where art collides

Home alone x

Took John and Matt to school and did meself a bacon sandwich when I got back. Also washed the dishes and emptied both kitchen bin and recycling bin into their appropriate bins out the front. It’s the no jury service effect. Having two weeks where I thought I’d be doing jury service but am not has made life mind blowingly boring at times. I think if I was totally retired I’d have to have a routine that filled the day in order to get through the day. As it is I can’t see myself stopping work fully for years. I’m too young.

This week I do have some work to be getting on with although much of it is still awaiting input from 3rd parties.

I still have the doorbell to sort out and the trapdoor for the attic. Maybe that is what I’ll do today.

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Made some progress with the trapdoor cover, albeit slowed down by the fact that the battery on the cordless drill has run flat. Funnily enough I had just been wondering to myself how long do these batteries last and hey presto, it ran out of juice. So now it’s charging. I only have the one battery. I got the drill at a reduced price because someone had stolen the second battery from the kit.

I’ll nip down to B&Q later (or Boris and Quack as the kids used to call it). I have to return some items (batteries and doorbell push/button/whatever they call it) and will look at a wireless doorbell when I’m there. They seemed to have a large selection of wireless doorbells. Actually they are called chimes now. Why can’t we just buy a simple old fashioned doorbell!

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Doorbell installed. Wow. The build standard isn’t very high on these things though. Had to employ bluetac to keep the bell push housing in place but it will be ok. Also a cover placed over the trapdoor. It doesn’t cover the whole opening as the ladder gets in the way but it will stop people from falling though which is it’s main purpose.

In other news my birth certificate has arrived which allows me to confirm that I was born. It should also be the last piece of the jigsaw that I need to get my Irish passport sorted. Yay.

to do jobs or not to do jobs

Good morning all. It’s 8.43. I’m up showered and downstairs. Looks like a lovely Autumn day out. Not in a rush for anything today. Breakfast will come when it is ready. No tea made yet either. John is upstairs still in his room. Presumably asleep but quite possible on his laptop.

Today is Sunday. The sabbath for some religions. First day of the working week for others. Why it is different I know not. Competitive sabbaths? Anyway the point is that one can choose to adopt the religious rulings of not working on a sabbath. If one so chooses. I do whatever I feel. Sunday for me has traditionally been the day to get jobs done whilst Anne is at church.

I still have to do some stuff in the garden and also create a cover for the attic trapdoor for when the ladder is down. It’s a bit of joinery that I’ve had one go at with the results being rejected by the customers, Anne and John. It is therefore a longer term project than they might have hoped for. I suspect that the week ahead will see it done.

Just hear the sound of someone climbing the ladder into the attic. John is awake.

V pleasant afternoon yesterday watching John play hockey in Hull. He scored a goal. Yay. They lost 5 – 3 but only because they tired towards the end and they had a few youngsters playing in the side. The pace is pretty fast in a game of hockey. Hull fair was on next to the pitch. Huge. Never seen anything like it. Check out the video. When Lincoln turned up it turned out their kit was very similar to that of Hull so they had to kluge together a red strip to play in. Bibs and odd bits of kit that they had brought along.

Back in Lincoln I dropped John off, popped to get some salady bits from Waitrose and had a swift un with Ian Stobie and his make Mick in the strugglers. Pleasant dinner and early ish to bed.

new router is a huge improvement btw. bliss.

Stay tuned.

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10.27 loud music has moved into the kitchen.

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Waitrose shop and a stop off at Yarborough Leisure centre to join John up for gym membership and it is now raining. Oh no. No gardening this afternoon now. We are having lamb and chorizo burgers with apricot salsa. Could only get dried apricots. What’s Waitrose coming to?

Ordered a couple more books: “The Foundations Of Modern Wales 1642-1780” by  Geraint H.Jenkins and “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere” by Jan Morris. Look forward to reading those. The history book was £25 new but only four quid second hand. Nobrainer.

first pot of the day, and the second

The full monty is in prospect including some fried potatoes seeing as I deliberately and with great foresight boiled too many last night. But first a reviving cup of tea.

I momentarily debated with myself, not out loud, whether that last sentence deserved to be a paragraph on its own. It seemed to stand out. Emphatically. The argument against is that the process of making the tea is not instant. The kettle has boiled and the water poured into the teapot with one tea bag (small teapot) but the tea now needs to stand a few minutes to brew.

It might be worth discussing what constitutes the ideal cooked breakfast. This is however a lengthy discussion for which I do not currently have the patience or attention span so I will leave it for a stand alone post. Also the news is full of the death and destruction left in Haiti in the trail of hurricane Matthew so it perhaps isn’t appropriate to discuss food this morning (although I know yes life does go on).

I don’t normally discuss politics either but this was the subject of debate at the Morning Star last night. The labour Party is in meltdown, UKIP is falling apart with suitably derisory and unseemly fighting amongst it’s MEPs in Strasbourg leaving the Tories drifting further to the right with no opposition and with the not impossible prospect of the whole country being totally buggered. Bring back the Liberal Democrats.

In other news England are playing Malta at Wembley today. I may even watch it for a laugh. It would be really funny if Malta won. Eh?

This afternoon I am going to Hull to watch John play hockey. Looking forward to that even though it’s a bit of a trek.

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Breakfast over. The day to get one with once the (second pot of) tea has been consumed. Ito ay oras para sa isang shower. Tandaan google ay walang isang Pilipino salita para shower.

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Sounds like there is a digger working away in the back garden of someone two or three doors up the road. Problem is I can’t see what’s going on. V frustrating. Might nip upstairs to look out of a back window. Ah it’s a chainsaw.

why am I awake?

3:34 a.m. and Anne is up and ready to set off for Ferrara with the girls. The alarm was set for 3:30 and so we’ve been waking up off and on all night. Claire is picking her up at 4.

4.08 and they have set off. Let’s see if I can get back to sleep.

4.53 still not asleep. Urgh.Dictating this.

Why am I awake? What’s it all about? Certainly gives you the opportunity to think about things. There is an empty space in the bed beside me. It doesn’t feel right. There was a time when Anne going away meant throwing off the shackles of family life and going out with the boys. I will still do this but I’ve arrived at a point where it feels right to be calming down. The problem is that 54 3/4 years of training means it is difficult to slow down the pace of things. Especially when you consider the semi international nature of my life.

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Finally dropped off and awoke at 7.40ish. Now 8.05 and downstairs making a bit of toast. It’s cold and wet out. Will have the Dyson fan heater on in the office today, probs.

The overnight news if of a change in name of a Facebook Group. “Your probably from Lincoln if….”  has changed its name to “You’re probably from Lincoln if….”. Bit of a shame really I always thought the grammatical error was quite quaint. It has 24,558 members. That’s a huge proportion of the people living in Lincoln plus a ton of ex-pats now living away. It matters not.

New router arrives today, if it is the will of Allah. Anne will be getting ready to board the plane now (8.27).

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School run dun. Waitrose shopped. Kettle on for first tea of the day at 09.34.

New tripod for the phone ordered yesterday from Amazon and being delivered today.

Also a Virgin router being delivered today. However (from the Virgin website): “Where’s my self install pack? Your self install pack has not yet been allocated a tracking reference number. When it is, you can check your self install pack’s progress right until the time it’s delivered to your door. Your pack will be delivered by our trusty partners, Yodel. Come back here closer to your delivery date and you’ll be able to link straight through to the Yodel website and track your order.” Doesn’t seem right that it’s being delivered today and has not yet even got a tracking order.

12:20

New router has arrived. The guy from Yodel said they usually have a tracking number giving a one hour delivery slot. Turned out I heard him at the door which was lucky. The doorbell is still not extant. Let’s hope it fixes the crappy wifi issue. Fingers crossed eh?

16.02

Back from school run. Router up and running, NAS box IP address changed, printer back online, weekend starts soon.

perhaps you’ll die

There is a fly. It is irritating. Constantly buzzing around the conservatory trying to find a way out. I have opened the door. The fly has flown through the open door and is now out in the garden. What does this fly want out of life? Inside the conservatory the conditions were benign. Comfortable. Outside the autumn is under way and soon the conditions will not be very conducive to being a fly. The fly obviously thinks otherwise. It knows better. Goodbye fly.

with Ian Stobie’s band

Nice night at the Strugs last night watching Ian Stobie’s band play some tunes. There were five of them in the band. Got cab home about 10.50 – was already past my bedtime so it saved me 20 mins walk. Taxi driver was a real miserable bugger. Had I had the exact money I wouldn’t have given him a tip.

Today is a day of jobs around the house so I’m getting this post done early. Not being helped by the appallingly intermittent wireless connectivity in the house.

Also taking John down for a jab at 12.20 – the docs rang and said they had had a cancellation. It’s a tetanus type booster. He had an appointment some time into the future. Picked John up from school yesterday. Good job Anne warned me about the building work. It’s made the carpark smaller and I went early to make sure of a spot. It was good advice. I spent the time reading.

I’ve finished one of the books that got delivered yesterday – “Protestant Dissenters in Wales 1639 – 1689”. V interesting. I’m doing some background reading as part of my family tree research. It’s 8 years since I last looked into it and ground to a halt in the 18th century with three brothers who were ministers of religion for the Church of Wales, The Baptists and Unitarians.

It’s Anne’s last day before she heads for a long weekend in Italy with her pals. It’s unusual for it to be this way around. It’s normally me doing the jetting off.

Toasted bacon sandwich for breakfast this morning. Streaky bacon. HP sauce, of course. John and I will have free rein to eat what we like for the next four days. WIll focus on healthy stuff obvs. A boys trip to Waitrose must be in the offing. Lunch yesterday was at the Burton Road Chippy btw. Ranked in the top ten in the country. I noted this morning a comment thread on the Your probably from Lincoln if Facebook group where there was a strong debate going on as to the best chippy in Lincoln. Interesting what gets people excited.

The band isn’t called The Ian Stobie Band btw but Ian is one of the guitarists. Andy is the singer.

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Bit annoyed. Our doorbell has given up the ghost. It’s pretty ancient and didn’t look worth trying to fix so I bought a new one from B&Q. They only have one or two wired options available and all the ones that I wanted, the battery operated ones, had had their packages opened. I thought this was a little suspicious but bought the one in best nick and took it home. It doesn’t work. Worra pain. Now I have to take it back. I’m going to have to run with a wireless option. They had millions of those.

In other news my thunderbolt ot Gigabit Ethernet adapter has arrived. Works fine out of the box so I’m alright at at my desk. In fact it’s a breath of fresh air having internet access that works as it should do. New router arrives tomorrow.

Lights in the back garden at the strugglers

I bumped into two guys…

So I went to the gym yesterday afternoon and thought on the way home I’d swing by the Taphouse and Kitchen for a pint of lime and soda. Turn’s out it was closed – new winter opening hours. So I swung by Ian Stobie’s at Colonia, had a bit of a chat with him, and was moseying back to the car when I bumped into Adie Smith and Ian’s brother Gary on their way to the Tower Hotel. At about 3.30pm.

Went along with them, the car was parked outside the Tower, and popped in for the aforementioned lime and soda. The lime and soda morphed into five or six pints of beer and a chinese at the Newport Arch and I made it home just after 9.30. Fortunately early on in the proceedings I’d moved the car around the corner to a spot with no time restrictions. So shortly I’ll be walking back to the Bail to pick it up.

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Car retrieved. It’s a beautiful morning out there and it was a very pleasant walk to the Bail. Plenty of spare parking as the road closure associated with the resurfacing of some of the Bail’s cobbles is putting people off coming to the area.

Today I am having lunch with a couple of Timico guys then this evening it’s the jazz vehicle run followed by going out to the Strugglers to watch Ian’s band in action. Two nights out on the trot in Lincoln!

There is also the possibility of going to watch the Swallows and Amazons film at Bishop Grots but I’m not yet sure about that one. I hear good things about it and am a big fan of the books but in my mind, going to the flicks in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday is quite possibly the beginning of the end. I’ll let you know if I go.

Pic below is of a leaf that blew in through the car window whilst I was reading my book waiting for John to come out of school. The book was “Protestant Dissenters in Wales 1639 – 1689 by Geraint H Jenkins. It arrived in the post this morning together with “A Social History of the Nonconformist Ministry in England and Wales 1800 – 1930” by Kenneth D Brown, a notification of a VAT refund and a copy of mam and dad’s marriage certificate.

Oh and I’ve ordered a new router from Virgin. The superhub 3 which will replace the superhub 2 that is giving me serious grief with its wifi performance. I tested it this morning with both a wired connection and wireless right next to the router. The wireless connection took a lot longer to load the page. Speedtests were the same for both.