11 May 2011 (Wednesday) - Tree Huggers

Yesterday I mentioned that my pond looked “frothy” and that the bubbles were an early warning system for filter blockages. Having cleaned the filter out last night I was rather disappointed to find that the pond was the frothiest I’ve ever seen it this morning. So much for filter blockages causing the bubbles. I wonder what is really causing these bubbles….

Work was dull, and this evening I set off on what I (wrongly) thought was going to be a seriously tedious ordeal. “The Tree Huggers” were holding a Bluebell Walk, and ‘er indoors ^TM was keen to go. I suspected the worst, but thought I’d go along for want of anything better to do.

We arrived at the meeting point, and eventually ten of us congregated. The walk was led by a friend with whom we’ve camped, so we were off to a good start. And (perhaps disappointingly) there were no mung-bean-eating-weirdy-beardy-tree-huggers. We wandered into the woods, across fields, up hill and down dale; in all we walked about five miles.

The idea was to be looking at the bluebells, but they were past their best. Instead we got to see squirrels, rabbits, and three separate herds of deer.

I must admit I went there expecting to point and laugh at the tree huggers. But we had a really good evening. I’m looking forward to the next one….

10 May 2011 (Tuesday) - This n That

Moggy update – I am informed that following the removal of his “flowers and frolics”, “Daddies Little Angel ^TM ” ‘s cat has spent the morning walking like John Wayne, but is now on the mend. The poor thing.

We had a letter from our GP surgery the other day. The letter reassured us that we would be unaffected by what was happening at the surgery, but that we would still have access to a doctor in the meantime, and lots of other meaningless phrases in the same vein. I phoned the surgery this morning to ask what the letter was all about, and a rather snotty receptionist told me not to worry, it was a circular; everyone had been sent one. I pointed out that sending out several thousand (it’s a *big* practice!) letters that could be ignored was cause for worry in itself, and the receptionist gave me the phone number of someone else.

“Someone else” turned out to be the people who administer the provision of health care in Kent. They explained that I shouldn’t worry, and I really wouldn’t notice any change; if anything there would be an improvement. After all, as the nice lady said, things really couldn’t get any worse with my GP practice, could they? I was amazed – for some years I’ve been unimpressed with my GP. Now it transpires that officialdom is equally unimpressed.

She went on to explain that the gist of the letter I received was that the provision of GP services locally is changing. Most GP practices are clubbing together to work as teams. In fact more than most. All of them except my one. No other practice wants anything to do with them, and so the top management have had to step in.

In the past I’ve mentioned about wanting to change my GP. I might not need to. I am assured that the practice is receiving a serious kick up the butt. We shall see what happens.

And then we had the weigh-in at work. It’s now five months since I’ve been keeping regular tabs on my weight, and in that time I’ve lost half a stone, and put it back on again. Mind you, according to the Internet I need to lose about a third of my current body weight to become “healthy”; my current BMI is off the scale. I suppose I might exercise a bit more, but I’m not really that fussed. After all I’ve always been of the more generous physique.

This morning I noticed that my pond looked “frothy”. I mentioned this to a colleague who also keeps Koi. She said that she’s noticed a similar bubbly-ness on her pond about a week before the filters block up. And on reflection that’s what happens with my pond. So I mucked out the filter (yuk!) and from now on I might just use the bubbles as an early warning system for filter blockages….

9 May 2011 (Monday) - Stuff

A minor panic last night as my PC crashed with the blue screen of death. Notwithstanding the expense of replacing the thing, I’ve spent years getting it how I want it. There’s stuff on it which, whilst probably replaceable, would be a serious problem to replace. And now the house has gone wireless networked, my backup PC is no longer on the network.

I wondered if maybe it was time to give the PC a once-over. I tried the scandisk, but the computer wasn’t having any of it. I suspect that’s not good.

Defragging is always good, so I did that. And mucking out .tmp files and caches never hurts too. I wonder if there is anything else I can do to chivvy along a limping PC?

Over tea this evening we watched the most recent episode of Doctor Who. The third episode of this year’s first run of Doctor Who episodes and…  It was watchable, I suppose.

Since Doctor Who has come back to our screens in 2005 there has been something wrong with it. Or several somethings. Too many daleks is an obvious one. And another one is the lack of cliffhangers. And too much continuity.

When I was a lad, Doctor Who stories lasted for two hours. They were in four episodes, each of half an hour’s length. Each episode ended with a cliffhanger, and we had to wait a week to see if Sarah-Jane would escape the cyber-mat, or if Nyssa would avoid getting goosed off of a Zygon. But once the four-part story was done, the next one bore no relation whatsoever to what had gone before. Doctor Who never had much in the way of continuity. It was tried a couple of times (N-Space and Keys of Time), and as a novelty it worked.

But the forty-five minute self-contained stories with larger ongoing cryptic plots of the modern series don’t do it for me. Bring back obviously plastic monsters in wobbly sets, with Wallace (of “and Gromit” fame) doing battle with Ice Warriors. And also bring back Perpugilliam Brown (and her chest!)

Meanwhile “Daddies Little Angel ^TM ”’s secondary moggy is on the mend. A couple of weeks ago whilst I was cuddling “Princess” I wondered if she might be sporting goolies. It turned out that he was, and today they were cut off. I mentioned in passing that it might be nice to have kept said goolies as a souvenir, but the vet was very reluctant to part with them. Even more so than the cat (probably) was. Apparently the vet couldn’t let them go for health and safety reasons.

One can’t help but wonder what hazards might be posed by a pair of cat-knacks.

8 May 2011 (Sunday) - Gone Fishing

Perhaps I slept too much yesterday evening, but I was up early this morning. Next door’s dogs were barking, and they were doing their recycling before 8am. Mind you, I’m not complaining – it gives me a free hand to make as much noise as I like. But it must be mayhem living next door. When I’m having a late night I can hear that their children are (usually) shrieking until 1am, and their dogs are barking before 6am. Do they never sleep?

With ‘er indoors ^TM off to the arky-ologee club’s seminar, I was left to my own devices. I mowed the lawn – always a good point at which to start. And then I swept the front and back yards. It’s amazing how much better they look for just having had a quick dust around. I then scurried up a dustbin bag full of rubbish. Our garden seems to be a magnet for unwanted cardboard – pizza boxes, lager cases; it all gravitates to the area outside the back door. It’s all bagged up now.

I then made a feature out of the new box we built yesterday. Having packed out the box with most of the wood off-cuts I could find, the box was all but full up. It only needed a light sprinkling of stones to make it look like it was full of stones. And then I popped a skull on top of it. When finances are better we might get something else, but we had an ornamental skull in the garden and it will do for now.

And then with the jobs done (and no money) I needed to have a cheap day. So I went fishing. I arrived at the pond to find no one was there, and I soon set up my tackle. In the past I used to fish with two rods. One rod for tiddler bashing, and a second rod dedicated for big fish. I’ve not tried a dedicated second rod for some time (because I rarely catch anything on it), but I gave it a try today, and nearly had success. One bite, and something big got away.

Mind you, I had two fish on the tiddler rod that were big enough to need the net, and several others which were almost big enough for netting.

After I’d been there for three hours the Folkestone contingent showed up. Between the four of us we caught over sixty fish. It was a really good afternoon: sitting in the sunshine, in a beautiful part of the world, with good friends. Must do it again soon. Next weekend…?

‎7 May 2011 (Saturday) - Gone Wireless‎

Yesterday I said that I was going to swear at the Internet company. After a dull morning at work, that’s what I did. The bloke with whom I spoke yesterday was a twit; insisting I do the obvious, even though I’d already done it. Today’s bloke was much more helpful. He explained that there was all sorts of work going on at their end, and that the internet connections would be problematical for the next ten days whilst it all settled down. In a spirit of helpful advice he mentioned in passing that my router needed to be plugged directly into the main phone socket: it couldn’t be plugged into an extension because that wouldn’t work any more. I told him that plugging the router directly into the main phone socket would be rather impractical. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing he told me to suck it up (fat boy!). Apparently in the new world order of broadband, routers don’t work on extensions. They might have done in the past; they won’t any more.

I thanked him for his helpful advice and hung up; mentally composing more of my letter of complaint to the internet provider.

So to prove what rubbish he was talking, I moved the router downstairs and plugged it into the main phone socket. Immediately ‘er indoors ^TM laptop sprung into life. Websites that had been hanging were now loading instantly. So we’d solved the problem. Or that is we’d solved one problem. Running cables from the living room all over the house was going to be somewhat problematical. So against my better judgement we set off to PC World and got a couple of wireless modems. (So much for economising!) With wireless modems in place, normal service was resumed. For a few minutes at least.

The internet connection is now far better than it was. It’s still stop-start: putting up this blog entry took over half an hour. But I’m being charitable and am putting that down to the thing being problematical like the company said it would be. It’s got ten days to get better.

In the meantime I phoned the internet company again and told them that the bloke with whom I spoke today was spot-on, really helpful, and should be commended, but that yesterday’s bloke was a twit.

And then (with the help of “My Boy ^TM ”) I took the off-cuts from last weekend’s decking project and made a garden box. In all honesty (and modesty) it’s a good box – you’d pay twenty quid for something like it at the garden centre. I’m not quite sure what we’ll do with it, but making a box from the left-overs was something I could do that wouldn’t cost any money. Unfortunately these days, cheap is good.

I’ve managed to get a couple of coats of varnish on it. I’ll do something with it in the morning. I have plans to make a feature of it using the red chippings that were left over from last week’s gravelling project. There’s probably not enough stones to fill the box, but there are some large wood off-cuts that I can put in the bottom of the box to fill the space that stones would otherwise fill. After all, who’s going to see what’s under the top layer of stones anyway?

And talking of cheap being good and economising, the plan for tonight was a quiz night. But the quiz night was in a pub, and I know what I’m like where pubs are concerned. So whilst everyone else went out, I had a cheap night in. The plan was to watch some DVDs – I slept in front of the telly…

6 May 2011 (Friday) - Connection Problems

When my Internet provider took over supplying the phone line, part of the deal was a faster internet connection. The speed-up happened overnight, and I can only describe the change as what I have come to call typical of all that is wrong with I.T. in this day and age. My router tells me that the connection is running three times faster than it was yesterday.

However that is just a meaningless number. From a practical standpoint web pages are taking noticeably longer to load, and emails are taking noticeably longer to download.

When I eventually got emails out of the thing this morning, one of them was from the power company asking me to provide my leccie and gas meter readings. It was easy enough to read the meters, but actually calling up the websites just wasn’t working. After half an hour I gave up and phoned the power people to tell them my readings.

And then I phoned the Internet provider to whinge at them. I wish I hadn’t. The chap at the other end of the phone had a script but he didn’t speak English very well. After telling me to do all the obvious fixes I’d already tried, he eventually suggested I reset the router, but I didn’t have the passwords for that. I left that to ‘er indoors ^TM to sort out. She did that this evening – it had no discernable effect. The Internet connection is still so slow as to be practically unusable.

I shall swear at the Internet company some more tomorrow.

And the election results are in. The pundits are having a field day about how come the Dribbling Democraps have had their worst electoral result in the party’s history. Surely it’s obvious – when one votes for a political party which then gains power, one expects it to at least have a go at living up to what it promised. And when it abandons everything it promised only a year ago, the electorate remembers that.

And the AV referendum has come down rather comprehensively against the AV system. Perhaps this was a mistake: perhaps his may well be the death knell for electoral reform. But after all was said and done we were being asked to approve a system that was patently rubbish. The fact that we weren’t given the option of a workable system speaks volumes about the likelihood of any practical form of electoral reform…

5 May 2011 (Thursday) - New Specs

Being on a late start I had a bit of a lie-in. 7.30am is a lie-in for me (!) My neck had got worse overnight, so before getting my new specs I popped to the chemist shop and I got a tin of Ralgex. Mind you, that stuff not what it once was. Whilst it still does the pain relief thing, it doesn’t smell as strongly as once it did. The whole idea of Ralgex was that people could smell that you were in pain.

And then I got my new specs. At first sight they are indistinguishable from the old ones. That’s because the frames are the same. The only difference is the varifocal bit is somewhat stronger. Having said that, I spent an hour or two imagining I could see a difference between the new and the old specs, even though I’m sure the only difference was the old specs were scratched and smeared, and the new ones were clean.

I had planned to pop into the bakery on the way back to my car – but it’s gone. A passing security guard told me that it closed down over a year ago. It’s amazing what happens when you aren’t paying attention.

At the car park my piss boiled double. First of all I was billed two pounds for twenty minutes parking. And having validated my parking ticket in the machine, I found the car park barrier was broken and locked in the open position. I could have just driven out without paying.

And so on to the polling station. As I walked in I bumped into an old cub scout coming out. Little Steven is now old enough to vote. Where do the years go? In retrospect I wonder if (in years gone by) I shouldn’t have mis-used my position as a cub scout leader to have done some political indoctrination?

I got my ballot papers and went into the booth (not that it’s actually a booth any more) and stared at the papers before finally putting my X twice (Paternalistic molly-coddling & NO!!!!), and then I came home where I wasted an hour in NeverWinter. I haven’t been in there for over a week. The place has been overrun with apparitions, you know. Apparitions are a new monster to me.

After work (dull) I checked my emails. I have a new follower on Twitter.  From what I can translate from txt-spk into English I think depressedangel7 is an underage pregnant teenager who lives in New Zealand. I can’t help but wonder why she’s chosen to follow my tweets: I haven’t done any for over three months. I must admit I’ve rather given up with Twitter. I can’t have a good rant in less than 160 characters.

I see I’ve another blog follower – hello to everyone at to Easy Home Brew: your products should hopefully go down well over the summer…

I then spent five minutes on a survey about how many films I’ve seen at the cinema over the last year (none), and got given fifty pence for doing so. Another half-dozen surveys and I should have enough credit for a Kindle voucher…