Current entry Archive May 2002

Behind These Eyes - May 2002

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Wednesday, 1 May

Still going mad, but getting a lot done.

Aside from being completely 100% caught up with laundry and dishes for the first time ever, a few other little matters have been dealt with. Let's see, what have I been up to?

The current heating system is somewhat Frankensteinian; half the house is on a central heating system, which consists of radiators in the rooms, attached to a hot water tank which is filled by a boiler. During the autumn of 2000, part of this system broke; a pump died, so now circulation of hot water to the radiators only happens passively, and the one radiator that is downstairs basically doesn't work as a result. We had this looked at at the time, but were quoted about £500 to have it fixed. Given that this heating system is quite old and probably should be replaced anyway, it didn't seem worth it, so we haven't bothered. The rooms that don't have radiators have what the British call "fires", which are basically built-in gas heating units, individually controlled. So we thought as long as I was hanging around anyway, we might as well get a quote or two for having the entire existing system replaced with a new, up-to-date central heating system. So, I have had a gas company come in, look at everything, and provide a quote. When we might actually have it done is another question; it involves a fair amount of ripping house apart. On the one hand, it seems a good idea to be around while something of that magnitude is being done; but on the other hand, it would be fairly uncomfortable to be here during the transition.

The cold water tank is rusted and in need of replacement, but it is built into the attic and will be impossible to get out without taking apart bits of wall. Nevertheless, I had another plumber in yesterday to look at that, with an eye to replacing it if they thought it would be possible. On the phone they had indicated that they might be able to push the old unit aside, and not have to pull it out; as long as they could then get the new unit in, there would be no problem. This did not work out; but the plumber happened to ask if we had central heating, because apparently, if we had the style of central heating system that we've just gotten a quote for, we might be able to do away with the cold water tank altogether. So, as long as I had him here, I had this plumber (the line between plumbers and gas companies is rather fine here) have a look around as well and give us a second quote on replacing the heating system. So we still have a rusted cold water tank, but we also have a second quote, which on balance is probably a good thing.

If you go look at one of the very earliest entries in Mike's diary, you'll find a day when there was much fun with the house alarm. The panic button got pressed and it turned out that the code Mike had been supplied didn't actually work. He turned the alarm off by the simple expedient of disconnecting the wires, and there it has sat ever since. So yesterday, I had the alarm company in, for the purpose of rewiring the alarm and making it useful again. Amusingly enough, the technician who showed up was the same guy who performed the original installation, 10 years ago. One hour later, we had a working house alarm and a known code. (So if you've been considering breaking into the house, you've missed your opportunity.)

Had a garden tidying company in, to look at our once-again out-of-control garden. You may remember from my diary about a year ago that we had some people come in and basically rip out the garden. The plan at that time was to find a regular gardener who would come in once every week or two and do the mowing and pruning and weeding that we never seem to get around to. Unfortunately we never did find a garden maintenance service; they are harder to find than you might think. So another year has gone by, the garden is completely overgrown again despite our best intentions last summer, and we are back where we started. This time, I have two possible garden maintenance services, so I have high hopes that if we get the garden tidied again, we will be in a better position to keep it that way. Also, this time around, we may get rid of the derelict garden shed.

I dealt with the general paperwork that has built up, including finally filling out in sending off the ghastly treasury form, and also sending Massachusetts yet a third copy of my 2000 tax return, in return for them magnanimously considering leaving me alone in future. I have even finally sent off information to my UK accountant to allow them to prepare my 2002 UK tax return.

In addition to all this, there has been plenty of prosaic general tidying around the house. Not to imply that it is actually tidy yet, because we disorganize it nearly as fast as I reorganize it, but there has been some visible effect.

Last night I found myself reorganizing supplies on the shelves in the bathroom. Oh, the depths to which I have sunk.

Created at 22:37

Friday, 24 May

I'm back!

Yes, I know I could write diary entries by dictation, but when you're used to touch-typing at a fairly good clip, it seems so painfully slow; plus it's not really typing that has turned out to be the problem, so much as just sitting in a chair. So, I tend to save what typing or dictation capacity I have for work. But at the moment, although it's entirely possible I am imagining it, there seems to be a distinct improvement in the arms, so I am splurging and writing this entry.

Lots of entertainment; for example, at the moment the gas meter is lying like a severed head in the hallway, and there are two guys in blue coveralls taking up the paving-stones at the side of the house, and digging a vast hole, apparently to China. This may take a bit of back-tracking to explain...

You may recall that we were considering having the central heating system replaced and extended to the whole house. We actually went ahead with this. The company doing the work estimated 3-4 days to complete the job, longer if we were trying to live in the house at the same time (because they would have to put everything back into as much working order as possible when leaving every evening). We thought we'd best abandon the house for a few days to let them get on with things. This would shorten the job and let us avoid having to live in a half-broken house for a few days. Not to mention that with me being home at the moment, three or four days of work involving the whole house would not have been much fun to be around for.

The work was scheduled to begin on Monday morning this week. We arranged to go stay at a B&B in Shropshire for two nights, with the intention of going to see Ironbridge. The work team arrived about an hour before we expected on Monday morning and leaped right into it with a rather startling ferocity; they told us they were a really experienced team and fully expected to be done by Tuesday night! And here was me assuming the job would run over, because that's what jobs do.

Well, off to Shropshire we took ourselves, taking in a few other sights along the way, and possibly some tea, with a teensy little stop at a favourite antiquarian bookstore in Chester, with, ahem, possibly not very surprising results. Tuesday morning we went to Ironbridge, which was as impressive as expected--it is the world's first cast-iron bridge, so very much first that they didn't have special construction techniques for iron yet, so they built it as if it were wood, including such fun things as dovetail joints. We did a bit of other wandering around in the Ironbridge area, including a totally unexpected visit to an open-air museum of steel sculpture. That was quite cool.

We were expecting to spend Wednesday in the Llangollen area before heading home for the evening, but the installers rang in the morning to say that they were, in fact, already done, plus the weather turned rather gusty, so we headed home right after lunch. Good thing too, as they'd left our brand-new heating system turned on full bore. The house was about 90° when we got in and cheerfully heading higher. It didn't cool back down again fully until sometime during the night. We were also quite daunted at the disaster area left behind--not to imply that they left things in an unreasonable state, but having a project done that involves the whole house is probably unavoidably messy. We're still putting things back together.

Oh right, the guys tearing up the paving-stones. Yesterday afternoon I noticed a funny smell, seemingly chemical, in the side passage. It wasn't very strong, though, so I didn't worry about it; even if it was gas (as seemed reasonable to suspect, given the magnitude of the work just done), it didn't appear to be very serious. When Mike got home he had a sniff and agreed that it probably was gas, but was somewhat less complacent about leaving it till morning to call the installers back. So, I called them, and got their out-of-hours emergency people. I explained the problem; they said if it was outside the house (which the side passage arguably is), we'd have to call Transco (which was the gas company before it was privatised). OK, so I called them.

Well.

It seems they don't take the possibility of minor little leaks quite as casually as I do. All hell broke loose. They read me a long list of precautions to take right now (turn off all gas appliances, don't do anything that might create a spark, don't even operate a light switch, etc) and said they'd have an engineer out within the hour. Which, sure enough, within a few minutes a guy in blue (couldn't help thinking "smurf" like on a Royal Caribbean cruise) arrived. Within 30 seconds he established, to our considerable embarrassment, that what we were smelling wasn't gas at all, demonstrated by the simple expedient of turning on the cooker without lighting it and letting us smell that for comparison, leaving us feeling rather like users who call the help desk without having taken two seconds to think about the possibility of even the most basic troubleshooting. But that wasn't that; apparently once you call them out, they are required to go through a standard series of checks. This involved a whole panoply of really cool tools, including a device like a studfinder but for finding where utility pipes run, that basically enables you to dowse for utilities, and a sort of personal pile driver, which looked like a massive syringe. Once he'd identified where the gas line ran (and the other utilities, to avoid accidentally puncturing them), he inserted this syringe thing between paving-stones at the junctions nearest the alignment of the gas pipe. It then essentially pounded itself into the ground quite impressively, creating holes at which he could test for gas leaks. This was all quite noisy and attracted a lot of attention; our embarrassment level was not helped at all by the Transco guy asking all and sundry passers-by whether they had smelled any gas leaks at their houses...?

Oh yes, and at one of the holes thus created, his little portable gas-vapour-detector tool detected...a gas leak! Totally unrelated to the leak we thought we had, of course, and quite small, but it did make us feel marginally less stupid.

But this did mean that an investigating team had to be called out, and paving-stones lifted, and big holes dug, and the conclusion was reached that the pipe would have to be replaced. The team to perform the task showed up this morning, thus resulting in the banging and clanging and gas-meter-severing activities mentioned at the beginning of this entry. It's all been put to rights now, leaving us slightly the wiser about gas leaks.

Meanwhile, still waiting for the arms to get better; I've been to a physiotherapist twice now, and am guardedly optimistic. I'm afraid the whole thing strikes me as rather hocus-pocus, but I don't know much about it and am suspending judgment, pending the possibility of useful results. Yesterday morning the physiotherapist really ground me up, leaving me aching for the rest of the day, but strangely enough I seem to have noticeable improvement in the arms last night and today. I don't want to read too much into this, though, as I have thought I was improving before; it may all change again.

I had a few other things I meant to talk about--like the fact that Dad and Verna are coming to visit later this summer (hooray!) and Horrible Carrots (boo hiss!) but I've managed to catch a cold, it would seem, and I'm feeling rather lousy just at the moment, so I think I'll take some Night Nurse (like Nyquil) and go to bed instead.

Later.

Created at 22:24