- 10:00am: Finish the fourth coat of varnish on a bit of furniture we're varnishing.
- 10:30am: Start hand-mixing a 25kg sack of cement+sand mortar with water
- 10:45am: Start hacking stones out of the rubble pile with a pickaxe, and mortaring then into place in the wall I'm building
- 11:30am: Using the pickaxe, dig out the low points of our compacted stone and mud parking area (you can easily find the low points, after a rainy night they're lakes), and then apply the pickaxe to the rubble heap again to loosen up hardcore and shovel it into the holes, as an interim fix to the pooling-water problem.
- 12:30am: Go and have breakfast with wife and child
- 01:00pm: Head off to investigate a nearby builder's merchant type place, to see if their cement is cheaper than B&Qs, and to consider gravel to cover the parking area in, and to generally mooch around.
- 02:00pm: Head down to the excellent John Stayte Services to pick up 80kg of coal, then swing by Tescos for a few essentials and to stop so Sarah can have a coffee
- 03:30pm: Get home, put Jean to bed for a nap, and make and eat lunch
- 05:30pm: Rush out, realising we're late for the district Cub and Scout swimming gala.
- 09:00pm: Get home, put Jean to bed since she's tired and teething
- 09:30pm: Deal with laundry, and add some more varnish to the furniture
- 09:45pm: Cook and eat dinner
- 11:00pm: Wash up, bank the fire so it'll stay lit overnight, load the dishwasher, etc.
- 11:45pm: Blog about it all.
- 12:00pm: Put away huge piles of laundry so we can get to our bed and sleep in it.
- 01:40am: Finish putting away laundry. Get into bed. Start attempting to sleep.
I need an extra weekendend to recover from my weekends!
Recently, a feeling has started to appear in my life that's been missing for many years...
When I was a kid, I often felt geek exhilaration. All I had to do was sit with a notepad and think for a while and I'd come up with a design for something cool. Now, the kind of thing that interests me is infrastructure - I've always been more interested in designing, say, a game engine than in writing an actual game. So I'd sit down and pluck a random problem from the air and design an infrastructure for solving it. And then I'd feel excited about the lovely potential of this infrastructure.
Alas, this happened at a much higher rate than I could ever implement these things, so I had a sources directory laden with unfinished projects. But it was still fun.
Anyway, with age and responsibility and work and bills and stress this happened less and less; I still got to invent infrastructures, since it's part of my job, but I'd only get to design one every month or so at best. Five minutes of fun, then a month of implementation. And the problems I was trying to solve were relatively boring, and the solutions required often constrained to just solve the immediate needs of the users for the next year or so, rather than a sparkling generic platform upon which anything could be built for ever more.
But recently, for some reason, it's started returning.
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Today we discovered the wooden cube cabinate had cat urine soaked into it - AGAIN!!!!
We only moved the thing back inot the house just before christmas from last time 🙁 On top of that I had said last time I didnt want it back in the house until it was sanded and varnished so that things couldnt soak into it - but alas this did not happen and we had to bring it back in 🙁
So I spent a huge chunk of today trying to find homes for the things that live on the cabinate and getting a very stressed Al to bring it upstairs for me - it is now in soak in freash water after its disinfectant soak etc... It is most definatly not coming back into the house this time until varnished and its obvious we cant stand it back where it was as this will just keep happening. Also it turns out that Minni has been a very naughty cat - she though female is 'spotting' to mark her teratorry - sigh.
I wasnt very happy with her today.
On top of that the ADSL was down which lead to a slightly annoyed Sarah (who had planned to get loads of stuff done online whilst bobble was in nursery) and a very stressed Al indeed 🙁
Still I did get a nice birthday suprise of a great book arrive today so its not that bad - even if I did find a kitten mess in the stable by slipping on it - whilst trying to see if we needed to clean the litter tray - sigh.
Oh and I am desperate for the Dishwasher repair person to be able to fix the dishwasher tomorrow - my hands are a mass of red sores and bumps cuased by washing up and wearing gloves makes it worse (grrr! silly x-mar) - this means that I havent been able to do the washing up for the last week as its too painful. We therefore have a kitchen full of stuff waiting to be washed up 🙁
Here is Alaric modelling the very Bent french stick we bought in Tescos for, wait for it.. - 4p!!!! thats right Four Whole Pennys!!!!! It where freashly baked and everything!!!
I think it was worth it just for the humour value!!!!
Temptation begain to kick in by this point and he started insinuating I was being rude! I was shocked I tell you shocked!
He then started threatening me with said bent loaf - but I thought it made him look like mosses with the staff that turns into a serpant (I think thats the story anyway!).
I think much fun was had from the simple pressance of a long bent thing and the French stick was lovely we had it as part of my Birthday Dinner 🙂
Today has been cool - we've had three friends visit and Als cousin visited.
But we did have the drs appointment which was a bit strange - for a start I apparently missed an appointment that neither of us knew about! I specifically took Al with me last time and said appointment was apparently 2 days after the last one?
Still we both now have antibiotics - good ol' penicilling - Al has a bad virus apparently which I probably have on top of the coughing problem 🙁 So I also have a steroid noise spray thing.
Still hopefully this will fix things 🙂
The X-ray was clear to so - I is happy 🙂
Alaric | alaric | 
Sat 3rd Mar 2007 11:56 pm | 
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