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{ Monthly Archives } December 2012

Status check

Since it’s very nearly the end of the year, I thought it would be instructive to look back at my New Year Resolutions from a year ago, to see how things turned out. They were, in no particular order: Fixing the leak in the porch roof, which drips every time it rains – hmm. Still […]

The upside(?) of being an Early Adopter

Chris was a real fan of Apple products, and a veritable early adopter of their stuff. Not in fact as early an adopter as my family though – when I was a teenager we had one of the first Apple][+ computers in the country, which I blame firmly for my subsequent career as an engineer […]

Tales from Fawlty Towers

Now that I’ve been back home for over a week, I can look back at the several weeks I spent staying at Fawlty Towers during the equipment trial and laugh at the ongoing incompetence of the staff – but at the time it wasn’t so funny. It’s a real shame, because it could be a […]

Jamie’s 15 minute meals – not quite!

A friend gave me “Jamie’s 15 minute meals” as an early Christmas present, knowing that I find it a real chore cooking for myself during the week. Christopher and I each had a copy of Katharine Whitehorn’s “Cooking in a Bedsitter” which draws a distinction between “cooking to stay alive” and “cooking to impress”, and […]

A lesson learned the hard way

It was a real struggle to get out of bed when my alarm went off today, and if I had known what the morning had in store for me, I think I’d have just turned over and gone back to sleep! There was a very hard frost, and the car was completely iced up. So […]

The roofers are back…..

It rained again heavily on Friday, and again I marked-up the porch with coloured dots indicating the location of the leaks, plural. I currently have yellow, green and orange dots from the last three rainstorms, all adding interest to the decor. The roofers turned up again this afternoon, without any warning so it was a […]

Home at last

I’ve spent most of the last three weeks based down at our Hampshire HQ working on another equipment trial. It’s been very interesting – as an engineer, I always find it highly valuable to work with end-users of our technology in a controlled setting and see whether/how much our innovations actually add value to them. […]

Clearing out the pantry

If you are house-proud and fastidious, look away now! On the other hand, if you are interested in the psychology of bereavement, read on….. One of the hardest things I have had to do when widowed is to somehow turn “our house” into “my house”. It’s not healthy to live in a house preserved in […]