Beautiful morning

Piglet took me out for an early walk today. What a gorgeous morning!

Slug trails on the carpet…

A slug where it belongs

Eep! This morning there’s an intricate tracery of little slug trails all over the freshly-hoovered carpet downstairs. I suppose they’ve been in every night, but I didn’t see them until this morning as it was only last night that I finally removed all the boxes.

I must hoover the trails up before my sister arrives. I see that the slug made its way right to the couch where my sister is going to be sleeping tonight…

*wee shudder*

I’ll have to find a way to block them out. Any suggestions for a non-violent solution, peeps?

Moved successfully, but tons of unpacking still to do

Piglet, Puss-Puss and I have successfully re-located from the thriving metropolis that is Southport to somewhere much lovelier a little further North 🙂

Eternal thanks to Caroline, Alan and Graham for the help last Friday and over the weekend. I decided in the end not to use a removals company, as they were going to charge £550 plus waiting time (plus VAT), and that seemed ridiculously over-priced bearing in mind that I wasn’t actually taking a great deal of stuff. Instead I hired a Luton van/truck, and Alan and Graham did all the heavy lifting. (My tennis elbow came in useful for that… heheh…)

Although I’ve been here almost a week it’s still chaos in the house. It needs a thorough cleaning, and so I’ve not been able to put everything away yet and I’m still surrounded by boxes. I’ll get there gradually, though.

Piglet is delighted with the walking. We’ve only had a chance to explore the local walks so far, but we’ve already been terrified in a cow field this afternoon. Eep! We were almost through what I thought was the last safe field before the cow fields began when all of a sudden an enormous ginger-headed beast appeared on the top of a small ridge about 20 feet to my right. I was horrified beyond words, and dragged poor Piglet to the end of the field and lifted her over a barbed-wire fence to what I hoped would be safety. I then had to follow, which was an anxious experience in view of what happened to Alan when he last tried to scale such a fence. It had to be done, though. Sadly, it had to be done again almost immediately but in reverse, when I realised that what I’d hoped would be a safe place was simply a continuation of the field I’d been trying to avoid. I had to pop Piglet back into the lion’s den and jump back over myself, and then drag her at a great pace, protesting, through great piles of cow poo and down the hill to the field full of aggressive little rams we’d negotiated about 10 minutes earlier. We survived, though. Phew!

Piglet is now recovering herself on my bed–I think I may be changing the bedding a little sooner than I’d originally planned–and I’m girding my loins for a fresh assault on the boxes and boxes of stuff that are cluttering up the sitting room. It would be nice to sit down in there at some stage, but at the moment there’s no free space on either of the couches.

When I get a bit straighter I’ll take the camera out with me and post a lot of pictures. In the meantime, though, I’m not sure how to get the ones I took this afternoon from my iPhone to my MacBook, and so this post will have to remain pictureless.

Back to unpacking…

Gazing towards home

Moving…

I’m hoping to move house today, and it’s going to be a few weeks before I have an internet account again. I’ll have access via my wee mobile, but that’s not quite the same.

So, y’all take care in the meantime, and I hope to see you when I get back ♥

Unexpected kindnesses

I’m hoping (and praying!) to move house next week, and last week I got a dishwasher repair man out to fix my broken dishwasher as I didn’t want to leave a broken machine behind me.

The repair man spent 10 minutes lying on the floor with his arm beside the machine trying to diagnose the problem. He said he couldn’t get the machine out to look at the motor properly because one of the back legs was jammed against the laminate flooring. Eventually he told me he thought the motor was broken, and said that to replace it would be uneconomic as the machine is so old (13 years).

I took what he said at face value, and explained that because I’m moving I’d rather fix the existing machine than buy a new one. The reality is that the new people will prolly put in a new kitchen, and the cheapest semi-integrated DW I’d been able to find online was about £300 😦 The bloke said he’d try to get a new motor, and that he’d ring me back.

He didn’t ring back, and as time is tight I chased him a couple of days later. He then said he’d not yet been able to source a replacement motor, but that he was waiting to hear from a contact next Tuesday. He explained that even if the contact had a motor, though, it might not be possible to install it before Friday because it might be at the other end of the country.

I began to steel myself to probably having to buy a new DW, but in desperation I searched online and–miraculously!–managed to find a second hand machine on this site, just 10 minutes from where I live. I arranged to buy it for £140, and it occurred to me to ask my neighbour whether he might be able to install it, because he’s very helpful and extremely handy. It turned out that he could, and he even offered to go and collect it with his little trailer!

Anyway, the vendor delivered the machine and my neighbour installed it yesterday afternoon. It didn’t work immediately, and he returned and got it going. What an absolute star! He refused to take a penny, but I’ll certainly see him right in one way or another, and he’s going to have my lovely and enormous garden table as I’m not able to take it with me.

Interestingly, when he took out the old machine my neighbour encountered no difficulty with the laminate floor, and he pointed out to me that the repair man had simply not removed the screws that were holding it to the inside of the cupboard 😦 Apparently he just hadn’t wanted the job, and because I don’t proceed on the basis that people are trying to bamboozle me it didn’t occur to me to check at the time.

Prior to finding the new machine online I’d asked for help on a white goods web forum, and this morning I’ve read there that it’s quite possible that the motor wasn’t broken at all: it’s possible that a kettle of hot water might have solved the problem (I rarely use the dishwasher, and it might have just been a build-up of greasy gunk), or it might have been the capacitor, which is apparently something the repair man could easily have checked, had he wanted to.

So, because the repair man didn’t just tell me he didn’t want to repair the machine I may have spent £140 (plus his £15 for looking) unnecessarily. On the other hand, what an absolute star my neighbour is! He’s not a professional repair man, but it turns out he’s re-wired almost the whole of his house, and that he can turn his hand to almost anything. If he sees anybody in difficulty then he’s delighted to help. He reminds me a lot of my father, before Daddy was ill. Daddy was equally as smart and self-reliant, and just as happy to help.

Three cheers for the kind and helpful people of the world. They take much of the sting out of dealing with the rats who just can’t be bothered, or who try to take advantage of those of us who don’t know what we’re doing when we’re dealing with mechanical thingamajigs.

Internet/email broken

My Virgin internet went kaput yesterday morning and the estimate is that it won’t be fixed until 14th June i.e. 5 days 😦

Until it’s fixed I’ve not got email (unless it will still arrive magically to my Blackbverry: not sure about that) so if you contact me urgently and don’t get a response that’ll be why. Not that anyone is likely to contact me urgently, but just in case…

Update: it’s working again 🙂

Naughty…

Large mocha, extra shot, with cream…

Heh…

Gmail — Google now demanding mobile phone number?

I’ve just tried to set up a new gmail address so that I can post to Usenet via Google Groups without receiving a ton of spam, but I got a message saying that Google had detected unauthorised activity on my account and asking me to give them my mobile phone number so that they could send me a verification code. I don’t like giving out my mobile number so I started again, this time choosing a different username. Even though all I’d done was complete the form, though, I got the same message.

It seems that Google is now requiring people to provide a mobile phone number in order to provide them with a Gmail account. I’ll have to look for something else. Does anybody know of any other easy free email accounts? I just want something that I’ll only ever use on Usenet via the web.