We changed electricity supplier recently, which is great, but the downside is that I've just noticed a bounced direct debit from NPower (the old one) for £661 on our joint account, to clear our remaining balance 🙁
We were paying a regular direct debit of £130 a month, which we tried to keep to by not being wasteful with the hot water (electrically heated) and by rationing the use of the fan heater (which at 3kW costs just under 50p an hour to run, which at the planned four hours a day comes out to £60 a month, the rest being our normal 'summer' power consumption)
I've no idea how we've gone £661 over in the past year 🙁 I can't find my old workings, but I know my estimate of our summer power consumption involved a lot of guesswork, and I was uncertain as to how many months of the year we'd run the heater for... but it looks like we won't be able to afford to run the fan heater at all this winter; thankfully, we've managed to plug a lot of the draughts in the house, and I'm going to try and arrange secondary double glazing (be it nice sheets of plastic mounted properly... or bubble wrap pinned to the window frames), so hopefully we'll be able to get by with the coal fire downstairs, which normally gets through something like £5 worth of coal a day.
I'll be more frugal with the gas heater in my office, too - last winter, it was used to great effect (especially once we'd managed to close the warped window properly so there wasn't a huge draught), but the office is a high-ceilinged room so a lot of empty space has to be filled with warm air before I feel much of it. I budgeted for one £15 cylinder a month, but we ended up using one about every ten days, from memory.
By comparison, Sarah's electric blanket only uses a sixty or so watts, and keeps her toasty warm all night! Which just goes to show how much of the heat from a room heater goes to heating the walls and air, rather than heating us. I need to get some time to refit Sarah's heated jacket with a cable to plug into a plugtop PSU so she can be kept warm without needing to get through batteries like they grow on trees...
Jean has been playing with Dino-Mountain pretty much everyday but one of the interesting things she has done is put the dinosaurs in family groupings. This is interesting as she has large and small of the same type of dinosaurs but they are in like different style and different colours!
Also depending on what she's been doing - the dino's have adventures such as getting excited about cattle country and going to birthday parties!
She also pretends she is god and saves the baby dino's from the volcano by having it snow on them.
The only iffy thing is that she has decided that stegosaurus is a carni as the toy she has has viscous looking teeth!
Jean keeps asking for stories from mine and Alaric's childhoods and in trying to drag something up I began a story about my friends party as a kid. Her grandfather was a magician and needed an assistant but instead of picking his grand daughter he picked me a) because I wouldn't say how the magic house worked and b) I was small and double jointed.
Jean asked me to explain how the trick worked and I said I couldn't because I had promised and from this the conversation got onto the Magic Circle. At this point Jean got upset because me and Al where saying we didn't know the things magician knew and that we couldn't becuase we weren't part of the Magic Circle.
She was really really irrate with us until we explained that Grandfather Lionel was part of the Magic Circle - this cheered her up and she decided she wanted to email him to ask.
So we sent the email off and she later had a skype call with Lionel (I think I wasn't there) and from this she has decided she wants to go to some magic school and learn tricks. She has also been making up her own magic tricks - which are sweet and slightly painful to watch and has led to some rib cracking moments when she hid a banana down her trousers. We couldn't stop laughing - she couldn't see the joke and got angry with the stupid adults!
After acting like a monster Jean proceeded to do something amazing for a 5yr old. She'd gone over to Barbara for a yogurt and came back saying she'd had an adventure - she then told use she had washed Barbara's leg and put a plaster and bandage on it.
We asked why and she told us Barbara had stabbed her leg with a fork!
Startled Al rushed over to Barbara's to find that indeed Barbara had stabbed her self with garden fork, she had been carrying over her shoulder and let go and it had fallen hitting and stabbing her calf.
Al told her that it would have to be kept an eye on and if it didn't heel or became infected she'd have to go to a Dr (She should have gone anyway but that wasn't going to happen.)
Anyway I was amazed at Jean - should could have just run away from the situation like most five year olds or been inept but she wasn't. I am also worried that she was put in such a mature situation to be quiet honest :/
But mostly I'm proud of her.
Barbara got convinced to see a Dr by a friend and ended up on antibiotics.
Starting slightly late this month but I do have a series of challenges - first off I want to get back into the novel I was writing for the Terry Pratchett Prize. It has been on the back burner for two reasons a) Jean being on holiday and me being pregnant meant I just did not have time or energy to do much other that look after me and the 'kids'.
And b) I have sorted out the storyline now - there is actually a plot and stuff but somehow this appearance of a destination stopped me writing :/ I think I need to force myself back into it which is what I shall be doing this month.
I am not doing any proper work at the moment as my hands and things are just being to too erratic - basically if I fail at my own challenges I'm not going to upset people or get sued where as if I take on a client - it's a different matter entirely :/
I would like to get the novel finished this month though realise the hope of doing so is minimal :/ I'm going to say I'll do 1000 words or an hrs writing today - mainly because if I haven't reached 1000 words in an hour I'm struggling and it probably will not happen no matter how long I sit there!
I would like to have the novel finished so that a) I can attempt GothNoWriMo in October but with NaNoWriMo that would be three concecutive months of novel writing and I'm not sure I'm up for that!
b) I want the novel have it's first lot of changes done in the beginning of October ie spelling and grammar and then to be sent to readers for feed back. This would hopefully then give me a month to effect any further changes and get it actually sent off!
So with this tall order what is my second creative challenge for the month?
To write a blog post a day - this is not a hard one as I tend to manage this each month without trying 😉
Ok so I shall begin!
Building Maintenance | alaric | 
Mon 27th Sep 2010 1:11 pm | 
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