Pros and Cons (by alaric)

The downside of this morning:

Jean woke up about at 2:30am, when I was just drifting off after unwinding with a good book after a late night working, and wailed. I went and picked her up, and she quietened instantly, then fell asleep on my chest as I sat with her. I slipped her back into her cot, substituted her teddy bear for myself in her arms, and went to bed.

About half an hour later, I was starting to drift off again, when she started to wail again.

Repeat this a few times.

Then after a while, she stopped falling asleep on my chest, and instead was playful. But then screamed if I left her alone. Brought her into my room to see if she'd fall asleep being hugged, but just ended up being poked in the face by a curious baby. So we set a DVD playing to keep her entertained in her room, and tried to get to sleep again.

But the DVD finished, so she started crying. I went back and made it play again. This time, she started crying before it was finished.

Tried getting her to sleep in the bed with us again, no cigar.

Eventually, she drops off at about 6am or so. I'd never quite made it to sleep, but I managed to at about 6:30am. Slept clean through the 7:30am and 8:00am alarms to wake up in time to take Jean into nursery and woke up at about 11:30am, feeling a bit grotty. At the time of writing (3pm), Jean is still sleeping happily in her cot (thankfully...).

That's the bad news.

The good news is that the electricity bill came today!

Now, last winter, when we'd just moved in, Sarah was cold, and Jean was cold, and all we had to heat things with were electrical heating and the single coal fire at one end of the (long, thin) building, so we used a LOAD of electricity. Out here in the sticks there's no gas pipeline, and we don't have gas or oil tanks; electricity heats our water, cooks our food, and (apart from the coal fire) heats the house.

The bill for that quarter was based on an estimate. An under estimate. When they got a reading last summer, we ended up with a wopping huge bill, that they said we could pay off in installments, along with our predicted next bill, based on the new estimate of our usage.

So for six months, we've been paying £300 a month in electricity bills; half paying off the winter before, half paying for this winter.

So it's a good thing that the bill has come, because it means this period is over. The bill was for fifty pounds; their estimate of our usage, minus what we paid in direct debits. And since we now have draught-reducing and convection-limiting thick curtains over all the windows, have figured out how to convert the coal fire into a blast furnace, and have portable gas heaters, when we send them our meter readings, we're hoping they'll have found they overestimated our usage and pay us back money...

Which will be welcome, as things are still rather tight!

Minni Helping Alaric Work (by sarah)

What a day! (by alaric)

• 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!

Geek exhilaration (by alaric)

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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Will the Curse Ever go Away? (by sarah)

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 🙁