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Google Calendar from beyond the grave

When Chris was first made redundant, almost exactly two years ago, he was keen to take on the role of  “house husband” and do more of the running of the house. But he really wasn’t a details person and was concerned that he’d forget something. So he decided to use technology to help, and set up a Google Calendar for the house which would give annual reminders for tedious but important things. He started with a major flush of enthusiasm, so October’s diary was filled with “things to do”. That soon tailed off however, both as the key annual things got sorted out, and then as he got sick and we had other things to think about.

What that means in practice is that, over the past two weeks, I’ve been getting a little flurry of reminders from beyond the grave: “sort out car insurance”, “empty septic tank” (I’ve already done that one!), “arrange boiler service”. It’s nice in a way that he’s still helping me by reminding me to do things – but also rather upsetting.

12 10 2011 Gillian status Comments (2) Permalink

Yet another view of the garden

View of the top two terraces

I realised that, although I’ve mentioned before that my garden has multiple terraces, I’ve only actually posted pictures of the bottom two.  So to remedy that, here is a picture of the top two terraces. On the right is the new fence running along the top of the second terrace. On the left are steps leading up to a decked area and a Victorian summerhouse. We had the decking done several years ago, and it’s a really good place for summer barbecues, with spectacular views over the top of the house across to the Malvern Hills. The only trouble is carrying all of the food / drink/ cooking implements up to the very top of the garden – which is why we used to plan al fresco dining like a military operation.

09 10 2011 Gillian garden Comments Off on Yet another view of the garden Permalink

Earthquakes in London

My original plan was to have a quiet few days this weekend.  It’s been a pretty tough week at work, including a 7.5 hour meeting at our Hampshire headquarters on Wednesday. That turned out to be harder work than I expected when my colleague texted me whilst I was on the way there to say that he was ill, and would I please not only cover for him but give his talk for him too….. It would have been nice to take some time off in lieu of that long and rather stressful day, but there was a customer milestone due on Friday, and since it is my job to do a final technical review and give release approval, I had to be there.

So it would probably have been sensible to have a really quiet day today to recover. However, I’d had an email earlier in the week from Malvern Theatres with a special offer of tickets for the “National Theatre on Tour” production of Earthquakes in London, for only £10, less than half price. That seemed too good a bargain to miss, so I booked myself a ticket to the Saturday matinée. I didn’t know anything about the play, but the company have a good pedigree, and I reckoned that if it turned out to be another so-called comedy about cancer I could always walk out half way through.

Well, it wasn’t as quite bad as that, but I did find it pretty dire. It turned out to be a polemic about global warming, and was full of doom and gloom. I didn’t find a single character to be pleasant or sympathetic. It was based around the story of three sisters. The eldest was a cabinet minister,  an ambitious driven bitch who bullied her husband and employees. The middle one was heavily pregnant and suicidally depressed about the thought of adding to the Earth’s over-population. The youngest sister was an attention-seeking druggie student who tried to seduce her eldest sister’s ineffectual husband.  Their father was a renowned climate change scientist, but a deeply unpleasant man, hated by all of the sisters. Even the minor characters were nasty – blackmailers, slimy airline-industry executives, unsympathetic doctors, doom-laden old ladies and self-centred yummy-mummies.

The play was also over-long, with  running time of three hours. At the interval, an hour and a half in, I realised that I was fed up of being lectured, shouted and ranted at about climate change. I didn’t like any of the characters enough to care what happened to them in the second half. So I walked out. I should have stuck to my initial plan of having a quiet weekend!

08 10 2011 Gillian Day out Comments Off on Earthquakes in London Permalink

Wading through treacle

I’ve sometimes, indeed often, felt like my life over the past year since Chris died has been like wading through thigh-high treacle – extremely hard work, and achieving seemingly infinitesimal forward momentum. But now, if I feel like that, I can simply look out of my kitchen or bedroom windows and see something tangible that I’ve achieved in that time.

Chris and I had been discussing sorting out the garden terraces for several years, but had never found a practical or affordable solution. We discussed several potential approaches last summer before he died, but nothing seemed entirely satisfactory. And then of course he got so much worse that minor things like garden design became completely irrelevant.

I realised while I was off work on compassionate leave, immediately after he died, that I would need something positive to focus my efforts on and keep me going. In the short term, that need was fulfilled by sorting out Probate and the Estate, but that wasn’t really particularly constructive – it was stuff that had to be done anyway, and just required being organised. I decided to make “sorting out the garden” my priority, and gave myself a deadline of this coming winter to accomplish it. I didn’t want to go through another potentially harsh winter worrying that the garden would slump into my house.

I first made serious enquiries towards getting designs and quotations on 2nd September last year – less than a month after Chris had died, and only days after I’d gone back to work. Then I had to settle on a design, get engineering drawings made, apply for planning permission, get quotes from two builders, select one and wait for them to have a space in their diary to do it. In itself, the process has felt like wading through treacle – it’s taken just over a year from start to finish. But I think I would be being hard on myself if I expected to do it any quicker – I still have limited reserves of energy (and work takes up most of what I’ve got) and planning permission is intrinsically slow and tedious.

So I’m very pleased now to have a concrete (and steel, and wood!) example of what I’ve achieved over the past year. And since some of Christopher’s ashes are firmly embedded in the foundations, it feels like he’s really part of it too.

04 10 2011 Gillian garden
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Trouble with the utilities

The plumber came out yesterday morning, only 20 minutes later than he said he would, which is almost early for a plumber! He confirmed my diagnosis – the isolation valve leading to the dishwasher was leaking, and needed to be replaced. That was a pretty quick job, only around 15 minutes or so.  He charged me 50 quid, and I was able to get into work before lunchtime – which was just as well as I hadn’t planned on being at home for Friday lunch and had very little food in.

Last night I thought I’d have an early night. But, as I was getting ready for bed, the lights flickered and then went out. Great. A power-cut. There was very little moon, so it was pretty much pitch-black. I groped my way to the hall, where I keep an emergency torch, and located it by feel. Then it was a case of trying to find where the candles and matches are. They turned out to be in Christopher’s bedside cabinet, underneath a whole load of surgical dressings! Don’t ask me why he kept them there…..

So then I had to get washed and do my teeth by candlelight. It did make me think about how the original inhabitants of this house must have coped. It was built in 1872, so spending evenings by candlelight would have been standard back then. I was less than impressed however. And to add insult to injury, I was so tired that I couldn’t remember which lights had been on when the power was cut, and which off. So when the power eventually came back on, my bedside light turned on and woke me up. Grrrr.

It didn’t stop there either. I was about to put all the cleaning materials back into the kitchen cupboard this morning (I’d left them out and the door open to give it all a chance to dry out) when I noticed another puddle on the kitchen floor, in the same place as before. Fortunately, I knew where the torch was, having used it last night, so I was able to see that there was water running down the same pipe and dripping onto the floor. I had to phone the plumber and tell him that he hadn’t managed to fix the leak, and that I needed him to come back and have another go. I just managed to catch him between jobs, so thankfully he was able to come up this morning and re-tighten everything.

I’ve just had the dishwasher on this afternoon, and spent much of the time lying on the floor playing the torch over the pipework, looking for tell-tale glistening patches which indicate a leak. I think it’s now fixed – though I shan’t put the stuff back in the cupboard until tomorrow, just in case.

01 10 2011 Gillian house Comments Off on Trouble with the utilities Permalink

Just 36 tradesman-free hours later

Although I’m very pleased with the work the builders have done, it was such a good feeling when they had finished. I was looking forward to having the house (and garden) to myself without tripping over builders. But my life at the moment really does seem to be a case of two steps forward and one back…..

I was tidying up the kitchen after dinner tonight when I noticed a puddle on the kitchen floor. I traced back the puddle to what I think is its source, and it looks like the pipework hidden in one of the cupboards has sprung a leak. And, judging by how sodden the stuff in the cupboard is, it might have been leaking for quite a while. Fortunately, it seems to be more of a persistent ooze than a gush.  I hope I’ve managed to temporarily stem the leak by turning off the valve in the pipe – which assumes that the source of the drip is above the valve not below it.  I think that’s the first time I’ve had to go delving in Christopher’s tool-box, to find a big enough screwdriver.

I’ve had to arrange for a plumber to come out tomorrow morning to fix it, which is extremely annoying. Fortunately, I don’t have any important meetings tomorrow and I can sort out the most critical work stuff on the phone. I’m hoping very much that by the weekend I’ll have a fully-functioning and tradesman-free house once again!

29 09 2011 Gillian house Comments (2) Permalink

The builders have finished!

The builders had pretty much finished by the time I got home yesterday afternoon. They came back this morning to return the garage key and re-seed a few patches of the lawn that had got the worse for wear. I’m surprised that the lawn isn’t in worse shape actually, when you consider how many tens of tons of steel, wood and gravel have been carried over it. They also presented an invoice, which was the bit I wasn’t looking forward to! But it came in only 1.2% higher than the original estimate, which is pretty good really and within my contingency.

I really am very pleased indeed with the outcome. It has totally transformed my garden. I really need a wide-angle or fish-eye lens to capture the full context and extent of the works – but I haven’t got one since I gave away Christopher’s camera and lenses after his death. He would have just loved to photograph all the little details and document the progress.

Here is a picture I took today from the first terrace, showing the overall effect.

The finished upper and lower terraces

One detail I particularly like is the way they have bridged the gap where the old “water feature” was. The square-topped arch that they have built out of left-over sleepers picks up an architectural detail of the house, which has many windows that shape. So that sort of ties the house and garden together into a unified design, which I really like.

And here is another view, this time from ground level.

The terracing from ground level, showing the slope up

I like the way they have put an “end stop” of an off-cut of sleeper in the lowest I-beam so that it looks “finished”.

And finally, to show just how much of a difference it makes, here’s a pair of “before” and “after” photos, taken at ground level from the patio at the back of the house.

Before - concrete blocks and a shoddy fence

After - a forest of oak, and a big improvement!

28 09 2011 Gillian garden Comments (2) Permalink

Like an episode of Butterflies

Does anyone else remember the Carla Lane sitcom, Butterflies, starring Wendy Craig and a very young Nicholas Lyndhurst? It must have been on around 1980 +/- a few years. There was one set-piece in it which always made me laugh. It was a four-car family (father, mother, both teenage sons each had a car – pretty unusual I guess in 1980). Whenever someone wanted to go out, they always seemed to want to use the car closest to the house, so everyone else had to reverse their car off the drive in a complex dance to release the target vehicle.

Well, that’s what it’s been like here for the last three weeks. There is just about enough space on my drive for my car, two builders vans, a portaloo, a trailer and several tons of building materials. But not in such a way that we can each independently get off the drive. And because I’m working part-time, I generally leave for work after the builders have arrived, and often get home again while they are still here. Furthermore, unlike in Butterflies, I’m on a busy A-road, not a quiet suburban street, so I absolutely refuse to reverse out onto the main road.

So there has needed to be some major choreography thought out to enable us to all get on and off the drive safely.  I get very grumpy if I get home from work and find that they haven’t moved their vans from “first positon” (in front of the garage) to “second position” (one of them reversed around the corner of the garage) so that I can get off the road safely and pull up in front of the garage into “third position”. Then, when they’ve all left, I have to move the car into “fourth position”, where I’m around the corner of the carage, parked hard up against the portaloo. When it works, it’s fine. But a delivery of several tons of gravel, as happened this afternoon, means that “fourth position” is blocked so it’s going to be a struggle getting us all on and off the drive tomorrow.

Oh well, only a few more days to put up with it, then they should be finished!

26 09 2011 Gillian car
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Negotiating about my hours

Ever since Chris was first diagnosed with terminal cancer, and I had an “acute stress reaction” to the situation (for which read “pretty comprehensive breakdown”), I’ve been working part time. Initially, this was an informal arrangement, and I took a mixture of leave and sick-leave to cover the times I was unable to work. However, it became apparent in the months after Chris died that I wasn’t going to be strong enough to work full-time in the short-term, so I formally moved to part-time working. I’ve been doing an equivalent of a three-day week, but flexibly spread over the full five days.

That’s been working out well. I’m not keen on the 40% pay-cut I’ve taken as a result, but I’d much rather be doing half a job as well as I can, than trying to do a full-time job, failing dismally and making myself ill again.  Both my boss and I are keen that this part-time working be only a temporary solution, and the aim has always been that I should increase my hours – but only when I can do so without making myself worse.  I’m pretty sure that he considers me to be my own worst enemy in taking on more work that I really should, and is extremely diligent about his “duty of care” under the law to stop me from doing so.

He’s right that I do have a tendency to think I can handle more than I’m ready to do. I’m very frustrated at how long it’s taking to get myself back together again – but I know that if I overdo it at work I’ll come down with a three-day migraine.  I’m finding being bereaved to be absolutely exhausting – it takes so much mental energy just to hold myself together. I’ve spoken to a friend of mine who was widowed a few months after me, and she reports the same thing – she is permanently exhausted. No doubt that will improve – in fact I’m already finding it easier than it was – but it doesn’t seem to be a quick process.

The arrangement was originally due for review in May, and it was quite clear then that I was still running on empty and unable to take on more work – at least not sustainably. So we extended the part-time working, with another review due at the end of August. As it turned out, I was on holiday the last week in August. Since then I’ve then been out of the office quite a bit at meetings with various customers, and those times I was in coincided with when my boss himself was off-site on business. But we put a meeting in the diary for the first day we were both in Malvern, with the express aim of discussing my hours and whether I was ready to increase them.

So you can imagine my surprise when I got a letter from HR, two days before I was due to meet with my boss, which said that they had reviewed the situation and were pleased to tell me that they’d put me back to working full-time, back-dated to the 1st September! I nearly panicked – that wasn’t what I’d been expecting at all!  The plan was always to gradually increase the hours and I’m still far too easily exhausted to work full-time. I think my boss was at least as surprised as I was, and quickly rescinded HR’s decision which was a major relief (although thinking about it now, I’ve not actually seen anything in writing from HR  confirming that. I’d better chase them up on Monday).

Over the last few weeks (since getting back from my holiday in fact) I’ve had so many off-site all-day meetings that I’ve been working more than 22.5 hours per week anyway. And if I do the work, I think I really ought to get paid for it. So I was keen to increase my contracted hours – albeit only gradually to start with – by working an extra half an hour a day. It doesn’t sound much, but it’s another 10% on top of what I’m already doing. I think that’s sustainable, but my boss wanted evidence that I could cope before he changed my contract. So we’ve agreed that I’ll work the extra 2.5 hours/week as overtime for the next six weeks, and see whether I can sustain that without making myself ill. If so, we’ll up my contracted hours by that much, and re-review at Christmas.

I’m pleased with that outcome. It gives me the chance to demonstrate that I’m up to doing more, but with a safety net in case I’ve over-estimated my capacity again. And there is so much going on at work at the moment (one major project just kicked off, about to bid for another two projects) that I welcome the opportunity of having  few more hours a week to cram everything in to.

24 09 2011 Gillian status Comments (2) Permalink

What a difference a day makes!

I got home from work this afternoon to find four very tired builders – 103 sleepers had been delivered just after I left this morning, and they’d been working through those, as well as finishing off the first level of fencing. All the preparatory work they did yesterday has really paid off, and they’ve made huge progress today.

Outside the kitchen window

The snapshot above shows the view from my kitchen window. You can get a really good idea now of what the finished job is going to look like – imagine a second tier of fencing running along the top of the upper terrace.

My kitchen is suddenly a lot lighter. Before, with the black membrane in full view, it felt really dark. Now the wood is reflecting the light in, and it’s almost making a “light well”. I am very pleased with the effect!

21 09 2011 Gillian garden Comments Off on What a difference a day makes! Permalink