the place I wanted to seal, so I’ve just and simply cleaned it today, tomorrow morning I’ll throw the sealant on.
Anyhow, I don’t think I’ve shown off these yet, so here’s the shower and the toilet…
Right, so I’m going to be a bit knackered for the rest of the evening, and mehaps sit here and possibly watch a film, if I can find one I fancy, since the whole of you sorry lot aren’t online. I watched ‘Men In Trees’, S1E1 today, it looks like it’s going to be good, although I’m now missing AK as well as Kathryn. :-/
And for some reason, Kathryn’s plane is showing up as ‘Cancelled’ on the Sea-Tac website. Grrr. Here I am being the neurotic worried partner, and it’s not helping.
Anyhow, back to work tomorrow, so Merry Xmas everyone, have a great day :)
So, the bathroom is now solventville, again. I put a third coat on the radiator – except for one bit which I brushed against while it was drying which means there’s one patch that now needs patching up, and my work teeshirt is well painted. I also played games with silicone sealant. Today was a ‘good’ day, assuming it actually sticks to the shwoer basin, something I’ve been having problems with. There’s two edges left to do in the shower, and the two teeny strips above the shower door.
I’ve also made a hole in the bathroom wall, it is, as I thought Lath and Plaster – and quite easy to disassemble (and quite fun in a dusty way); I need to remove part of one of the framing pieces though and then I can – theoretically at least – run the pipework for the boiler. I’ve also gained even more understanding of the way the house is wired (oddly) – and what I thought was the ringmain entering the kitchen now appears to be a spur for one socket that obviously wasn’t there before. Still, I’ll leave that as it is – can’t touch wiring in the kitchen; I really ought to get my City and Guilds in this sh*t, because I do so much of it and its always good to have more strings to your bow.
Sometimes dumb luck is just handy though; the builders put the soil pipe in a different place to where it was officially meant to go. A good foot or so to the right, looking from the back of the house. While this is a pain, it means that the boiler can, actually, go where I want it to. Just by sheer dumb luck they put the pipe in the wrong place, but if it hadn’t have been the boiler would have had to go somewhere else :)
Ra.
I think it was hiding under the carpet. Anyhow, positivity got me into the fracking cold bathroom, fan heater enabled and pointed at the still tacky radiator. It’s still tacky, but there was considerable fumeage as it heated up. I peeled off the masking tape to reveal the tiles which look shockingly respectable; finished cleaning the shower stall and washed the tiles around the edge, and the basin of the shower with white spirit to try and get the grease off in the hope that the silicone will stick this time. It’s stuck along the front edge, which gives me some hope. I then polished the tiles outside the shower on the corner, and all the way round where I’ve put the top bit of grout in.
Definately coming on, it is. I did a teeny bit of scooping up the crap, then prepped one of the last areas that’s not yet grouted and….grouted it :) That took much of the afternoon; but now there’s only small areas by the sink and some of the boxing left to do, oh and the strip right by the door, because the paint wasn’t really hard enough and it needs another coat.
Then, because I wasn’t done being productive I stripped the cupboard out of the downstairs bathroom. This cupboard hid the waterheater (well, it did until I took the door off to put the temporary link in to the upstairs bathroom, then it just surrounded the waterheater) and other than mouldering away slowly hasn’t really been doing much else. Oh, it hung the moose, too.
Anyway, with somewhat of a battle it’s been removed. See, blokie blokie assembled it, then put it in, then tiled. Which was fine, except that I’ve run a pipe through what was an appature, and suddenly found I had a giant frame around my pipe which I couldn’t easily disassemble (or move far enough to get to the screws to disassemble it). In the end I applied brute force (and ignorance) and “it came apart in my hands, guv”. Some of the better bits have been salvaged in case they’re handy for the temporary kitchen. The rest has gone in the front garden pile of rubbish.
After a lot of sweeping up, the bathroom downstairs actually looks lots bigger. And it’s now possible to run the heating and hot water pipes where they should go, at least it will be when I’ve taken a small chunk of wall out. Hopefully soon the radiator will dry, so I can cut the pipes and fit the damn thing, it’s terribly frustrating at the moment :-/
I’ll grant that it’s not -something insane, but it’s definately in the minuses, and the absence of heating is continuing to be an issue. Paul turned up, as promised, with the Viva’s engine – and we trundled round to the garage, Paul following. Having returned home it became apparent that the Viva had, in fact, coated the front of Paul’s car with oil – it’s been burning so much. But hey; the garage will be swapping head from Brick to new engine and new engine into car. They’ve also said they’ll try and flush the coolant system (particularly the heater) while they’re at it. This will give the car a much needed boost in heating performance.
Hopefully this is the final big expense until the Viva-EV project is sorted.
The cold, however, is having a delaterious effect on bathroom progress. I can’t paint the radiator because the 12 hours to dry only applies to ‘normal’ houses where the temperature is, say, positive. I could and might attack the shower tiles some more after lunch; because, well, then I could put silicone sealant round and that could not dry too. I’m hoping the radiator might be dry enough for it’s third (of two) coats. It does look surprisingly okay though, given the poor job I did of stripping it. I managed to get the edges pretty good, but I just couldn’t get all the paint from the centre bits between the fins. Still, we can but try.
Looking at the space where it’s meant to go though, that’s good. Because it looks quite bathroomy now; just the act of polishing the tiles and painting the skirting’s made a lot of difference. I still have to run the radiator pipe along the wall, and clean the floor tiles, but once that’s done and the radiator’s painted and dry, it can all go together. Oooh, faint stirings of some excitement.
I’ve also been studying the current bathroom cupboard, and, I think whole thing above the water heater – cupboard, doors, shelves. I think it’s entirely non-structural. I’d assumed that it was part of the support for the hot water tank, but no, I think the tank just sits on the shelf. this is good, because it means I can remove chunks of it and then whip away the wall from behind it, and run all the pipework for the boiler without actually having to have the original boiler taken out. ‘course there’s still the small matter of sinking all that wiring into the wall in the kitchen. Ah, there we go, the tiredness at the slow progress has come back :-/
Ach. Well, we’ll see how I get on after lunch.
Okay, it was here yesterday too:
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And the fire’s pretty nice…
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Today was better. Yesterday I felt like I’d spent a few weeks in a cave and then been stuck out in the outside world with only a spoon.
But today, while not packed full of energy (and I’m bloody starving now); I felt like a real human. A tired one (yes, it’s a cliche, at least with me), but a human nonetheless.
So, progress report for the day:
– Kitchen is clean
– Washing up is done
– Tiles behind where the radiator will go are polished (now need washing to get the last remnants of groutycrap off them)
– Woodwork by the radiator is painted (needs a second coat tomorrow)
– Radiator is painted (needs at least a second and most likely a third coat)
– Some of the shower is ready to be washed down with white spirit and then to have sealant put around it…
In other words, we’re getting there. Slowly, but surely.
I tried to work out whether I could mount the wall plate for the boiler without taking the old water heater out, and damnit, it’s less than 10cm out. But, on the plus side it means I can cut out that section of wall (oh yay), and run all the pipes to the correct spot, then just dump the wall hanging plate on the wall and run that final section of pipe. Which should be non-traumatic. Gives me something to do once the bathroom’s finished anyhow ;)