It’s either clear out 3 kitchen drawers, or escape to write a blog post. Hmmm, no choice is there? It’s amazing what 15-odd years can accumulate… now, do I keep the four packs of paper cake cases, considering that I no longer make many cakes as I can’t eat wheat products?
I’m getting used to having a kitchen sink a foot to the left of where it has been for the past fifteen and a half years. Quite a different view from the window.
I’m loving the streamlined surfaces, and once the sent-back-for-remanufacture as Witchily Specified rather than as-they-thought-best utility tops and sinks are returned at the end of next week (*crosses fingers and toes and does spell*), I shall be able to begin to forget the hassle of it all. For the present, the contents of the utility and some of the contents of the kitchen have to remain in the lounge and dining room, a situation which becomes very tedious as it enters its third week.
I am so glad that I asked Mr BW to work from home yesterday. After my experiences when they came to template the work surfaces, I didn’t fancy dealing with them on my own. And, as La P predicted in the comments under the linked post (I suspect from her own experiences of a kitchen refit last summer…), it was a good job Mr BW was here.
It never ceases to amaze me how workmen treat men and women differently. For instance, Workman 1, on (somehow) causing the tap conditioner cannister support that Mr BW had carefully installed, to break off, and breaking a tile, said to me, in a very off-hand and not-at-all-apologetic way, “You’d better tell your husband we’ve broken a couple of things!” whereas when Mr BW came to investigate he was more contrite, explained exactly what had happened, and looked almost sheepish as Mr BW inspected the damage for rather longer than was strictly necessary, before saying anything.
I don’t know how people who haven’t got DIY skills cope. I just could not tolerate all the messing around and bodge/half- jobs that the so-called ‘professionals’ provide. Never having had to negotiate that minefield for day-to-day things (Daddy BW and Mr BW being extremely competent at almost everything practical, both coming from proper engineering backgrounds), on the few occasions we have engaged professionals for particular reasons (usually size of project or time constraints), there have almost always (with only a couple of exceptions) been problems that there shouldn’t have been.
Yes, I know that we are both perfectionists, with unfeasibly high standards, but we always make it perfectly obvious to whoever we’re engaging (who are always well-researched in advance of even being asked to quote) that that is the case, and are always very clear (often in writing) what we require and expect. Why then does something go wrong almost every time? Maybe it happens to everyone and most people just shrug it off and put up with it, but, I reckon that I’m the paying customer and have a right to expect work to be done to at least the same standard as we, as amateurs, can achieve, on time and without issue, to our specifications. After all, both of us work to very high standards in our lines of work for other people, so surely we are entitled to expect that others do too? Whatever happened to professional pride?
Mr BW has had to work from home again today as it took him an hour to do 3 miles in the direction of County Town this morning. The traffic wasn’t moving at all, and it was unclear what the problem was. He then gave up and came back. One of his team spent 4 hours attempting to get in from the south-east, before giving up and going home. The Highways Department are obviously on a cost-cutting exercise again: but, not gritting just causes traffic accidents and mayhem. Plus, it costs everyone more in the long run, with increased insurance premiums.
The snow is laying and crispy at around 3 inches here now. And, talking of laying, one of the Bu77 Orplngtons (the ones we hatched the spring before last) has just decided to start laying again. Although we have 14 Feathery Familiars at present, the whole of The Coven Egg supply has been down to just one dear little white hen for the past month. She has faithfully produced one white egg every day, even though her sisters were slacking off. I’ve never seen a new-lain egg freeze and split from end to end before yesterday.
Nice and snuggly and warm here. The Coven is super-insulated now, and the boiler has hardly fired-up all day, despite it being several degrees below zero. We haven’t even had to light a fire, such is the retained warmth. I was always very cynical about the described benefits of cavity wall insulation, but, four years on, it was undoubtedly more than worth the money.
Just about to have a sacrificial farewell to the Brita water jug.
The new tap, with its inbuilt third purified water lever system is brilliant (thanks for all the advice on that a while back, especially to Ham and NiC).
Brilliant, that is, apart from the fact that it insists on doing a dribble several seconds after it’s turned off. Mr BW tells me that ye canna change the laws of physics, and I have to accept that [something to do with the fact that the tap neck is about two feet high and there is water left in the pipe which falls when the pressure is released] is operating. My answer to that was that at five hundred quid a piece (list price, of course I didn’t pay that…) they should have bloody well engineered a solution. Yeah, I’m impossible 😉 I feel like Wheelchair Andy from Little Britain. “I don’t like it!”
How’s the weather where you are?
Month: November 2010
So my Witchy Powers let me down.
Despite my conviction that we’d get Absence Excuse 512 from the Bumper Book, Workman 1 and Workman 2 arrived. Rather earlier than foreseen.
At 8am rather than 9.30am actually. Which meant I’d not had time to make the notice I’d planned for the cloakroom, where there’d been signs I didn’t like last time they were here. “Please Point Percy Prettily!” it was going to say.
“Good job you wasn’t in for tomorrow love!” said Workman 1, “It’s gonna snow, and we can’t get through snow…” It did snow about 1cm during the night, but, obviously nothing for him to notice. He confirmed my belief that our minor roads are the most treacherous he’d come across, ever. “Why dontcha make ’em grit ’em?” he said. If only he knew how hard I’d tried, over the years… I think the Council did once grit them, actually.
Mr BW was still in Small Town at the time, having left at 7.05am, getting some plumbing bits to redo one of the outside taps’ stopcocks, which has long been seized, but which we didn’t remember/get to yesterday afternoon until too late to realise that a bit wouldn’t come off a pipe leaving enough spare to rejoin. Of course, that was after 4pm when even the new Wickes in Small Local Town had closed.
Workman 1 was in a much jollier mood today. Either he’d been told that I’d mentioned, in passing, to his boss, that I’d found him “surly” and “unhelpful” last time, or his footie team won at the weekend. Who knows.
Anyway, by the time Mr BW got back at 8.10am, they’d got the utility worktop in. Good job Mr BW had removed the door frame.
Now they have the island worktop on.
And Mr BW is still trying to get his pipe through the wall before they get to fitting that worktop – it’s an easy job until the worktop is on, but, once it is, it’s a question of sitting inside a dark corner cabinet with a blowtorch.
More later… must go and investigate that crash I just heard…
As the national weather makes it quite unclear what’s happening where, let’s have a quick whip round the UK (or world, if you like) to see what’s what.
Here it hasn’t been above zero for a couple of days, and the hard frost Friday and last night has looked like snow in the early morning light. We haven’t actually had any snow though, and I’m pretty certain they haven’t gritted any roads within a ten mile radius of here, once again. I had to go out early yesterday morning, and, as my Broom has been running on fresh air since about Wednesday, I had to fill up with diesel. For the first time in all the years I’ve been driving, I found that I couldn’t get into the fuel tank as the lock was frozen. I’ve never had frozen car door locks (although that’s probably because I’ve had cars with central locking since 1989). By repeatedly heating the key in my hand, I eventually got the flap open after about 4 or 5 minutes.
Here, the protected outdoor sensor (up under the eaves, south west facing) is currently reading -2.5 C (the lowest it’s been this year) and the more exposed wall thermometer is on -6 C. Thick frost but clear and bright sky.
So, over to you… even if you don’t normally comment, or want to remain geographically anonymous, just call yourself “Weather from…” inserting the rough area (people from smart areas can comment too ;)), and make up an email address, and the comment software will do the rest.
I’m particuarly interested in the conditions betweeen here and Northampton because they’re supposed to be (finally) fitting the new kitchen and utility worktops tomorrow, and that’s where they’ve got to get from…
What time of day do you do your best work?
And is that when you do most of your work?
And has your time of best work changed over the years?
My answers: morning, yes and no.
Here are some key dates in UK political history:
Conservative Government: 1951 – 1964
Conservative Government: 1979 -1997
Labour Government: 1997 – May 2010
Coalition (Conservative/Liberal Democrat) Government: May 2010 –
Here is some key information on student finance from Wikipedia:
- In the years following World War II, most Local Education Authorities (LEAs) paid students’ tuition fees and also provided a maintenance grant to help with living costs; this did not have to be repaid. The Education Act 1962 made it a legal obligation for all LEAs to give full time university students a maintenance grant.
- The Student Loans Company (SLC) was founded for the 1990/91 academic year to provide students with additional help towards living costs in the form of low-interest loans. In its first year, the SLC gave loans to 180,200 students. This represented a take up rate of 28% of eligible students, with an average loan of £390.
- Introduction of tuition fees: in 1997, a report by Sir Ron Dearing recommended that students should contribute to the costs of university education. The Labour government under Tony Blair passed the Teaching and Higher Education Act 1998 which introduced tuition fees of £1,000 to start in the 1998/9 academic year. In addition, maintenance grants were replaced with repayable student loans for all but the poorest students. The total loans provided by the Student Loans Company increased from £941 million in the 1997/8 academic year, to £1.23 billion in the next year, when tuition fees took effect.
- Tuition fees in Scotland and Wales: in January 2000, the Scottish government, which consisted of a coalition between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, decided to abolish tuition fees for Scottish students studying at Scottish universities. In a similar vein, the Welsh government gives Welsh students studying at Welsh universities a tuition fee grant.
- The Higher Education Act 2004 increased tuition fees from £1,000 to £3,000. By the 2005/6 academic year, the Student Loans Company was providing £2.79 billion in loans to 1,080,000 students.
- Recent history: the Student Loans Company currently employs 1,894 people in the two Glasgow offices and at sites in Darlington and Colwyn Bay, Wales. In late 2009, it was heavily criticized by universities and students for delaying in processing applications. It is being further criticized in 2010, as previous issues do not seem to have been sorted out. Such issues can include the loss of financial evidence multiple times, refusal to admit that an applicant exists, sending schedules for entirely incorrect universities and in some cases years, and failing to keep applicants informed at all. The Chief Executive, on a salary in the range £390,000 – £394,999, resigned in May 2010.
- The current position: all full-time students are entitled to a tuition fee loan which covers the full cost of the tuition fee. For the 2009/10 academic year, universities are entitled to charge up to £3,225, except in Scotland where the students do not pay for tuition. In the 2010/2011 academic year, the tuition fee will increase to £3,290. All eligible students are also entitled to a maintenance loan, which is designed to help pay for living costs whilst at university. All students are entitled to a set amount, with those living at home entitled to less and those living at universities in London entitled to more. For the 2009/2010 academic year, the maintenance loan was set at £2,763 for students living at home; £4,998 for students living in London; and £3,564 for students living at universities elsewhere in the UK. Students from low-income households may apply for their loan to be increased. Universities themselves are legally obliged to give a non-repayable bursary to students in receipt of a full maintenance grant.
- Prior to the 1998/9 academic year, repayment was made using a ‘mortgage-style’ system of 60 monthly instalments which began when the student was earning over a certain threshold (£27,050 for the 2009/2010 financial year). This system was criticized because no matter what the size of the loan, it had to be repaid within the 60 monthly instalments. All loans from 1998/9 onwards are repaid under the Income-Contingent Repayment (ICR) scheme. This involves the loans being repaid directly out of the student’s wages, at a rate of 9% for everything earned above £15,000 in that tax year. Repayments continue until either the loan is paid off, the payments have been continuing for 25 years, or the student turns 65. In October 2010, the government announced that the annual earnings threshold at which repayments start was to be increased to £21,000.
Now then, dear students, here are some examination questions for you, based on the provided facts. You will need to refer to both sections of the provided facts to answer them:
(a) Which colour government introduced free higher education, including maintenance grants, for all UK citizens who obtained university entrance?
(b) Which colour government set up the Student Loans Company?
(c) Which colour government introduced tuition fees in 1998?
(d) Which colour government increased tuition fees in 2004?
(e) Which colour government allowed the Student Loans Company, under a CEO who was paid nearly four hundred thousand pounds per year, to become more and more incompetent in executing its duties?
(f) Which colour government allowed Scottish students to have free higher education, while those in England, also a part (the major part, in fiscal terms) of the UK, have to pay?
(g) Which colour government raised the threshold at which loans would have to start being repaid from £15,000 to £21,000 in October 2010?
Yes, the answer to all the good things is Blue, and the answer to the bad things is Red. So why the fuck are you all so angry with the present Coalition?
They were not the ones who started charging for university education. They are simply trying to sort out the huge financial mess left by the last bunch of idiots.
I guess most of you weren’t born then, and are more interested in Facebook than British Political History, but, please, do get your facts straight before you blame everything on the current administration.
The gravy train has to stop.
The country is broke.
The UK has £4.8 trillion of debt.
You probably don’t understand big numbers, so let me tell you instead that if every single home in the UK were sold, it would still not be enough money to pay off the national debt.
People in this country have become too used to having the state provide them with everything from birth to death. It can’t go on. And it’s time you started thinking about that rather than ‘protesting‘ – smashing up buildings, starting fires and assaulting police officers is not the way to make a coherent case against fees. It simply gives the impression that you are irresponsible, immature, petulant and spoiled. If you don’t like the fact that you will have to pay back what it costs for your post-school education, then get a job (or some other form of training for which you are paid while studying) instead of delaying the inevitable for 3 years. Or even get a part-time job while you are studying, or in the long holidays. After all, students in America have had to pay for their higher education for years and years. And it doesn’t seem to have hurt (or deterred) them…
Oh, and, one small request: could you please point out this piece to your parents, grandparents, and other nearest and dearest, because I am heartily sick of them all moaning within my earshot, without having any understanding of the true historical facts?
Love,
BW (for whom free university tuition was about the only thing she ever got for all the tax she has paid since the age of 16, but the world was a very different place then, and people had very different expectations; plus the limited number of university places on offer were hard won, and a degree was worth the paper it was written on…)
I was listening to a programme on the radio yesterday morning that mentioned a new study suggesting that it costs 20% more to live in a rural area than in a town.
That was the only mention I heard of it.
The main thrust of the argument was that public transport is generally so poor outside of urban areas that rural dwellers need to run a car, which is expensive.
Why then, on every news broadcast I have heard in the last 18 hours, are they incessantly bemoaning the fact that train fares are going up an average of 6.2%?
I wish that the cost of running a car had only gone up 6.2% in the last year… or even the top quoted fare rise of 13.2%. I haven’t heard anyone make this point. The constant rise in motoring fuel and insurance prices seems so much a part of life these days that it goes unmentioned.
Now that I’m earning a lot less than I was in an attempt to improve my health, I’m looking again at our costs. Not much left to cut, as our past frugality has left to us being quite well-placed now, and I’m not prepared to lower our standard of living unnecessarily. Unfortunately, we can’t manage with only one car, as Mr BW has to provide one for business use (and receives a generous car allowance for so doing), and often has to go to various places at any moment in the working day. My mileage is already low: only just over 4,000 last year. That sounds a lot until you think of it as 80 miles per week.
The only way to trim any more from my transport costs is to start being really hard. There are lots of people around here who don’t drive for various reasons (eg age, health, eyesight, can’t afford it). And they’re all very keen to ask people with cars attending the same group or meeting if they could just drop something off to someone for them, or pick them up, or take them home, or just drop them somewhere… without ever offering to pay towards costs incurred (or acknowledging the gesture in another way, perhaps a bottle of wine occasionally etc). The tax authorities in this country cosider that 40p per mile is the cost of runing a car. Asking a driver to make a detour a couple of miles out of their way therefore costs them nearly two quid. Do that every week and it’s £100 per year… But, I know it won’t go down well to say, “Yes, I will take you the 3 miles home, but that’s 6 miles in total out of my way (not to mention my time), so I’ll want £2.40…”
No, I wouldn’t do it, but, why do people without cars assume that cars run on fresh air?
It costs over £60 to fill my small tank, and, while I get nearly 600 miles from a tankful, diesel is only one of the many costs involved. Tyres, servicing, car tax, insurance, MOT, parking, cleaning, repairs… it goes on and on. I’d love to see the cost of vehicle excise duty (car tax) put on fuel, as it would be a good way of making those who pollute/drive most pay most. It would also mean foreign lorries paid towards the costs of using our roads, and would stop our resident EU ‘migrant workers’ bringing over cars from their native country to avoid paying VED, having to have a valid MOT (ie so ensuring their vehicle is officially inspected once a year and deemed roadworthy) and having to take out UK insurance.
Because my car is 13 weeks too old to come into the new VED bands, I have to pay £215 a year – or, on my mileage, over 5p per mile (if my car were 13 weeks younger, it would cost me only £90 in VED every year). That means that a rise of anything up to 60p on every litre of fuel would leave me better off. Put that way, it’s quite shocking, isn’t it? But, something that people without cars probably don’t even know about.
And don’t forget, people who have to run cars because of their location are already paying their share of the cost of providing public transport, on top of their car-running costs…
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.
– Henry David Thoreau
I arrived at my p@chw0rk group on Wednesday three hours late (planned), to find one of the ladies in a state of extreme agitation.
I thought someone had died or something.
It turned out that her iPhoney had not worked since she got to the hall due to lack of signal. She was beside herself that she hadn’t been able to get her messages for several hours, and wasn’t concentrating on what she was doing at all, so kept making mistakes. “I think I’d be better going home…” she said.
Having commented that it had become a very very sad world when such minor inconveniences caused such grief, I suggested she turned it on and off again. Of course, it then worked, but she’d never heard of doing that. I guess that’s what happens if you’re a late adopter of technology: you let it dictate your life rather than support it, and have no idea how it works.
I see no attraction in being permanently and unavoidably contactable, and lots of disadvantages. Plus, my poor eyesight struggles to read small print in small quantities, and I really can’t be bothered with manipulating such tiny keys. Seeing Mr BW struggle with email on his work SoftFruit just makes me cringe.
While I’m moaning about such subjects, I was horrified to see that one of our local papers is now quoting from Facebook in some stories. For instance, there have recently been a series of t33nage 5u1c1de5 (perhaps copy-cat) in this area (and in several others, in totally separate parts of the country). This rag had quoted, verbatim, the messages posted by one dead person’s friends on her wall. I don’t know if it’s just me, who doesn’t, and won’t ever, engage in that genre of brainless communication attention seeking, but, if I had rather less on my plate at the moment, I’d put in a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission about that. Bad taste, certainly, but… the information had been put in the public domain, so whether the PCC would do anything, I don’t know. And, for all I know, perhaps FB users crave this sort of re-tweeting. If that’s not too much of a mixed metaphor…
Ron wrote the other day about his love of lists and his new electronic finds to enhance the listing experience.
I love lists too.
But only on paper.
The whole of my life was on a Palm (6 or 7 years ago now). We’d been away for a week, and it crashed in the car on the way home, causing me to lose the lot (not having been able to sync it in that time). That was the day I gave up electronic storage. Since then I’ve lost 3 hard drives (fortunately, all but one part, totally backed up), so proving my point four-fold.
I was at a craft demonstration the other day. The presenter had his presentation stored in a cloud rather than on a USB stick. There was no mobile reception for his dongle in the village hall. I laughed. And then let him use my dongle (on a different network). Had I not been there to save the day, he would have been more than a bit stuck.
Clouds and electronic lists cannot be relied upon. And there’s nothing as satisfying as crossing a completed task off a paper list.
Sorry, I am a Luddite.
Actually, I have list books: one upstairs, for computer/work related desk tasks, and one downstairs, for general house and garden tasks, where we have columns for me, him, and us. As one of us thinks of a job, it gets added into the correct person’s column, and then crossed off when done. If a job isn’t done before it becomes critical it either gets a * by it, or gets highlighted. And then I have a shopping list small wipe-clean whiteboard, which sits on top of the fridge, where things have to be written before they run out. There are known ‘stock levels’ for each product, and when something gets below that level, the person who is using the item has to put it on the shopping list. And, given that there are only two of us, I know who to blame when something I haven’t used runs out 🙂 There are separate columns for Costco, Sainsbury’s, Aldi and Other (I buy set things in set places as I know what’s cheapest where, and which brands we prefer), to aid quick transcription onto a piece of scrap paper before going shopping.
Interesting discussion on the subject of lists between two of Lord Sugarcube’s wannabe Apprentices this week. One 20 year old male claiming it was all in his head, and one 30 year old woman saying she wrote it all down. It’s not an age thing for me: I’ve always made lists. Write it down and you can forget about it, I find.
Do you make lists? If yes, are they paper or electronic? If no, how reliable is your memory, and how do you stop yourself fretting about the possiblity of forgetting something important?
Grief, where is this week going? And are there any competent people, other than me, left in the world? *sighs*
Mr BW informs me that Mi1dred and her cronies require us to turn up to the Club FOTCR™ Meeting in fancy dress. The theme, apparently, is ‘H3r035 and H3r01n35’ (if you can work that out… no doubt others will be Googling for ideas and I wouldn’t like to help them out…).
Now, I think we should just go as ourselves, but apparently that is too narcissistic.
All and any ideas welcomed… the simpler the better as I don’t have time to make two Mickey Mouse costumes from scratch, and the hire shop won’t have anything in our sizes (I know, I future-proofed by checking what they had when I happened to be there seeing a client a few months ago).
My bank were celebrating a significant-to-them birthday by offering a free case of wine if you bought a qualifying product from them on that particular date. Given my love of high rate interest accounts and of wine, both Mr BW and I signed up for 5% fixed rate for a year (well, OK, I signed him up: he earns most of the money these days, I just arrange to spend and save it).
The free case of wine turned out to be a voucher for £65, which, in fact, only bought 6 bottles. Half a case, then. It also took nearly a month for the vouchers to reach us, which I thought was piss poor marketing.
They could not have made the system for using the voucher more complex if they tried. Despite the fact that the bank would only have issued the vouchers to people over 18 (because only people over 18 would have been allowed to purchase the qualifying products), one was required to prove one’s age on the wine company’s ordering website by entering a credit card number. Now, cynical me was of the opinion that the most likely reason for this was so that they could mess up the ordering process such that you paid for the wine rather than got it free with the voucher code.
So, what happened? Yes, you’ve guessed it: a website glitch meant all sorts of pop up boxes popped up at various times, and refused to go away and let you move around the site until you’d filled them in. This led to two separate accounts being generated, and the one that sent out the wine was not the one with the £65 credit from the entered voucher in it. Although, of course, I did not know this until the final screen told me that my card (which I’d only entered to prove I was 18, remember) had been debited.
I rang the wine company to sort out the mess.
Apparently, the problem wasn’t caused by their poor website design, it was, as I was told, caused by, “You using the website incorrectly.”
This happened yesterday afternoon. It’s still making me laugh now. I just hope the wine is better than their infrastructure. I’ve already directed any further emails from them (of which there will undoubtedly be copious quantities, despite me having ticked the ‘no to further marketing’ boxes) to be deleted from the server without downloading.
The media have a new darling.
We have a new Queen-in-Waiting. At least we’ll have a few more braincells entering the Royal Lineage now 🙂
That’ll spend some more of UK PLC’s overdraft…
I know a lady (early 40s) who shares her exact full name. That will be complicated for her in future.
Di-dee-die.
They have sent me two templaters. At least they turned up this morning, despite the very hard frost and freezing fog.
One is about 19 or 20 and of average ability and understanding, and quite pleasant. The other (who appears to be in charge) is dimmer than many a child I placed in a special school in days of yore (before the concept of ‘inclusion’ ruined many a child’s chances), and extremely surly, despite having been given chocolate biscuits. He has so far proved incapable of adding 38mm and 20mm without using a calculator, and thought it was OK to cut his sheet of corrugated plastic with a Stanley knife on my kitchen floor.
Our layout is extremely complicated, and we (erm, probably I) want different things in different places. Plus, the worktop surface overhangs we require are different in different places, as are the upstands, grooves and returns.
This is not good.
Particularly as the same two are fitting it. Mr BW is going to have to have the day off on that day as I am not handling them on my own.
At The Coven, BW ruefully regarded her washing-up cupboard, while thinking of spells for the non-attending-on-spurious-excuse new worktop templaters:
Somehow the sight of these chillis (slight over-stock there from this year’s harvest…), sitting on top of the washing machine in the utility (one of two surfaces left)…
… seems to have muddled up in a thought (“Must ring Texti1e Tutor for Thursday’s class requirements”) in the spell. When I rang her, Texti1e Tutor said that her eyes were unexpectedly stinging as if she’d just touched onions or chillis. Ooops.
How do people manage to wash up in standard sized plastic washing-up bowls anyway? They either live on take-aways or don’t cook in sensible-sized pans… I’ve solved the problem by re-using my bathwater. So what if the next dinner tastes of Badedas? 😉
… how many tiles got broken this morning in the process of removing the kitchen worktops to allow the templaters to do their job tomorrow morning?
Mr BW yanked the last bit out just as Michael Schumacher’s head nearly got removed in the last Grand Prix of the season. I shouldn’t have laughed, should I? 😉
If you haven’t read it already, this post provides the background.
Rather than 3 sinks in the kitchen/utility I currently have one washing up bowl on the shelf of the cupboard where the kitchen sink normally resides, and a tap sort-of falling into it from a metre above (that is, water and tap sort-of falling). And tomorrow I have 82 pieces of fabric that I dyed in interesting ways on a colour course yesterday (the best course I have been on, bar none: at last, a tutor who knows how to teach, can deal with the Class Idiot – there’s always one – and can pack a week’s worth of most tutors’ knowledge into a day) to wash out… Not that there aren’t five other sinks, a bath, and two shower trays in this Coven, but, I’d have preferred to do it in the removed sinks as I could then move the fabric between sinks at various stages of the rinsing process.
Another pleasing date today: 12.11.10.
There’ve been rather a lot of them recently.
Someone mathematically nerdy I knew once wrote me a computer program to work out all the sequential and palindromic dates between two given dates. I’ve still got it on a floppy disc somewhere. I also still have the Amstrad PCW 8512 (which was actually an upgraded 8256) on which it runs (which is, incidentally, the only computer I have ever truly loved, and which I totally understood how to use – and, oh, look, the Power of Google indicates that you can still buy spares… maybe I shoud resurrect it?).
Two Friday Questions today: answer one both or none as the mood suits you.
Are you a fan of pleasing dates?
Are you a collector of old technology such as computers, mobile phones etc?
Gosh, don’t utility rooms look large when they have had their fitted units removed? I went out to a talk for a couple of hours last night and couldn’t believe that the utility, normally essentially merely a walk-through passage to outside, was actually square, and, as Mr BW said, as large as most modern kitchens. I had to spend some long while convincing myself I did actually want the unit and sinks put back, such was the niceness of the differently shaped, unfamiliarly large, space.
But, all went to schedule with the first bit of the plan this morning. Other than a problem with particularly prominent pipework (NB For those of you who know about plumbing, this will probably look a mess; I hasten to add that Mr BW is not responsible for any of it. It was all done in the last 15 years by allegedly professional plumbers *laughs* hence why Mr BW is sorting it out this time),
which resulted in carpenter being persuaded to be plumber (much to my surprise) rather than have Mr BW come home to hacksaw off and cap the pipe down from the solar panel so it didn’t foul the support bars and top drawer in the new unit, Stage One (remove old unit, sink, tiles, redundant pipework, and worktop from utility, rub down and repaint walls, and replace with large new slidey drawered unit), is complete.
A nice white primed unit stands (a giant 1 metre tall, before worktop, so I don’t have to bend when working at the sink, as bending at sinks is not good for My Witchy Condition, and 1m 15cm wide) awaiting Phase Three (Phase Two – stripping off the old worktops only has to happen in the main kitchen: many thanks for all the suggestions yesterday, I’ll let you know how it goes: Mr BW now reckons he can get the worktops out without needing to take off the tiles, but, we’ll see, and, strangely, the quote does include integrated upstand a couple of inches up the wall all round, which perhaps the chap doing the quote, knowing we were replacing just the tops and the walls were tiled, anticipated, even though I assured him I didn’t want it), plywood templating, next Monday.
Apparently, according to Carpenter BW (he passed the quality and versatility test, so gets a BW Title, and would be employed again, even though, at one point, he did say he might have to take his jeans off) there is now special paint for painting MDF kitchen units. Anyone know anything about that? I used to know every product that every DIY shed sold for every purpose, including, probably, the price. But, that was 15 years ago. Now, I haven’t a clue and I barely recognise what some of these new-fangled products they sell are for. But, no doubt someone will know, she said, hopefully 😉
So, while Large Slidey-Drawered Unit was being cut and fitted this morning, and Cleaner BW was cleaning up the mess everyone had made in the 5 days since we got back from t’norf (she’s an angel that woman), I was outside, in the drizzle, picking up all the soggy fallen leaves that had congregated around the house (do leaves congregate? No, on second thoughts, perhaps they accumulate?), which were driving me mad coming into the house every time the front door was opened, in anticipation of the torrential rain and gale-force winds that have since arrived here. 8 bin bags full. Mr BW usually sucks them up as they fall (not personally, you understand, with a thingy, and not individually either), but they’ve fallen off earlier than usual, and a huge mound had piled up and got wet last week which just would not be able to be sucked off the gravel, so, I picked them up, by hand.
There were about 100 oak leaves from our tree this size:
It’s a common oak, and it’s never had leaves more than the normal couple of inches long before. This one is eleven inches. Was it another misfiring spell I wonder? Anyone else had overly large leaves on their oak, or know why it happens?
One of my more classic hyperactive entries today, I feel… I’ve hardly slept all week, with everything that’s been happening, one way and another, but I’m sure you’d never tell, would you? 😉
Problems.
I can see them flying in from all directions. It’s whether my bat is large enough and facing the right way at the exact moment it’s needed to bat off the next one before it becomes a major spanner-in-the-works…
Replacing just worktops is complicated.
Much more complicated than I’d hoped.
Well, it wouldn’t have been complicated if I’d gone to a DIY shed and picked a few chipboard tops that Mr BW could have fitted, but, I had to want the ones that needed sinks and existing tops removed for templating, tops put back on, sinks reconnecting, days passing while they’re manufacturing the new tops, and then removing all the old parts again so that they can return to fit the new ones. And then trying to make the old sink and tap wastes and pipes fit the new ones.
Add to that the utility (through which you need to pass to get into the Coven Grounds, as one needs to do several times a day) having to be completely redone (as it was hastily installed ‘to do for a couple of years while we work out what we actually want’ when we moved in fifteen and a half years ago), including installing a made-to-my-utterly-non-standard Witchy requirements, by a carpenter friend of Cleaner BW’s, new super-unit for the utility, that has to be fitted in the place of the old one before the templating happens, and every person/firm involved trying to delay things, without caring about the knock-on effects (particularly on Mr BW, who is doing all the bits that he can do, such as removing and reinstalling, plumbing and tiling, in his spare time, which isn’t very spare at the moment, with all the brown stuff currently flying around at his place of work – most of which is being caused by unreliable sub-contractors – hmmm, pattern emerging here… must be a mis-firing spell methinks…), and you’ll begin to see why I’m almost wishing we hadn’t started.
I haven’t removed ceramic tiles from walls for 15 years (when I did, oh, hundreds of square metres worth, most of it in the post-dawn hour before I went to full-time employed work every day), so I’d forgotten how imprecise an art it is, until yesterday. Most therapeutic though.
So, whereas I’d thought it would be easy to take just the bottom row off the tiles in the kitchen, where they meet the worktop, in order to get the worktops out, I’ve now realised it isn’t easy at all. In fact, I can’t think of a way of doing it. We always buy spare tiles, but we don’t have enough left to redo the area, and… the lovely local shop we got them from disappeared last year when a Topps Tiles opened and stole their trade. T’inter isn’t listing them, so I think they were a special import by the tile man (who had Spanish relatives who sourced non-standard tiles for him to supply to discerning clientele in the days years ago when most tiles available in the UK were boring).
So, we can’t get any more matching tiles.
The worktop won’t come out without removing the adjoining row of tiles. The worktop could be cut back to the existing tiles, except that I can’t think how it could be done.
There is no way that I want to have to completely retile the kitchen as that is a several thousand pound job that does not need doing (hopefully ever again in our lifetime), and I cannot bear the thought of all the mess (there are lots and lots and lots of tiles and it is a very big area).
So… anyone ever removed just one row of tiles, abutting a worktop? Any ideas? Mr BW tells me that dremelling the grout (as I’d sort-of thought) will use one disc per tile, as 10 year old grout is the hardest thing known to man, and probably won’t work anyway. Altough he did mention using an angle-grinder…
Please. Help….
Are there actually any proper retailers out there on the internet? That is, people who hold stock and have premises, and care about their customers, rather than just work out of their spare bedroom, or a desk under the stairs, optimising their websites to get Google hits, so they can take orders and do nothing more than pass them on, and cream off a fat referral fee?
I don’t think I really realised just how prevalent this phenomenon was until a chance conversation at a craft class I attended in the summer. Another lady sat with us mentioned a problem she was having with her new hens and bushy tails (can’t mention the f-word here). I was sharing my experiences of the subject (electric netting), when another lady sitting with us said that that was one of the lines that the company she owned dealt in. She then admitted that she knew absolutely nothing on the subject, and often had to bluff to people who rang up or emailed with questions. A bit more probing revealed that, until 5 years ago, she’d been an accountant in the City, but had given it up to exploit, in her words, “The very lucrative potential of the internet.” Basically, she’d identified some high value products that people would buy online, bought some appropriate domain names (often typos of manufacturers’ or existing well-known retailers’ ones, she said), had her web-designer partner build snazzy and informative websites (often stealing text and images from manufacturers, or other, sites, with or without their agreement), bought lots of Google ads, and raked in the cash, simply for acting as middleman. She said she’d more than quadrupled her annual income, from what she’d earned in a top London job, in 5 years, simply by reselling.
I try to avoid buying from sites like this. I also avoid buying from sites with only 0845/0844/0870/0871 numbers, or with only email contact methods and no real geographic address listed.
Despite this, I still find myself having had to repeatedly read the riot act to a certain tap supply company (recommended by a BW reader) who failed to deliver yesterday as promised, on an order placed last Tuesday. One of the 11 year old Pupils BW, overhearing a conversation I had with them yesterday afternoon (in the middle of his lesson, unheard of, but such was my annoyance with them that I needed to take the call) said, “Oh BW, my mum’s doing a ‘develop your business’ course and has been watching some DVDs on how to handle awkward people, and you’re even better than them!” Too bloody right, and I have now got them to agree to sort out the problem to my satisfaction (after hearing every excuse in the book for why they couldn’t) but it has taken up nearly 4 hours of my life, and, apparently, involved pulling the MD out of a funeral to authorise the resolution I was insisting on (yeah, right, I thought – and said – that too)…
Everyone can mess up, but I cannot bear not being kept informed of problems (they knew on Friday morning, but didn’t let me know, so I waited in all day yesterday for a delivery that never came, on which other parts of the worktop replacement project depend), and I dislike being lied to even more. If someone told me at 4.07pm yesterday afternoon that he’d be arranging a solution to the issue his company had created first thing this morning, knowing that he was due to go on sick leave from last night for 3 weeks, I don’t think that is good business practice, let alone morally or ethically defensible.
And, trust me, if the eight hundred quid’s worth of taps don’t arrive by courier before 11am tomorrow, as I’ve been promised, you can expect the appearance here of a fully linked Google-bomb. Given that their site is well down the Google rankings anyway, I suspect that I can repeat the Cant’s Roses / Mesh Computers successes of yesteryear and do some serious damage to their business. Grrrrr…..
Here’s Kitten and Big Brother, through the bedroom window, just as we were about to leave, ten days ago (and that filthy after a summer’s use by 4 cats cushion is heading for the bin as soon as the parasol comes down, next time it dries out):
Here’s Kitten in her favourite position, looking drunk… it was dark and the camera did odd things to her eyes:
Reminds me, she must be about 16 weeks now, I must ring the vet or her brothers will be done for paeodokittenophilia…
The first night:
The last morning (the only morning with frost – most abnormal for this time of year up there):
In between (not much):
Spot the fishy (that one was longer than my arm – only the second time we’ve seen them trying to jump up the waterfall there):
Spot the pumpkin:
Spot the crip (fantastic – but, sadly wasted on many of the half a theatre – 100 or so – very ageing people (maybe they just wear badly up there) who turned up to see it in Hexham methinks – did punk actually ever *get* up that far? 😉 – only Liverpool dates this week left in the tour now):
Roll on next year…