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{ Monthly Archives } July 2011

Nearly a navy knitting wool moment

There is one summer holiday when I was  teenager which has gone down in family history as the year that the exhaust pipe fell off the car in the middle of nowhere in France. My parents made a frantic raid on our luggage to find something to tie it back on with until they could […]

Yet more work on the roof

I admit that I’m struggling somewhat at the moment. It’s really hard to motivate myself to get out of bed in the morning, even though work is so busy right now. I am just so tired that all I want to do is curl up in bed and stay there. But that’s not an acceptable […]

A crazy week

Work has just gotten crazy this past fortnight. I’m in the middle of a major bid which is taking up a huge amount of everyone’s time and energy, not just mine. On the one hand, that’s a very good thing right now – it gives me something concrete to focus on and keep me busy. […]

Death by Fatal Murder

I’ve been feeling pretty miserable recently. It’s nearly a year ago that things went from very serious to critical with Christopher, and I’m really not looking forward to the anniversary of his death. So I thought I would attempt to forcibly cheer myself up by going to the allegedly extremely funny spoof murder mystery that’s […]

Planning Permission

I got a letter from the local council yesterday, informing me that my application for planning permission for the garden has been granted, with no additional conditions. I now have three years to get the work done – though obviously I’m not expecting it to take nearly that long. Now I “just” have to find […]

Like painting the Forth Bridge

I’ve got Rob the painter here yet again all week, painting yet more of the outside of the house. This time he is concentrating on the woodwork at the back of the house, where I had a new utility-room window installed, the large stretch of replacement barge-boards and soffits where I had work done on […]

Unsubscribing from mailing lists

It was relatively easy to get Christopher’s name removed from the junk mail / catalogues etc that seem to form a major part of my post. The pack that one gets from the Registrar when one registers a death has a form in it to send off to some mail-order clearing-house, and fairly soon the […]

More on giveacar

After Christopher died I scrapped our old Polo via giveacar.co.uk and was very impressed with the service. I got rid of an old and virtually worthless car with virtually no effort on my part, it was disposed of legally, and a charity of my choice, St Richard’s Hospice, got a donation. In my view it […]

An Inspector Calls

I was just about to leave for work this morning, when I saw a car pull up into my drive. For once, I wasn’t  expecting any tradesmen to call today, so I was rather surprised. I went outside and  greeted the chap with a somewhat stern  “Who are you? And what do you want?”. “Errm, […]

Emptying the septic tank

This house is too far out into the middle of nowhere to have mains gas or mains drainage. It’s also too far from the nearest telephone exchange to stand any chance of having superfast (or even adequately fast) broadband – a fact that really used to upset Christopher. I’ve become resigned to the fact that […]