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Ten workmen-free days?

…..You must be joking! I had three burly workmen around earlier this week to install a new kitchen window. Admittedly, I probably wouldn’t have commissioned it if I had known that my chimney needs repointing and releading before winter, which is going to be a fairly big job next month. However, by the time I realised that my roof was dodgy, the window was already half-built so I was committed.

I have disliked the original window ever since we moved in. It was metal-framed, out of keeping with the rest of the house, the double-glazing seal had blown so there was internal condensation, and I couldn’t reach the fittings to open it without standing on a chair. The central window at the top was even worse – I couldn’t reach that even on a chair and had to get the stepladder out if I wanted to open or close it! But it’s funny how you sort of get used to things, and think that because that’s how it is and how it’s always been, you just have to accept it. Well, I’m not in a particularly accepting state of mind these days and I decided that I wanted a kitchen window which I could actually open without risking my neck!

The new window is wooden, with decent double-glazing, and matches the rest of the house. Nothing in my house is a standard size, and so called ‘right angles’ aren’t necessarily 90 degrees, so everything had to be measured carefully and hand built. The joiner came round a few weeks ago to measure up, and copied the details from the other windows to made sure they matched. The best part of it is that the fittings are placed very low, probably less than a third of the way up the window, so that I can stretch across the sink and open them without having to climb on a chair. I tested that out before I let the fitters leave, as it was a vital part of the specification! I have to say that I’m very pleased with it.

One of the fitters was the same chap who has been working on my dodgy porch roof and leaking gutter / down pipe. Although it was dry on the day, it had been raining heavily overnight, and he wasn’t entirely happy with the location of the damp patches on my path near the front door. So he had yet another attempt (that’s three to date!) at fiddling with the guttering to try to seal it better.

They’ll be back next month to do the chimney, and then I’ve got Rob my reliable decorator booked in to come along after them to paint all of the new woodwork on the porch and the kitchen window, and to cover over the damp patch on the kitchen ceiling. So all in all I’m expecting a good few more visits from tradesmen over the next few weeks! But I want to make sure that the house is largely sorted (or at least as ‘sorted’ as a Victorian cottage can be) before winter.

15 09 2012 icyjumbo house Comments Off on Ten workmen-free days? Permalink

More internet hassles

Christopher bought web-hosting and email from godaddy.com, who host this blog. To make life interesting, that’s completely separate from the organisation from whom he bought the icyjumbo domain name, which is 1and1. I don’t know why he did it that way – he did explain but it made no sense to me at the time. The domain name was due to expire the month after he died, so I spent ages on the phone to them two years ago getting the domain put into my name. Which reminds me – it must be due up for renewal again this month, so I had better check the credit card hasn’t expired, or the blog will vanish!

GoDaddy had a major DDOS attack on Monday, which brought down their server and meant that I couldn’t access my email. It also probably took this blog off-line for the duration. Today I got an email from them, apologising profusely, and offering me some credit off my renewal fees – except that the email was addressed to Christopher, not me. And I do hate it when I still get emails and letters addressed to “Dear Christopher Booth”. My heart sank, as I realised that I hadn’t updated GoDaddy after his death, nor got the account – and payment details – moved into my name.

So this evening I’ve spent nearly an hour on the phone to GoDaddy customer support in the USA, trying to resolve the problem. The first attempt completely failed – the IT support person directed me to a form to fill in that wouldn’t actually accept the information I needed to give it – it complained that the domain name wasn’t registered with them, which is true, but not the point. I phoned back (fortunately this time I found a UK number which redirected to the States, so it shouldn’t cost as much as a transatlantic call) and got someone else who said that I didn’t need that form anyway, he could talk me through it all online. So I’ve been juggling Christopher’s iPad (which was getting the support and password reset emails from the GoDaddy support staff), my laptop (where I had a browser open filling in the new details, but can’t pick up his emails) and the phone on loudspeaker, as I attempted to get it all moved into my name and redeem the credit.

I think I’ve got it all sorted out now, but I’ve got a thumping headache! Which wasn’t helped by the first of the tech support staff suggesting that the easiest thing would be for me to ask Christopher Booth for help, as he had clearly set it up for me in the first place and would presumably know the account details. At which point I pointed out that he was DEAD and that his ashes weren’t being very communicative! Honestly, you would think that they’d never come across a widow before……

12 09 2012 Gillian invective Comments Off on More internet hassles Permalink

Blitzing the garden

Our friends Carol and Mark visited me for the day today, to implement the next tranche of Carol’s plan for a GroundForce-style makeover of my garden, though thankfully without the “water feature” which always seemed to be a compulsory feature of that programme! Chris and I had the water feature (a waterfall into a shallow pond covered permanently with blanket weed) dug out within a year of moving in here, because we hated it so much, and I’ve no desire to replace it.

Carol and Mark brought with them a car boot full of spare plants from their garden, including a tray of alpine strawberries, another of bugle, one of vinca (periwinkle I think) and a fourth of grape hyacinth bulbs. We then made a trip to my local garden centre, where I bought another boot-full of hardy perennial bedding plants. Given that I’m not one of life’s natural gardeners, I think perennials are going to be far more practical than annual bedding plants, which I would have to replace every year. I’d much rather plant clump-forming and spreading perennials just once, and let them do their stuff to fill the borders, and hopefully out-compete the weeds. I take a robustly Darwinian attitude to my garden! It’s very much the case of survival of the fittest.

We spent the afternoon planting up the beds that are most visible from the house, particularly along a sunny wall underneath my apple trees, and in a much shadier and damper north-facing bed next to the house. We also under-planted some of the rose garden with the strawberries and bugle, though there we’ve only managed to clear the weeds out from a small fraction of that bed. The rest is still full of Ladies Mantel (alchemilla mollis) which seems to sell for £5 a pot in garden centres, but is nothing but a weed in my garden. I’ve asked my gardener to try a clear a bit of it every time he comes, because if I set him to do the whole lot at once, I suspect he’ll hand in his notice and I’ll never see him again!

I’ve now got a gardener to come once a fortnight to do some weeding, pruning and hacking back the undergrowth. He seems to need quite a lot of supervision, which is tricky as I’m not sure myself what is a weed and what is a “real” plant. But at least he seems happy to climb a ladder to weed the concrete slabs in the retaining wall behind my garage – there were some quite large sycamore and ash saplings growing out of it and I wanted them gone before the roots did any damage. I’m really not happy going up a ladder myself to weed that bit of the garden. Last time I did so, I got stuck on the narrow ledge, couldn’t turn round, and had to shout for Chris to move the ladder to the other end of the wall so that I could get down – clearly not an option these days! That wall is one of the last patches of the concrete slabs left visible in the garden – almost all the others are now well hidden behind the oak sleepers, which are beginning to weather nicely after their first winter.

09 09 2012 icyjumbo garden Comments Off on Blitzing the garden Permalink

Decision Time

I’ve been faced with a very difficult decision which has been looming over me for a while now.

I’ve had an agreement with my boss and HR to work on a temporary part-time basis ever since Chris was diagnosed. I get tired far too easily, and that’s been the only way I’ve been able to continue doing what is really a very challenging job. But the Company has a rule that, if you go permanently part-time and then change your mind and want to increase your hours, they are not obliged to agree, and will only do so if there is a business benefit.  Hence formally going part-time can be an irrevocable one-way step, and my boss didn’t want to put me in that position since it was originally the hope/intention that if and when I was strong enough I would go back to working full time. However, I can’t keep working on a temporary arrangement indefinitely, and I had an agreement with my boss that at the end of August (i.e. two full years after Christopher died) I had to decide either to return to full-time working or to make the part-time arrangement permanent at a sustainable level.

I had really hoped that I’d be well enough by now to go back to full-time working, but it’s clearly not to be. It’s time to face the facts. I’m finding this bid such hard work and so tiring that colleagues are stopping me in the corridors and asking if I’m ok! I’m absolutely exhausted, and that’s doing a nominal three-day week, spread flexibly over five days, plus some overtime, but still adding up to substantially less than a full week. There’s no way I could keep up this level of intensity full-time without going off sick with a string of migraines, and conversely there’s no way I’d be happy coming into work and offering anything less than my best effort.

So I have decided that I would much rather continue to work at my peak performance for as much of the week as I can, than work sub-optimally full-time.  The former is better for me, and also better for the company, as they only pay me for what I actually do – so in my opinion are getting an absolute bargain! The quality of my work is as good as it ever was I believe, I just can’t keep up that sustained level of effort full-time without making myself ill. I often come home from work, have a cup of tea, and go straight to bed for an hour or so before dinner! There is also the consideration, which my boss takes extremely seriously, that he has a “duty of care” towards me as an employee. Since he knows full well that I’m my own worst enemy and have a clear bias towards overdoing it, he needs to make sure I’m not put in a position where I can run myself into the ground and then go off sick for an extended period.

So I’ve asked my boss for a clear statement from HR of the impact of going permanently part-time, which should  include the rules on pay, pension, over-time, redundancy, sick-pay, and annual leave. I’m not keen on continuing with what is effectively a 40% pay-cut, especially since the house is costing a small fortune at the moment, but I think it’s the only sensible decision to take.

It’s tough. I had never expected that it would have taken me this long to get over Christopher’s illness and death. But clearly that’s how it is, and I need to face up to it and be pragmatic. So part-time work it is.

05 09 2012 Gillian status Comments (3) Permalink

An afternoon concert

After the stress and hassle of having workmen around mending my roof for the second time of asking, plus making the additional unwelcome discovery that my washing machine had leaked all over the kitchen floor, I decided I needed to do something to cheer myself up.  I had spotted in the local paper that there was a concert being held at Malvern Priory on Saturday afternoon, and best of all it was free. So I took myself along.

It was a choral concert being given by the  Worcester Liturgical Music Course, a dozen singers who had met for the first time on Tuesday, and had spent the past four and a half days in Worcester Cathedral practising plainsong and unaccompanied choral works dating from 16th Century or so right up to very modern pieces. For what was effectively little more than a “scratch” choir they did very well, and the few dozen people in the audience got a real treat.

My favourite piece, and the reason that I decided to go, was the Allegri Miserere. Christopher first introduced me to it – he always said that it would be one of his “Desert Island Discs” – though he would have insisted that the top C (which is such a feature of the piece) was “done properly” – i.e. sung by a choir-boy treble rather than a woman soprano. In that respect he wouldn’t have approved of this performance. But nonetheless it was a very beautiful piece, sung very competently, and one which always makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. The surroundings of the lovely medieval church of Malvern Priory, which is almost like a small cathedral, were particularly fitting, and the choir split themselves into three groups standing in different parts of the church, which made it easier to follow the different voices.

My least favourite composition was the most modern. It was part of the African Sanctus by David Fanshawe which mixed a rather beautiful and traditional-sounding Kyrie with a simultaneous playback of a recording of a1960’s Cairo muezzin warbling the Allahu Akhbar call to prayer. I think the two parts were meant to act as a counterpart and complement to each other, but I found they just competed so that I couldn’t concentrate on either. So that particular piece did absolutely nothing for me at all, but I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the programme.

It did also bring home to me once again how small a town Malvern is. I’ve commented before that it’s hard to go into town without bumping into someone I know. This time, sitting in the nave a few rows behind me was my parents’ now-retired solicitor, who was at the same ante-natal classes as my mother some forty-odd years ago, and has effectively known me since before I was even born!

03 09 2012 Gillian Day out Comments Off on An afternoon concert Permalink

Still leaking

I had hoped that the leaking porch roof and blocked down pipe had been fixed the other week. But then a huge thunderstorm hit Malvern just before the Bank Holiday weekend, complete with torrential rain, and it became clear that I still had a problem. The two original leaks in the porch roof had indeed been fixed, but now there were two new ones. And the down pipe was no longer splashing water all over the walls from the gutter, but was instead gushing like a fountain from a joint half way down! Plus I noticed a disturbing-looking new stain on the kitchen ceiling……

Of course, it being a Bank Holiday, there was no one at the builders until Tuesday, though I did phone on Saturday morning and leave a long, and rather annoyed, message on their answer phone. I rang again at one minute past nine on Tuesday morning and was put straight through to the boss, who already had my file open in front of him. He said that they really needed to wait until after it had rained again, so that I could clearly note exactly where the leaks were to help trace them back. I replied firmly that there would be no need to wait, as I had stood on a chair in the porch during the thunderstorm, sticking post-its on the woodwork to identify the positions of the leaks. He commented that I was very organised! No – just cross and practical.

So today I had a queue of white vans waiting to get onto my drive at quarter to nine, as a posse of builders turned up to finish the job. They’ve lifted my paving slabs on the front path, thoroughly cleared out the drain and pressure washed it to show me that it’s running freely. They’ve been up on the porch roof to have another go at sealing the glass against the lead. And they went up onto the roof above the kitchen to investigate the source of the stain on the ceiling, which to be fair to them was a new problem and not one they could have known about before. That turned out to be due to a bodge job dating before we moved in – some cowboy had tried to seal a leak at the bottom of the chimney with what looked like super-strength waterproof gaffer tape which was no longer waterproof. In investigating the problem, they removed some of my roof tiles below the chimney, and pulled out a dead mouse! So at least I know the poison is working!

I asked the roofer to temporarily bodge the chimney for now, to leave me with a watertight roof, and to quote for doing the job properly next month, before the winter closes in and the frost starts. The original Victorian lead is going to need to be replaced, and the entire chimney stack repointed. Groan. That won’t be cheap. But I really don’t need a leaking roof, as that will get very expensive if the timbers start rotting.

01 09 2012 icyjumbo house Comments Off on Still leaking Permalink

Embroidering a horse’s backside

In the end, I didn’t do anything to the jigsaw on Monday. Instead, I spent the day embroidering a horse’s backside!

Crossing the Channel

The story started years ago, when Chris and I were on holiday in Normandy and visited Bayeux. We naturally went to see the Bayeux Tapestry, and I was very taken with a kit I saw in the gift shop. It was for a full-size stitch-perfect replica of one of the scenes from the tapestry (technically, actually an embroidery), showing soldiers and horses in a boat crossing the Channel on the way to invade England. It was quite expensive, so we went to the coffee shop while I dithered about whether or not to buy it, before I succumbed to temptation.  It then took me several years to complete – each square inch takes me about an hour to embroider, and takes four passes – first outlining it, then filling in the block colour, then laying couching threads at right angles, and finally tacking down the couching threads.

Soon after I’d finished the scene with the boat, we went on holiday to Boulogne, where we found a superb embroidery shop in the old town. Unforgettably, it had the wonderful name “Les Mystères de Fanny”! The shop had a wide range of kits on sale, and I spent ages talking to the shop-keeper discussing which one to buy. Unfortunately, he didn’t speak any English, and my French is pretty rusty so Chris usually did most of the speaking when we were in France (his language skills in general, and French in particular, being significantly better then mine). However, Chris didn’t have the necessary technical vocabulary to discuss the finer points of embroidery technique so I had to get by with a mixture of appalling French and mime, before settling on another scene from the Bayeux tapestry. That was larger, and again took me several years to complete – it needs good lighting so that I can see what I’m doing, so I can really only embroider at the weekends or in the early evenings in the summer, preferably sitting in the window seat in the living room to make the most of the natural light.

Setting off to battle

By the time I’d finished the second scene, I was completely hooked and immediately ordered my next fix, buying it on-line direct from the manufacturer in France. This time it was a scene showing some Norman soldiers (you can tell they’re Norman because they’re wearing chain mail) setting off to the Battle of Hastings. From past history, I knew it would take me years to complete, but this one actually took longer than either of the others. That’s mostly because I spent lots of time on it when Chris was ill – especially when he was in hospital having chemotherapy or being treated for neutropenia. It gave me something to concentrate on and kept me too occupied to worry about what was happening. But then of course, after he died, I simply couldn’t face working on it as it brought back too many painful memories.

I didn’t so much as touch it for about eighteen months, but then I decided that there was just too much time (and indeed money) invested in it to date to just leave it sitting half-finished on the side. So when the evenings started getting longer again this spring, I had another go at it. I’ve been sitting in the window seat, with some loud music on the stereo, embroidering the horses and riders. By Monday I only had a few square inches of the yellow horse left to do, so I decided to make a big push to complete it.  I took it along to the framers this afternoon after work, and have already ordered the next installment from Bayeux Broderie. There must still be at least a dozen metres-worth of tapestry that I haven’t copied though, so I don’t expect to ever run out of scenes to work on!

29 08 2012 Gillian art Comments (1) Permalink

Banished to the spare room

The mice are back! I first noticed them last Wednesday night. When I say “noticed”, that is an understatement. They were partying hard directly above my bed every half an hour from midnight through to 4am. So just when I thought they’d finished and I was about to drop off to sleep, they would start up again. Their latest trick is to scramble up and down the cavity in the wall behind the head of my bed, which sounds extremely loud indeed in the small hours! That’s effectively the only cavity wall in the whole house, and when I had the insulation survey done a few months ago the surveyor said it wasn’t worth the disruption and effort of insulating just the one wall. Maybe not from a thermal efficiency point of view, but perhaps it might stop the mice!

I had a major meeting with my boss on Thursday morning, to review the status of the bid, so I was really unhappy to get so little sleep. Plus I had to interrupt the meeting to place an emergency call to Tim the pest controller, and I really don’t like mixing home and work to that extent. To give Tim massive credit though, I called him at 10am to say there was a problem, and he was at the house at lunch-time to investigate it. Better yet, it’s all covered by the annual rolling contract, so it won’t cost me a penny. He’s put tons more poison up in the loft, so I hope that things will quieten down shortly.

My boss asked me on Thursday, when I was yawning through his meeting, why I hadn’t simply moved into the spare room to get some sleep. I think the honest answer is that I just didn’t think of that. I am not at my most logical at 3am! Last night the mice were at it again. I think the poison is kicking in, as it sounded as if they were knocking things over in the loft, and I swear that one of them was so clumsy he lost his footing and fell down the cavity between the walls behind my bed. But this time I was prepared, and didn’t just lie there listening to them. I took my pillow and moved into the spare room, where I’d made sure the bed was made up ready. So I did at least get some sleep.

27 08 2012 icyjumbo house Comments (1) Permalink

Door to door salesman

I get very few cold-callers coming to my door. Even the Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t bother coming this far out of town – too few souls to save to make it worth their while. There is the occasional lost tourist who wants pointing towards the pub, or a delivery-man looking for directions to one of my neighbours, but that’s about it for unexpected visitors. Plenty of tradesmen call, but always by appointment (four separate lots yesterday, a new record!) and that’s another ongoing saga in near daily instalments at the moment……

So I was rather surprised this afternoon to see a strange man heading purposefully for my front door. His opening gambit was “Are you the homeowner?” which is guaranteed to get my back up and to elicit the icy response “I’m not prepared to answer that until you identify who you are”. It turned out that he was going door-to-door in the neighbourhood flogging aerial photographs. He had a very good photo of my house, with such high resolution that I can even make out the Easter Island head in my front garden! And the moss on my roof, which was cleared off last week. It was apparently taken from a Cessna on 21st July, using a Canon1D with 300mm lens – I think he was surprised to be quizzed on the technicalities. He wouldn’t sell me a soft copy of the file, but I did succumb and buy the A4 print there and then. Now I’ll need to get it framed and find somewhere to hang it.

24 08 2012 icyjumbo house Comments (1) Permalink

A bank holiday, did you say?

I think I am burying myself perhaps too deeply in this dratted bid. I had a teleconference with the customer today, at which I explained that the consortium were providing me with some critical information by the end of Friday, so I would be in a position to collate it and send it through to the customer on Monday. At which point the project manager pointed out that I meant Tuesday, as Monday was a Bank Holiday. I had no idea! If she hadn’t have said anything, I’m sure I would have been at my desk on Monday morning, wondering why there was no one else in the office!

So now I need to think what I’m going to do for an unexpected day off. The weather forecast isn’t looking too good, so I may spend day at home trying to relax and not to think about the bid. My sister and her boyfriend gave me a fiendishly difficult jigsaw for my birthday, which I have not made much headway with. It’s a 1000-piece puzzle, which shouldn’t be too bad, except that the pieces are a quarter the size of a normal jigsaw piece, so it’s very hard to see the details in the picture. I keep having to take my glasses off to peer closely at the pieces! Monday may be an opportunity to put some loud music on the stereo (to drown out any thoughts of work) and to try to make significant progress on the jigsaw.

21 08 2012 icyjumbo status Comments (3) Permalink