Monthly Archives: December 2006

Kitchen progress!

Well, the kitchen is coming along nicely.

The fridge-freezer and dishwasher arrived on Monday. Our new fridge-freezer, which 990mm tall, and contains many litres of storage space is actually less heavy than our current, centuries old 2 cu ft freezer!

The kitchen was delivered on Wednesday. It over filled the sitting room to the point where it was practically impossible to get into the room, and certainly not possible to sit. Or store the contents of the kitchen cupboards on the dining room table, as planned.

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Shortly after all those thousands of boxes were delivered, I took a call.

“Hi Mr Foster – we’re planning to start on Monday, is that OK?”

Erm, not really. You told me previously it was going to be Thursday. I can’t move around in my house with all the boxes filling my entire ground floor. Let alone go another five days living off the few utensils that are still left in the kitchen.

“Sorry, Mr Foster, that’s when the guys are available.”

Grr. Oh, well. It gives me plenty more time to pack up the kitchen cupboards, tidy, clean, etc. We don’t use the sitting room all that much, anyway. Specially at weekends (!)

Then this morning at 09:05am I took a call.

“Hi Mr Foster – would you mind if we came this morning after all?”

WHAT????? I haven’t packed the cupboards, emptied the room, removed the tiles from the wall or anything.

“Oh, that’ll be ok. We’ll be there in an hour.”

Eep. Frantic kitchen packing.

Fitter arrives at 09:35. Lots of grumbling. Can’t BELIEVE the kitchen. The designer has left plans that JUST WON’T WORK. TWO DAYS? Yeah, if I was a four-man team. (Eh? You couldn’t fit a four man team in the bloody kitchen!). Long phone conversations. No, we can’t put the dishwasher there, it will be in front of the stop tap. The sink can’t possibly be directly below an electric socket. You’re just not going to fit those units in that space. What do you mean it’s been measured by three different people?  Oh, well, they’re not fitters.
All the while, I am still frantically trying to put the contents of my cupboards into boxes.

About 20 minutes later, all the wall cupboards are empty and I’ve run out of packing crates. I move onto filling bags, and while I’m still packing away, he starts to take cupboards off the wall. Which is a fairly impressive sight. Crash, bang wallop, all gone.  The tiles just drop off through a practised claw-hammer action.  I don’t even own a claw hammer!
I’m hoping if he’s got as far as trashing the old kitchen he now believes he can at least fit the new one.

OH MY WORD, look at that! The old tall cupboard is sitting on two bricks. Not the like the neoprene feet the new kitchen will have. The wall between kitchen and dining room just plasterboard and low quality battens. (Hmmm… thinks… we could have a totally open plan downstairs… if only we’d thought of that before we forked out for a kitchen.)

Eventually, I’d chaotically packed up everything and scattered it around the house – on the landing, in the bedroom, up the stairs, on the windowsills – and the kitchen continued to be removed.

When I came back from work – I was impressed! He’s made quite a lot of progress today.

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And we can already use the sitting room slightly, and tomorrow, it will be much better. The fitter has threatened promised to turn up at 7am, and finish the job tomorrow if he possibly can, even if it means stopping til midnight. He wants the weekend off. We shall see.

Ratcliffe on Soar

There’s a new Flickr group for the Ratcliffe on Soar power station – hundreds of photos of a coal-fired electricity generating plant in south Nottinghamshire.
The first I saw of the group, I thought it was a bit odd.  But then it can be seen for miles around, and it is very striking from a distance.  You can certainly see it from the top public floor of the Cornerhouse in the centre of Nottingham, on a clear day.

It used to be a personal milestone for me when my parents were driving me back to university at the end of holidays – I new when we saw the cooling towers from the M1, that our journey was nearly at an end.

And another power-station-factoid – some might argue that all those tall cooling towers are a phenomenal waste of valuable energy.  After burning all the coal to boil water into steam to turn turbines which turn magnets in coils to generate electricity for thousands of homes, the steam is cooled down again in those vast concrete towers.

I have read that rather than force-cooling the steam down, an infrastructure could be created to pipe the steam away for better use – eg heating houses or plants.  I have read the steam can be piped up to 30 miles away.  That’s easily enough to get from Ratcliffe to anywhere in Nottingham city.  There are also plenty of homes and businesses much closer to the power station that need heating.
Another power-station fact.  They store coal in huge great open-air piles near the entrance to the station.  You can see them from the road.  If the coal is carelessly stored, if, for example, you make the pile too deep, it can burst into flames.

Diet books for cats

I asked on Cix if people think I’m overfeeding the cats.  They ask for so much food, sometimes I just give in, and don’t stick to the amount of food on the packet of the dry biscuit.  Is demand feeding bad for cats.

I saw a link for a librarian cartoon strip on UMRA. This edition might just answer my cat question!

Now I’m obsessively going through a couple of years’ worth of comic strips, instead of getting on with my jobs: tidying, clearing and emptying the kitchen, writing up minutes and everything else.

Almost as bad as Saturday night when I got caught up in “Things My Girlfriend and  I Have Argued About.”

Rock quiz

The SeekerYou scored 52%!
I don’t know if you’ve been searching low and high, but you do know your bare-bones classic rock basics. With this kind of score, you probably nailed the signature song questions and most of the albums.You probably don’t have much of a classic rock collection yourself, but when your friends play theirs, you recognize the songs. This is a respectable score: you’re neither know-nothing nor nerd.
My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender:

free online dating free online dating
You scored higher than 99% on notes

Link: The BASIC classic rock Test written by allmydays on OkCupid, home of the The Dating Persona Test

What it says here – not even slightly true! I know naff all about rock and guessed the answers to most of the questions!

Telly, telly and more telly

Well, not content with just watching University Challenge whilst we ate, we went on and watched The Choir, a programme about a thin posh bloke trying to get school kids in Northolt to sing. He was reasonably successful, but we sat here criticising his choice of music and his tactics.  Easy enough to do from the comfort of an armchair.

Then on to HIGNIFY with Rob Brydon in the chair, which was greatly amusing. And now on to to Newsnight.  I don’t think I have ever watched Newsnight from start to finish.  In my parents’ house, there’s always a scrabble to turn the programme off before the theme tune starts.  Jeremy Paxman is ever such a strange colour.

I have watched more TV on TV in the last few days than I have for years.  I tend to watch more on DVD on a computer upstairs.  Wireless laptop lets me spod from the sofa. Ideal.

Sending Christmas cards?

Please put your address in with your Christmas cards if you’re sending them through the post.  Sticky label on the back.  Somewhere on the round robin.

This is our second Christmas in this house. The previous owner died last August. Last Christmas, we took the big stack of Christmas cards that came to the to the estate agents for handing back to the lady’s executors.

We can’t really do that this year, so we’re opening them to see if we can send them back, or drop a note to the senders.  Most of them, there’s nothing helpful. Lots of personal information, but no addresses.
Obviously, if you’re sending cards to someone, you don’t think they’ve died. I don’t think there’s anyone on my Christmas card list who hasn’t made it through the year.

University Challenge

It’s certainly the week for watching telly.
Well. I’m not sure I can concentrate on the questions, what with those extremely dishy guys on the right hand side of the Manchester team. Lavin and Elliott. Phwoar. They certainly “qualify”.

Fnarr, fnarr.

Sustainable Christmas

Right. Here is my Christmas Rant. I am going to go through this at length and I am setting out my thoughts. I am not trying to set out a polemic or start a pointless argument. If you would like to comment, please do me the courtesy of respecting my point of view rather than using the facile and well-trodden path of shouting Scrooge or Bah Humbug. I have come to these downbeat conclusions over a number of years, and I don’t think well-timed visits from men in nighties is going to change my mind much.

Those of you who know me will know I’m not a big fan of organised Christmas activity. There are parts of it that are wonderful. Who wouldn’t like an excuse for a big festive dinner and a bit of a drink, a chance to shut ourselves up with our loved ones and pets for a day, and whirlwind of catching up with our friends and neighbours for a few seasonal parties? I don’t mind putting cards in the post. I even have been known to write a round-robin, and it’s nice hearing back from people telling us what their years have been like.

There are parts that are bleak and dark for me. Gift-giving is one such. I extend this to birthdays too. It would be wonderful if we could have a brief exchange of meaningful gifts – things we have bought for each other because they will make our lives easier or better or happier. Things we know will be appreciated. But I bet most presents most people receive this year won’t fit those categories. They will receive presents that say “I spent a lot of money on you” or that say “I was tearing round the shops at the last minute and this was the last thing on the shelves that even vaguely matches your personality.” I know I have given gifts just like this.

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A short Full Council

I thought I wouldn’t be at Council today – I’d made my apologies to my Group, and was planning on sitting home waiting for shiny kitchen appliances to be delivered.  They duly turned up mid-morning, leaving me with no excuse for Council at 2pm.

There was a very short agenda this month, and a similarly short one last month. The Lord Mayor proposed to cancel the November, roll the business together to form a more substantial meeting in December which could be rounded off with festive cheer and a Christmas dinner.

Unfortunately, the  Lord Mayor doesn’t have the constitutional right to cancel a meeting, so members were sent a letter saying that the two meetings would be combined unless an objection was received from one or more Members of Council.

A Conservative member objected, I understand.  They had a motion they wanted to table in December, but worried that in the planned fuller December meeting, there was scope for the motion to be filibustered out and not discussed.  We had no feelings either way – we felt there was no advantage in turning up twice if we could fit it into one meeting.  But if the Tories actually had business that would warrant everyone turning up, then that was reason enough to continue with two meetings.

Two meetings we duly had.  Last month, we made sure we tabled our maximum number of questions, as did the Conservatives, to give us at least some reason for being there.  The meeting lasted just over an hour, if I recall correctly.

This month, we turned up again.  The Tories, who had pretty much insisted on us having this meeting so they could table a motion, didn’t do so.  They also didn’t ask any questions, and they refused to vote on the only other substantial item of business, concerning super-casinos in Nottingham.  They frequently refuse to vote on most things going through Council.  Presumably this is so that no-one can print in leaflets that the Tories voted for X, although what they say is usually enough for us to go after them when we need to.

So today’s meeting finished in under forty minutes, with the Conservatives, who insisted on having the meeting, not saying anything and not voting on anything.

It wasn’t an entirely fruitless meeting.  We got our full quota of questions in. We engaged in full and frank debate about council housing in the city, with a series of questions relating to news stories about Decent Homes.  We got to play off Labour MP Alan Simpson’s forthright, and probably incorrect views about sustainable building in city schools against the views of the portfolio holder.  Cllr Chapman gave an entertaining, Christmassy response, criticised the MP in veiled terms, and eventually undertook not only to include substantial sustainable elements in the new school developments, but also to take the designs to two Scrutiny Panels.  Which is a Good Thing.  And a series of questions to the Leader got him a bit hot under the collar.

But because there were two short meetings finishing before 3pm instead of one longer meeting, we don’t get our festive Council Christmas dinner.  Well done, Tories!

(Actually, I don’t mind at all. We have loads of stuff in the freezer that needs eating.The food at Council is really very good, but tonight I’d rather have home-cooked chicken korma than Christmas dinner.)