Friends and Homes (by sarah)

Yesterday my friend visited - she is in her seventies, she bought loads of books and pretty trousers for Jeans and a teddy and dolly for Mary and for me purple, pink and white flowers. She reminds me of how proud I am of how I've set things up in this house - here they are at the dinning table.

The pink jacket Jean is wearing is from her too. I love our dinning area 🙂

I have loads of pics of improvements we've made which I really should post at some point. This time last year we were desperately waiting for the mortgage to go through after having negotiated a cheaper price. Alaric and Mary were ill with pnumonia and I was still using the crutches.

Things have changed for us drastically and even though the workshop has leaked and maybe ruined some of Alaric's tools things are still on the up. Over the next week or so he and my dad will make it safe for at least the winter, Monday he sealed some of the gaps in the bathroom and did some general mantinance things.

We have purple carpet on what was bare concret, with a purple setee from my family and purple curtains from my friend (same one who popped round today). We still haven't unpacked everything which is dreadful as we are approaching the 1 yr mark rapidly but at the same time I have just unpacked my Harry Potter lego which was still in the boxes we moved from Essex! They never got unpacked at The Bakery!

Last week we had my friend Becca visiting with her sister and little niece. This was something that wasn't really possible before as there was no were really to put anyone - oh we still had house guests but that had to be willing to sleep on the floor/sofa so was out for anyone with any sort of back problem!

(they bought astronaut icecream with them!)

We had a Baby Bake Off whilst Jean was at school!

I love the fact that people can tell it's our house by the fact there is a purple butterfly on the house and the amazement that I did not put the butterflies and dolphins in the bathroom - they were already there!

Yes we have had to give up the idea of bees (urban bees would upset the neighbours), but plans for chickens are under way. Main limiting factor is money is going to be tight again in the new year 🙁 But we plan to make a list of what and when we are doing certain things to the house and garden at New Year 🙂

We love our house! Everything from the kitchen that lends itself to our epic cooking feats to the Hammond Organ we accidently bought! This was dinner yesterday - Jean wasn't impressed but it was yummy.

All Saints Church Long Ashton (by sarah)

I attended the Green Unconference 2012 at this church - I love church buildings and so couldn't resist taking some photos. (All of which will be appearing in a slightly nicer format on my photo blog.)

The stained glass windows had me most entranced

I liked the juxtapostion of these two 🙂

My new workshop (by alaric)

I took the day off of work on my birthday, to do something I'd been dying to do since we moved in - get my workshop set up to a state where I can actually use it.

To begin with, I had a load of things to put away. The floor was covered in boxes that needed unpacking, but as soon as I'd cleared enough to get sufficient access, I put up my big shelf.

It goes on the wall above my welding bench:

Drilling into masonry can be a pain, especially coarse breeze blocks like those, which are comprised of a load of tiny stones joined together with cement; the bit will tend to wander into a convenient gap between stones rather than ploughing through the wall where I want it to go. So the only thing to do is to break out my serious drill. Which I call Vera:

Vera is an SDS+ drill, which means it has a special chuck and takes special bits. The chuck fixing is actually designed for hammer drilling, unlike standard drill chucks, which means the drill can apply a much more significant and reliable hammering force. As such, it glides through walls like this in the way a normall drill glides through plywood.

As such, in no time I had each bracket mounted with 6x40mm screws into 10mm diameter wall plugs:

I could then life the shelf into place:

However, Vera's SDS+ chuck can't drive ordinary bits (although I do have an SDS+ to ordinary chuck adapter, but Vera would really be overkill for the next step), so I used my cordless drill to predrill holes for the screws into the bottom of the shelf. I like to think of this drill as Vera's filthy little sister, as it's fast and easy. The observant will also notice that it goes up to eleven:

Having done that, I screwed the shelf onto the brackets so it won't budge:

With the shelf up I could then put even more stuff away. I've made a little guided tour movie:

There's still more to do - I need to get Ethernet cabling down there so I can get Internet access, and I need to fix the leaking flat roof, and do something about the draughty eaves and the ivy creeping in. But now that the floor is clear and things are in useful places, I can actually use the workshop, which is great.

So two days later, I performed my first project. We needed a coathook for children's coats and bags, and we found the perfect design in a shop, except it was made to hang over the top of a door rather than to be mounted on the wall.

Not a problem when you own metal working tools.

First off, I used the angle grinder to chop the bits that go over the top of the door off, then with them out of the way, went in and neatly chopped the long metal bits off close to the part we wanted:

Then I used a center punch to mark where I needed to drill at each end:

To begin with, I drilled a 2mm hole, as that's a lot easier to drill accurately by hand than the 5mm hole I need:

Then I drilled it out to 5mm:

And then the screw could fit in:

And it was done:

British Gas (by alaric)

Ok, I'm starting to get annoyed with British Gas, so it's time for a RANT.

When we moved into the new home, it had prepayment meters for gas and electricity. For those not familiar, these are meters where, rather than having your meters read and being billed on what you have used, you have to take a smartcard to a shop and pay to get it "charged" with credit, which you then take home and insert into the meter. The meter keeps a credit balance, which it subtracts from as you use energy, and when it hits zero, you get switched off until you put more in.

This is annoying, as you have to keep remembering to top it up, and it's also more expensive; you get charged more per unit of energy used for the privilege of all that extra infrastructure. It's usually an arrangement one enters into if one is having trouble paying the energy bills, as it makes you unable to use more than you can afford. In which case, you can get put onto prepayment meters, at an even more inflated rate, in order to pay off the debt as well as buying your energy every time you top up.

So, we of course wanted OFF. To do this we first need to take over the gas and electricity supply from the previous folks, then when the account's in our name, we can get it transferred. The gas and electricity accounts are both run by British Gas, who helpfully send a letter to "The Homeowner" at the address telling us to get in touch with them as soon as possible so we can take over the account, as the previous folks had told them they'd moved out; in particular, it warned us that the previous owner's smartcards may be configured to repay debts, so we'd need our own ones to be charged a more reasonable rate.

So we sign up with them, as advised, and are told it'll take about twenty-eight days for "the paperwork" to happen, and then we'll get our new gas and electricity smartcards shortly after that.

So we plod on, using the previous owner's smartcards which, I note, are particularly expensive for gas at least; we're putting in £20 top-ups of gas at least once a week, and often twice.

Then we get a letter asking us to ring them to confirm some details, which I do, and am thanked for the details, and told the account take-over can now REALLY start, and will probably be finished around the end of February, and we should be able to get our meters swapped over to normal ones after that.

Well, it's now March, and I've rung up to ask about that, only to find out that only the electricity is in our name; the gas is still in the previous people's name. Apparently "an error" was made originally. Anyway, apparently that's being cleared up, and they're trying to get me set up for a credit meter, and I was on hold for ages, and got cut off, so rang up again, and was on hold for ages, then was told it was taking a while so they'd ring me back...

That was a few hours ago. I'm still waiting. And we're still running on the previous owner's smartcards, paying inflated rates. It'll have been two months soon.

WHY does this have to be so SLOW? Why can't they just put the account into our name immediately, when we ring up? Why does it need to take 28 days at all, let alone take the month and a half it's been so far?

While we've been waiting for the gas and electricity to be fully transferred, British Telecom have managed to lay an entire NEW PHONE LINE to our house, complete with digging trenches and everything, and Andrews and Arnold (AAISP) set up broadband on it. Both actions requiring ACTUAL WORK to happen rather than just changing some entries in a database and posting us some smartcards. AAISP's contribution to this alone is probably similar to what British Gas had to do; adding us to their accounts database and contracting BT to put an ADSL linecard in at the exchange, then posting us a configured router, and it took them one week, most of which was waiting for BT to do their bit...

A week off (by alaric)

I took last week off of work, to recuperate from the house moving and to spend some time setting up my workshop. That sounds like more house moving, but it's without deadlines, and it's taking time to sort out my own space the way I like it. So it's relaxing and settling! I did a few other things, too. I chose the Half Term week for my holiday, as no work AND no school runs would mean I didn't need to get up in the mornings, and so I could spend more time with our children. Sarah's teenaged (well, 12 and 14) cousins visited for half term, too, and were eager to help out with interesting DIY projects!

• We laid concrete in the fireplace, to bring the base level with the rest of the floor so we can tile it to make a nice hearth. We mixed the concrete by hand, and leveled and tamped it into the space, then checked back on it over the next few days until it was hard.

• We laid mortar along a messy and dirt-accumulating crevice in the workshop floor, to level it. This was fairly similar to the laying of concrete, except using sand rather than all-in ballast as the aggregrate.

• Painted most of the workshop floor with the special concrete floor paint I bought from the excellent and helpful Bailey Paints. We can't paint over the bit we laid mortar on until it's cured sufficiently, which will take a few months, so that bit can wait.

• Constructed and arranged the furniture in the workshop. Shelving had to be assembled, and my famous double-deck electronics desk put back together!

• Mounted my tool board on the workshop wall. It's happy in its new home.

• Mounted and wired in the Caffreys sign. Years and years ago Sarah and I, with my friend Matthew, witnessed a pub being redecorated, and the illuminated Caffreys sign was being chucked into a skip. We asked if we could take it, and it's followed us ever since then, being used as a rather unweildy novelty lamp; now we have a place we can mount it properly to the wall, so it's mounted on the outside of my workshop, with the cable run properly through the wall so it can be plugged in inside.

• Mounted and wired in the router, power strip, switch and UPS. We have a nice new cupboard under the stairs, built for us by Sarah's brother David. I've mounted the "core network" devices directly to the inside wall of the cupboard, and will mount one of my patch panels there when I run CAT5 to sockets around the house (and a trunk to the workshop, where my second patch panel will be installed in the comms cabinet - when it's bolted to the wall; we bought the bolts for that, but didn't get around to it).

• Gone climbing (with Jean and Sarah's cousins) at The Warehouse in Gloucester, which has excellent facilities for children and young folks. Everyone had a good time.

• Worked more on my scripts to migrate the massive amount of data from my current hosting setup, love.warhead.org.uk, to the new hardware. Love currently runs on a pair of servers, fear and infatuation, whose responsibilities will be taken over by one, just called love. This will be a simpler and more reliable setup, which will be easier to migrate in future, and will (touch wood) crash less. Oh, and it gives us much more disk space.

The love migration scripts were about the only stuff I did with computers all week. I'd have liked to have done more (I have some Ugarit, R7RS, and Chicken Scheme TODOs), but the presence of teenagers who would get bored if they didn't have exciting DIY tasks to do meant I focussed on things I could do with them. This isn't a problem, as in only one week I couldn't do ALL my projects; even focussing on DIY, we didn't get it all done 🙂

However, I think I need to take time off to relax like this more often. Mainly because, despite not needing to be up in the morning, I kept waking up at around 6am and not being able to get back to sleep. And once I woke up from a nightmare that I was neglecting all my responsibilities and everyone who depended upon me was being let down. These are not healthy signs...