Sleepy time down South West

I cannot stay awake at the moment. Hazel and I are both sleeping through the alarm and feeling like death warmed up when we eventually surface. We had time with Samuel yesterday, he is becoming more and more comfortable with us. He came and sat on my lap to watch Lazy Town yesterday of his own volition, nice. He is also becoming more vocal. His speech was bound to improve as he got older but now he is chattering away and making sense, most of the time, about everything. We are still noticing his reluctance to eat some foods though. He is fine with junk but not very keen on more mainstream foods like chicken and potatoes. This may simply be a current fad as he always used to like his food.

I brought the network back up last night, just the NAS boxes not booted in the correct sequence I think. Denise's laptop finally arrived yesterday and I have set it up for her ready to hand it over on Sunday. Hazel and I are off to a party in Exeter on Saturday so I won't be able to use it to chat to Russ as I had hoped.

The party is in honour of the 25th wedding anniversary of Paul and Rachel Bull. He is now known as Prawn Balls rather than Pobble as he was 30 years ago. It seems amazing to me that they are celebrating their 25th so soon. They married young though so it's probably just me.

I spent my lunch break checking on ferry costs for the break in September. The best Deal I can get is through Camping Cheques. They will do the return crossing for £100.00 less than anyone else and throw in five cheques as well. It's always expensive to travel from Plymouth but this is the best I've seen this year by a considerable amount. I might buy a few more than five as they will last until next year and they may well go up in price by then.

What a wonderful week.....

Not!!!When I collected the Sprinter yesterday, they had removed four nuts but left the jubilee clips on the hoses "because we didn't want to go too far". I was so mad, I was silent. Those who know me will realise that this is not a usual occurrence. What a bunch of smegheads! Fortunately, Paul has offered to do the job for me when we visit him in two weeks time. Just in time for the other work to be done. Thank goodness for families.

Once I had eaten, I had intended to watch a documentary about British Holidays of the past. All I could get was a tribute to Michael Jackson............. I am fed up with this!

This is the Diana thing all over again. I can't be the only person who feels that no one, I really mean NO ONE! merits this sort of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. He was a talented man and he died young. So have many entertainers over the years. That he was also barking cannot be denied, for whatever reason, he was a fifty year old child and run by his minders. I felt and feel sorry for the man but he did have a fairly decent life style to go with it so it wasn't all a bummer. Putting that performance on two terrestrial channels was a bad judgment. Later, I tried to get the network to function for Hazel and it simply refused. bums.

Just a taxi for my kids, that's me!

I spent another two hours yesterday moving furniture from Dougs flat over to Sals new place. She has a smashing room, very big and airy as it's the whole attic space of the house.

I watched a couple of documentaries about the moon program afterward and, whilst I remember all of the exciting stuff, I realised that I hadn't known much about the political background to it. I was just twenty years old in 1969 and thought I was grown up!

Woke this morning to the sound of water dripping. It seems we have a leak in our terrace. It's actually not that big a leak but with the rain we had overnight, it's still made a bit of a mess all the way down to the kitchen.

I brought some old slides from the sixties in to the office with me today in order to try out my new scanner. Oh dear, the slides are all, it seems, over exposed and the scanner can't be adjusted to account for it. Everything has to be done by software, not very useful.

ooos bin a busy boy den?

We all worked really hard on Saturday, went to Homebase for the plaster paint, Carpet Warehouse for the carpet and to Wickes for the flexi trunking for janis's electrical system. I managed to finish the fuse box off and have a very close look at the under side of the Eberspacher unit as well.

I had finished off the paintwork in the attic on Friday evening so we spent most of the day scraping and sweeping and vacuuming there and also did a lot of filling in the rest of the house. I also made up the first angle bracket to curtain rail set up and it looks good. Had a good chat with Russ in the evening but, as I was using the Skype phone, I lay on the bed for comfort. Wrong! When we finished chatting, I was locked for ten minutes until I was able to bend myself enough to get off the bed without falling.

On Sunday we went and picked up the carpet, brought it home and carried it up to the attic. Sounds simple but not so. This is a very large piece of very heavy duty carpet. We did, however, manage it eventually.

After several emails, Denise asked me to buy her a new laptop today as she and Peter will be in the UK next week and it would be very much to her advantage to carry it back to Malta as hand luggage rather than DFS it. I had already sourced the item, Samsung R505, so I fired off an order. The credit card was refused! I checked my credit and I am heavily under the limit so I rang Ebuyer and we changed the payment to a debit card. Denise will give me the money at the weekend so I will simply put it back into the account. Then I rang Lloyds. "Sorry sir, it was an unusual amount for you so we blocked your card." Half of me is pleased, the other half is fuming due to embarrassment. I had to get it unblocked in order to pay for the exhaust tomorrow grrrrrr. The cost of the exhaust, by the way, is a very reasonable £399.00.

Martin popped int to apologise for not bringing me the plans, he has done them but he emailed them to his desk and over the weekend, all the power breakers in Babbage and also at his home had tripped and the plans got lost somewhere. He will send them again tonight.

The neg and slide scanner Fred and I have bought arrived today. Looks good but I will bring in some slides and negs tomorrow to try it out.

Some you win..............

In the end, we didn't go to see Sarah and Scott yesterday. I was very tired but could have managed it, Hazel was in some pain but would have managed it but Sal was in a lot of pain and not well at all so we made our apologies and all had an early night. I sat in my chair and made up the second loom for janis' electrics and played around with a drive full of old TV, trying to copy it on to the NAS drive. Utter failure to be recognised by drive and gave up after an hour. Did set up part of a media system though, used it to watch on line trailers from Apple.
This is the non Samuel weekend so work has been planned. I must do the various drilling jobs on janis and clear up the loose ends there before I help Hazel with the painting. We have the top landing to do and various gaps on the middle floors as well as our bedroom. Most of it needs to have at least one layer of plaster paint to fill the cracks and rough areas. As we have run out of the first batch, I will have to go to Homebase and try to buy another couple of tubs. It was expensive but has made the enormous job of painting the whole staircase and attic so much easier. Once finished, we are simply putting on a good coat of whatever the chosen colour is for that area.

Water,.........water...........

It's just so hot. We have had rain today, it lasted about ten minutes and evaporated within fifteen.

The new fuse box arrived this morning and it's very nice, built like a brick outhouse.
Peter Bye put me on to http://retrovision.tv/ and I have over dosed on old fifties American sitcoms. I also found the Star Trek Phase Two programs and they are very good for amateur productions. Hazel and I are due to visit Sarah tonight as she is having a party, only she doesn't know it yet.
Bloods this morning and the clever girl had commandeered the office with air conditioning! She told them she needed it for worried patients. This was very true, I was worried I might melt until I got in her room.
Sal eventually went to see her dentist today, he was as horrified as me and has given her pain killers and anti-biotic to keep her going. He reckons she should be in hospital within the month. I'll believe it when I see it but it's a good thought for all that.

I took a look at a few other diary blogs today. My god, am I as obscure as they are? Most of what I saw was produced by 'wimmin!' (professional feminists) by the look of them. Very obscure and arty. I had intended to offer some suggestions, but, I feel that might be a mistake with what I have just written. Also, I may be just as guilty as they are of being pretentious.

Oh what a night..............

Late September 1962.

Or not really.

I went home at five, spent one and a half hours moving stuff around to make more room in the back room downstairs and then went out to pick up Sal and all her worldly goods from her old flat and bring her home. This took another two hours.

In the meantime, Ian and Lou had words because he had promised to be home by ten and he wasn't. Sal got involved, sent a very nasty text (as only a sister can) and she and Lou went to collect him. They all got back home again and Ian and Lou went to bed to argue some more / make up. Sal sat in the kitchen talking to Hazel. No one told me, I and the cats had been locked in the lounge to stop the cats (and me, presumably) from running out when the front door was opened. I watched about two hours of TV I didn't need to and finally gave up, went to the kitchen to be told not to worry, they were alright now. Went to bed and slept like the dead until six thirty.
The goodies from CAK arrived yesterday so I opened the parcel and checked them. I also built the first loom for the final fused system, very nice. Took Sal to Sarah's place and went to bed fairly early, I wonder why?