Mostly lemon based

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  • Not in the brochure

    As the financial year draws to a close, it is traditional for the NHS to ditch any attempt at real, long term sensible savings and go for ridiculous every penny counts savings. As a result of which it appears to be acceptable to run wards on less staff than I would deem ‘safe’. Less staff than are sufficient to do the job properly. Less staff than you need.

    I am exhausted. I’ve been exhausted for the last few days, but it has come to a bit of a head today. I’ve got violent, aggressive patients, and we had 5 staff on. One in charge, one bank (who’s actually one of our staff nurses), two (including me) staff nurses and an HCA. Oh, and a third year student. That’s for 29 patients, the large majority of which are confused, several of whom are aggressive, most of whom are incontinent, a not insignificant number of whom have diarrhoea…

    When you’ve got so few staff, little things start to get on top of you. I can’t think of a single day I’ve been on in the last week and half when we’ve been fully staffed, and I’m so tired it’s unbelieveable, and so, being spat at, swiped at, sworn at, and (and this is the clincher) having shit-covered nails dug into my arm so hard they broke my skin has really left me feeling utterly fed up. And I admit, it started to tell in my general standard of care. I was so tired (no break either, although I did decide to sit down in the office and eat my sandwiches while writing something akin to notes, although their level of detail was somewhat low) that I just started not to really care; I just wanted to come home and sit down. Which is not what you want.

    Cynicism and sarcasm can only get you so far. And incidentally, despite copious amounts of cleansing and finally on arriving home a cleansing with TCP my arm still hurts, and I’m going back in the morning to probably be cursed by the nightstaff for all the half-done jobs, and I don’t know where I’ll get the empathy and caring from. All I feel is exhausted, undervalued and unsupported.

  • Shiny shiny internet

    So, I was going to rant about being insanely short staffed, having sick patients and trying to cope with that while simultaneously endevouring not to treat a third year nursing student as a health care assistant because you’re so short that you can’t possibly do washes and looking after the sickies at the same time.

    I was, but I’m not now. No. Because I’ve had a sleep, I’ve had a very nice dinner (Pesto, veggie-pseudo-beef, peppers, tomato, onion and pasta), and in a shock move, slow though it may be, my network is actually currently working. But that’s not the only reason, on the plus side (plus plus), the Viva Workshop Manual arrived today (what’s faintly scary is I think that the manual for the viva is the same size as the workshop manual for the Minor, this isn’t scary in the sense of their level of complexity isn’t vastly different, it’s scary in that the minor covers 4 different variants, and the workshop manual for the HC Viva, merely one) and, most importantly, the internet has entertained me muchly while I wait for a file to copy (ever so slowly) across my network.

    This is the best anti-movie-industry’s current approach to piracy poster I’ve seen; it made me laugh happily:

    Pro-Piracy I guess :-)

    And this is a review chock full of hate of a mobile phone. Somehow, seeing a piece of crap hardware get slammed in an entertaining way has cheered me up.

    Both of these are, in fact, courtesy of Boing Boing which does keep me happily entertained, frequently. As it happens, tiredness is tempting me to suck down an alcoholic beverage, though why I want a depressant/relaxant when I’m so tired I could fall over I’m not entirely sure… So, everyone, how’s your world been today?

  • Rats

    No, the house hasn’t got rats, as far as I’ve noticed anyway. After yesterday’s successes, I finally got around to ringing Lucky and asking for the quote. He gave me what I long ago nicknamed a ‘go away’ quote. The architect reckoned that even if the wall that has to come down is a structural one and needs a steel joist put in to support the weight above (possible, but unlikely), then I’d need to pay around £9000. Not that I have £9,000 you understand.

    But my quote? £20,000. Ha.

    Of course, I shall be getting a few more in when I’ve got the plans back; but I am… well… surprised. And currently starting to ponder doing the work myself, again. There are several jobs I can’t do, and what I may do is just get quotes in to do them, and accept that I’m going to have to do a lot more work myself.

  • Lazy Sunday…Mornings

    I have stuff that needs doing.

    Instead, I’ve watched The L Word, I’m up-to-date now, without saying anything spoilery, the telephone-tag episode is awesome; and the next two episodes are also really damn good.

    Since lots of people reading this (not that there *are* lots of people, but a high percentage of the few that do) haven’t seen up to S4E8 then I shall shut up now. But my promise to myself to watch just the one episode didn’t really work out.

    I’m meant to be tidying. The house needs tidying. And cleaning. And all that domestic stuff which I like the result of but have to find the enthusiasm to do. I also think I probably *should* go to my mum’s and collect the ramps, so I can service Brick. But again, y’see enthusiasm anywhere round here? No? No.

    The other thing which has been bugging me in a major way in the house is that paperwork is entirely out of hand. I’ve got important documents I can’t find. The problem is, I used to have a filing cabinet. Or more accurately, I had a filing cabinet that wasn’t full of oil. See, when I moved into the rented place in Gatcombe Drive it came with a big ‘ol filing cabinet. So I stuck mine in the garage and it became a handy storage place for those lubricants that are required for looking after cars from the 60s. LM grease, EP90, and copperslip have all managed to thoroughly coat the interior of said object.

    Hence I can’t really pull it back into the house. So I need a new cabinet – but the problem is, I want a nice one. The spare room is to be a bedroom-come-office, and I don’t want it to *look* like a bedroom with random office furniture. Which makes the ‘filing cabinet’ a bit of a problem. But at the same time, it’s easiest and simplest way to store the vast amount of paperwork I seem to need. Lots of it is obsolete but I have to keep it for tax purposes. So I’m on the lookout for a nice wooden filing cabinet. Without woodworm. Also for really cheap.

    I don’t really like the modern laminated chipboard crap ones, I’m after one of those ex-army, solid wood and thin-panel things. One that’d match the doors :-)

    Oh, I nearly made the lounge door fit. It needs to come off again. The bottom is a mil or so too low, and the frame is well-off-square and needs me to shave loads off the bottom edge. although, looking at it I’m wondering if I should take the plane to the other side of the door and make it narrower that way. Otherwise it’s going to be much-thin’d on one side. Hrm.

    The hub continues to work ‘better’ than the previous one. Although for limited values of better. It doesn’t appear to crash-and-need to reset, but the PC downstairs still seems to limp at anything from a 5.5Mbps – 54Mbps connection. On the plus side it seems to reliably get an IP address. Or at least moderately reliably. However, actually getting videos downstairs is not an activity which will currently occur ‘on the fly over the network’. And seems to take several attempts, for the most part. And a lot of time. I’m not sure why this is. I don’t now know if it’s the homehub, the hubphone (which I’ve reconfigured again this morning – things *seem* to be hanging together still (I’ve yet to test if I’m still regularly disconnected)). I’m just a bit bored of it now.

    In other news, my mother asked me to do something ‘dangerous’ before she left on holiday. She asked me to go to Richer Sounds. The amplifier my dad bought, uh, 20ish years ago has started to get like my own one – flakey. Mine exhibits this as crackles on powering on and as the two channels not being the same volume at “low” levels (not that it actually goes quiet, or anything (presumably the pot is dirty)). My mum’s entirely loses the right channel, and seems to need a lot of fiddling with to get it back.

    But to be entirely honest, she really doesn’t need all the stuff she’s got. She needs a little dinky thing like the…thing…I’ve got. Oh ah. And some little speakers. Loud, but not nearly so big as she’s got. Hrm. I could just get her some bookshelf speakers, and give her my Denon thing. Mhm. Sorry, I’ll stop thinking aloud.

    So yeah, that’s my Sunday.

  • I should be asleep but…

    Couple of quick eclipse shots, before I kip:

    Plain old eclipse shot, unprocessed and raw.

    Mog and Moon

    Hope you all enjoyed the eclipse… Sleep now.

  • Right back where we started

    So I got the new homehub, and plugged it in, and astonishing things happened. The PC downstairs connected – and it got an IP address. All the machines could see each other. It was like magic pixie dust had been sprinkled all over my wireless connections.

    I was, I must admit, astonished. It all seemed to work.

    I left them on. this morning I came down and y’know what? They were all still saying “we’re connected, happy little networked computers”. Popped ’em into Standby, went to work.

    Came home from work, pull them out of standby, as usual the network is defunked. Kill and restart network drivers and lo, connectivity. Switch off hub, plug in hub phone. Configure for broadband telephony. SPLUTCH. Sans network. Fiddle for a bit. Connect…oh no, ‘s gone again. Reboot router. Connectivity! All is well! La la la l. Oh. Gone again.

    Reset router to factory defaults. Still nada. Reboot. Connectivity appears to be back. I want to blame the home hub phone, but I’m not certain enough that it is the cause. I have no idea what is the cause anymore, to be honest. But I wish the cause would make itself clearly known to me, because it’s beginning to drive me nuts.

  • Now you’ve made me angry…

    I actually find myself really quite angry, today. Which is odd, because I had a good morning. I got most of the things I wanted to do – done. I had a nice breakfast, relaxed watched firefly. I got some letters ready to mail. My new homehub arrived – and lo, connectivity was restored in house of Kate. This hub, unlike my last one, does not require 24 hours of sitting around before allowing wireless devices to connect. Windows is now happier. Lots to install before it goes back to being a true hub of my entertainment universe, but happier.

    I had a shower, not a particularly pleasant one, but nor unpleasant. I read LJ, I discovered that I may have someone in the Viva owners club willing to sell me a windscreen rubber for a bit less than the going rate – which considering mine leaks like a sieve is probably a good thing. Brick started and took me to the chemist and to the petrol station, and there I saw the news.

    Since then I’ve had a little angry bubble of “FUCK YOU” rolling around inside me. And I’ve printed an application to rejoin UNISON. My membership lapsed after I finished my course, but suddenly I feel the need to be in a Union.

  • Some things are a little insane

    I just have to share the Rototron Cornbobber with you all.

  • Keeping up appearances

    So, the Viva continues to be a nightmare to start. Well, to be entirely honest we didn’t reach ‘starting’ today. Today we got as far as flattening the battery (which to be fair wasn’t very well charged) and starting to flatten the battery on Rebecca. After a full half hour of starting attempts I took Rebecca to the recycling place instead.

    I’m managing to maintain the pretence that Brick is running by cunningly moving him (by a process of pushing) – so he’s now on that central island at the end of my street. And the battery is back in the house being charged… again. The most frustrating thing is it’s almost certainly something very simple. I suspect that I need to clean a few earth points, change the distributor cap, points, rotorarm and all that. Basically do a service – and I suspect he’ll be sorted. But it’s annoying. I wanted to get the tyre changed, so that when I *do* get ‘im started I can treck straight down to my mum’s and do the service in the garage there. Only, I can’t. But now I’m so unsure of the starting situation that I fear going anywhere except straight down there.

    So, yeah. Homehub, not arrived. BT again promise that it will be here. Each department blames the previous one. I’m really fed up though, of having non-working wireless. I can’t watch stuff on my TV because it all goes through the PC. The PC has just been reinstalled, and needs to connect to the internet to download the graphics card drivers – otherwise I get to endure black and white on the TV output. Which obviously makes watching things less fun – even were I able to watch them.

    The damn thing also randomly loses the Mac now, which is wired to it. It’s incredibly annoying. It’s not getting better after resets either, before the wireless problems’d go away if you rebooted it, but now no.

    In other news, hooking up my CD player has reminded me that my amplifier doesn’t really do ‘quiet’ – on it’s minimum setting it’s ‘a bit loud’ for the evenings… I can’t really afford another one, so I guess I just better get the PC working soon, because that you can adjust the level of the output on it, so it ends up being quiet enough. Mmm. I think that’s the news. Life on Mars tonight, so let’s pray it’s a nice day at work so I get out on time. Yeah. So. Anyway, the house should be okay for Kathryn’s visit, if I get off my arse and sort various things out. I think actually, I’ve worked out how to make the stone on the fireplace sit better. Unfortunately it means I’ll have to remove all the sealant that I did do. But hey. It’ll be a better finished product :-)

    Lordy lordy, this is a boring entry. I’ll stop now :-)

  • And another request arrives…

    So, having performed a surgical mould extraction on Brick, well, some of a surgical mould extraction I came in and was confronted by Nikki, who complained that there was only one photo of the new car online.

    Anyway, so I found the rust that I suspected was lurking. It’ll need fixing before the MOT, and is slightly annoying because it is just a few inches further along than I got as far as checking when I bought ‘im.

    It’s probably about a 6″ square area that *needs* replacement, and maybe 6″x8″ that it’s desireable to do. The non-surface rust seems fairly localised – and it’s clearly been damaged by some twonk allowing water to get in through the failed windscreen rubbers – and to sit in the soundproofing – keeping that metalwork wet. I’ve yanked a load of sodden soundproofing and slung it. I suspect I should really get the seat out and have a look there for wetness, but I’ve checked the rear footwells, and they’re dry (thankfully).

    So, yeah. It’ll have to be in the not too distant future, and it’s kinda something I expected to find. I’m not even deeply peeved, just slightly tired, and frustrated at losing more money that should be going on Rebecca.

    I also discovered that the other wing mirror which I presumed was complete isn’t. So I’ve got a very low bid on a pair of replacement ones from e-bay, because having only one wing mirror does drive me nuts. Anyway, here’s the (many and unexciting) shots of Brick.

    In other news, my mum headed off to Switzerland today – I ran her down to the airport this morning; I’m really nervous about her going – she’s not been abroad on her own for, well, a long time. We got to the airport and it was all automated check-ins, which I think unnerved her a little. She’s not good with IT. Anyway, that navigated I took her suitcases and she checked her baggage – I’m also worried about her having to move those heavy cases.

    :-/

    But she is insanely independent – I guess I know something about that! Anyway, she’s over there for ages; she wanted me to sign her Life Insurance before going (!), but kind of thankfully we couldn’t really get it witnessed, what with it being 10pm. Somehow, it makes me feel less worried about her which is silly I know, but it freaks me out when she does stuff like that. I worry that she might do something silly, or uncaring. I dunno.

    So yes, that trip to the airport though, after driving so much yesterday in vibrato-mog left me feeling somewhat drained. So I slept. And then got very confused about what day it was and which day I’d been up to see Kathryn and when I was next in work, and what I was meant to do today.

    After an exceptionally slow morning, a large chunk of which I slept through I got out and did Brick, the washing up, and sorted out a bit of recycling – and I finally got around to connecting up the CD player (waves thanks for CD at Kathryn). It appears that I’m down one socket – or more accurately I need another extension lead (!). It’s the lights that did it, they’ve taken up two sockets…
    In other news, my homehub still isn’t working properly. I’ve not heard from BT. They have ’til the end of the day to reply to the official complaint I sent them (that’ll be 2 working days) and then I start hunting for a different supplier.