still struggling to hold everything together… pretty much over the cold now
Well, last night I’d just come through about a week of mucho stuff going wrong. My life was as a Junkers JU 87D and I the pilot, trying to find a flat patch of destroyed city to land on before the burning wings ripped off. My radio was dead, the ejector seat was a dud and the controls were almost too hot to touch.
Last night I found that my replacement palm DID hotsync with my home machine, so it wasn’t all broken as I had suspected. Hoorah! I decided that was the turning point. I would go back to work, have no further bad luck with my project, deliver the last 5 days’ work in the 3 days remaining, get over my cold, rescue the girl, get Doktor Bad to fall into his own shark-infested acid pit, and be able to relax over the weekend.
This morning I got a call from a nice copper saying he’d got Kate with him in hospital, her having lost in a game of street sumo with a moped. The phone ran out of batteries before the policeman managed to explain that she was conscious, not missing any limbs, and in fact was only not talking herself cos she was weepy rather than cos she had lost the power of speech or was paralysed from the eyebrows down. Apparently I went rather pale on the phone.
About half way there in the car I managed to stop running scenarios and managed to decide to wait to see what the situation was before I got too excitable (too late!). The situation was, a woozy Kate on a hospital bed, accompanied by a nice nurse who had GALLONS of blood on her hands who was trying to read her the instruction of what not to do when you’ve banged your head. We then swapped that nurse for a nice lady who put 6 stitches in the back of Kate’s bonce, then swapped again for two nice policepersons who tried to clear up the remaining paperwork, readings-out of entitlements, etc with the minimum of fuss. After a couple of practice runs, we got her walking and I’ve now propped her up in the rec. room at work with a book and a herbal tea so that I can check she’s awake from time to time.
Well. I was right about the luck, in a roundabout way. A change is as good as a rest, they say, and this one certainly helped get a few things into perspective. Kate’s going to have a few days of pain and of boredom and isn’t allowed to wash her hair which is caked in blood for 3 days, but it seems there is no lasting damage, and everyone has been most supportive.
Now I’m in charge of making sure she doesn’t fall asleep until bedtime, though I’m not convinced I’m going to make it that far…
What a week it’s been for technology. First I spent far too much money on a Mac Mini and some Timbales, then the exhaust fell off the car and my Palm died. I hadn’t been backing up the Palm lately because I was still in the process of recovering from pre-emptively sacking my hard drive after it started to hint that it was dying.
Hmm, the ‘trouble’ which manifested itself as a clicking disk drive, started around the time I bought “the invisible invasion” … hmmm …
This week I bought a set of TORX screwdrivers (to get the back off my old Palm) and a new Palm (because I don’t believe I’ll find anything in there I can fix). I received the Palm today, and it wouldn’t Hotsync with my work machine! Calamity! Callooh! Callay! (oh, no I think they’re good sounds, I think I meant I was frumious with uff) Unfortunately I am two days behind something that needs to be in in two days time so I didn’t have a lot of time left over for applying rational thought to this problem. Well tonight (after two hours’ salsa teaching, which always improves my mood, or at least renders me too tired to be grumpy) I got home with the intention of dismantling the NEW palm and disconnecting the battery as I had heard somewhere that this particular one would get confused sometimes and the only solution was to completely run the battery down.
I got home and thankfully thought I’d try hotsyncing first, and (o frabjous day!) it worked!
So tomorrow I will gallumph back to work and take a vorpal blade to the work Pee Cee.
All of which is rather more detailed and less interesting than I was hoping. Suffice it to say, I believe that my bumpy spell with technology is over.
Touch wood.
This evening I spent an inordinate amount of time finally sorting out my ‘universal’ remote control. It turns out the on digital box I’d been given could be (and had been) set to an alternative code set. I set the box back to its original codeset and ordered a universal remote from Argos to be picked up tomorrow. I put the reservation code in my palm, which waited for me to close the browser window then promptly died. It is hoseder than hosed and there is no way I’m getting back any of the info I’ve put in in the last few … er … months actually, considering both the machines I’ve hotsynced it with have been replaced. That’s it. Everybody’s birthdays, phone numbers, all my appointments, and the list of stuff I was supposed to be doing, all gone forever.
Fussocks.
And the reservation number for getting this remote.
Arse.
On Sunday, having got my home unstuck and being full of action, I started digging through the mounds of unopened paperwork that have accumulated in my home. One of them was a letter informing me that, since I was the registered keeper of my car and nobody had seen fit to tax it (uh I mean pay road fund licence duty on it), I should pay a £40 fine plus arrears within a month (i.e. before last week) or pay an £80 quid fine plus arrears.
These things happen to me from time to time on account of me not actually having a recall facility in my brain. Stuff just doesn’t occur to me. Usually I have a physical system of piles of stuff to be dealt with, piles to be looked at in a month’s time, etc; but with all the turmoil of the last couple of years that has fallen apart.
I was a bit puzzled however by the conspicuous absence of a reminder that my car tax was going to run out. This would normally have been opened and placed on the top of a pile of stuff to do at the weekend.
I paid the fines and the arrears cheerfully, slightly confusing the people at the call centre who had a whole bunch of rebuffs lined up for when I tried to wheedle out of it. I quite agreed that 3 months was a long time to have been out of tax, and yes, I was lucky not to have been also done by the police (the police generally can’t give a monkey’s about tax discs, but my blood ran cold when I realised this).
£107 later, it just remains for me to actually tax the car again as of this month. I had planned to do that on Saturday but as I’ve just made arrangements to drive all my friends to Manchester on Friday, I thought it would be a bit rude to get the car impounded whilst there.
I’ve got away with the exact same thing at least twice in the last three months but there’s something too ironic in getting nicked the night before you were going to fix everything. The chances were a million to one, which as we all know, practically guarantees it.
Today I dashed home to dash to town and get a shiny blue tax disc. There, neatly filed under “vehicle” next to my MoT and insurance certificate, was the reminder. Doh!
Far more dangerous a threat than extremists trying to blow up parts of my country was a single extremist seeking to simply destroy everything my country stands for. Today he failed.
http://www.thisisyork.co.uk/york/news/YORK_NEWS_LOCAL0.html
http://www.thisisyork.co.uk/york/news/YORK_NEWS_LOCAL9.html
http://www.myyorknews.com/myyorknews/news/MYYORK_NEWS_GENERAL2.html
I particularly like the first link… “the great majority” enjoyed the show… This is on my list of tips for how to make apologies. DO NOT say “nobody else has complained”! That just tells your customer that you think they’re wrong, and is not an apology at all.
Hoorah! My domestic situation has got itself nicely un-stuck. On the downside I’m now paying more than double the rent I was at the start of the year. On the upside, it’s still cheap, and I have permission to throw away all the ratty furniture that the landlord was happy to leave lying around 6 or 7 years ago when he moved out. So far I have put a desk, 4 chairs, a bedside cabinet, a sofa and an armchair up for freecycling, and reduced a second armchair down to two binbags and a bundle of sticks.
Last night I tried to move a wardrobe from the junk room to the freshly-decorated upstairs front room. When I found it wouldn’t get round the corners easily, I simply pulled it apart and earmarked it for being used at kate’s allotment.
I hadn’t appreciated quite what an effect the stagnation in the house was having on me. I now have a sense of progress and it feels like there is a point in tidying etc.
York used to lay on some rather spectacular fireworks at Clifford’s tower, a picturesque vantage point in the city. There was trouble with the roads getting blocked up (another reason why they should have joined butcher terrace to hospital fields road with the millenium bridge) so they moved it to the knavesmire, then lost interest for a while.
This year, being the 400th anniversary of the capture of York-born explosives expert Guy “Guido” Fawkes, the council were laying on a week-long special celebration. The front of the Minster was illuminated in the most incredible way, picking out all the detail of the masonry. Truly incredible. I was very impressed that the British managed to do a genuinely good job. Turned out to have been done by a Frenchman.
The council refused to say where the fireworks were, saying that they would be visible from anywhere in York.
Except for the minster, it seems.
We were half expecting there to be fireworks launched from all around the walls but in fact there were a few very expensive ones launched from up river somewhere, with the result that the 8 ‘crowd control’ officials were swamped by 2000 people running all over the roads trying to get to a spot where there wasn’t a building between them and the display.
Still it was all good fun, stopping all the traffic, watching irate businessmen trying to go about their, uh, business.
I want money off my council tax next year mind. I paid for those fireworks that I didn’t get to see.
Just received these from an ebay seller:
God alone knows where/when I’m going to get to play these babies. But play them I shall.
O yes.
Play them I shall.