Murdering Orange B*stards

When they killed Wildfire a couple of months ago, it would appear they also nuked the personal fax number I’ve had with them for the last six years. I don’t use it very much, but I thought it would be a helpful thing to be using whilst trying to get my mortgage application sorted. Goodness only knows where that fax ended up. The number goes adrift every time I change my handset, but has always been retrievable in the past. Now, it’s gone for good. They’ve had to allocate me a new number.

The house purchase is coming along: mortgage chosen, and nearly applied for, solicitors instructed, now the waiting game.

Argh

My first post from the new blogging system. Unfortunately, I’m ill. I have a minor cold which is making me worse than usual in the mornings, leaves me bunged up, and has left me with much less singing voice than usual.

Which wouldn’t normally be a problem. Except that next week, I’m off on a singing holiday to St Paul’s, London. We’ll be singing evensong every day at 5pm. The music we’ll be attempting is here.

OMFG!

B3ta is down.

How will we cope?

oOo

I’ve spent the evening techily occupied finding a new web host that will run WordPress for me. I’ve outgrown blogger. I’ll be moving a spare domain to a new host for experimental purposes and will be migrating www.niles.org.uk in the fullness of time. The ageing content of the site is a little bit embarrassing now.

It’s been a techy few days. I spent Sunday evening upgrading a computer in the office. It now has a network card and an extra ISA parellel port and has been transformed into a print server. It’s been ages since I’ve had to do anything ISA and I’d forgotten what life was like pre-PnP.

This is Libby, our neighbour’s cat who came in through our open back door earlier today. I shot a ‘reel’ of film of her before we escorted her off the premises in accordance with the terms of our lease. She’s looks very much like my parents’ cat Ellie except that where Ellie is grey-only, Libby has warmer colours in her fur.

I’ve just started watching tapes of 24 Season 4, even though we’ve not finished Season 3. Paul has Kiefer Fatigue and has decided three seasons of high tension cliffhangers is quite enough for him. Me, I’m a glutton for punishment. “Looks like someone’s trying to corrupt the internet!” Techy bloggers the world over are up in arms.

Busy day

Today in Nottingham, there’s been a

  • peace rally in Market Square
  • Gay Pride festival in the Arboretum
  • and a Mela on the Forest Field

All connected by the tram, so a peacenik gay Asian with a bus pass can hop between all three.

Unfortch, I didn’t go to any of them. We had a delivery day in the diary from months back so I went leafletting with a bunch of Lib Dems.

I’m starting to work on the fantasies about the new house and garden. If we’re moving in at the end of the summer what can we plant? Help is at hand on the HDRA website that gives a month-by-month account of what needs doing in the garden — and what you could be enjoying if you’d followed their instructions earlier in the year. The Organic Catalogue has been constant bathroom reading for the last six months.

Will we keep chickens? There’s plenty of room. But to be honest, we don’t actually eat all that many eggs. I’m sure we can always eat more omelette, cake, quiche, egg sandwiches… We can Go To Work on an Egg, provide Oeufs Durs a la Mayonnaise to every bring’n’share… (Blimey, the Eglu has changed so that now it can hold rabbits. Are the rabbits for food or looking at? I don’t think that we’d need an Eglu when a couple of feet of chicken wire and some wood will do…)

There’s a quite a bit of garden out of sight of the house, so we could have a polytunnel and grow chillis and melons. And have a full sized compost heap instead of a garden compost dalek. But with all that garden, we’ll need a way of disposing of dead leaves and grass cuttings.

Maybe I’m jumping ahead of myself. First we’ll need to rewire, redecorate and furnish the place. That’s assuming we can sort mortgage, surveys and the conveyancing. Dammit! I want to move now!

But of course the main reason for moving? Away from restrictive leases and evil, inspection-mad letting agents? KITTENS!

Houses

We’ve had an offer accepted on a house.

There’s a long, long way to go yet, and it doesn’t look like I’ll be a home-owner by my birthday, but it’s an important step down the road.

3-bed 1930s semi with large established garden in Sherwood, Nottingham. Kitchen, Lounge/diner, lean-to. Shed. In need of redecoration, and a bit of basic maintenance, which is the only reason we can afford it.

I’m finding it harder than usual to concentrate on working!

A local printer for local people


P7120012
Originally uploaded by nilexuk. During elections, we print target letters, mailmerging letters to thousands of people. By-election stalwarts of many years’ standing will tell you horrendous stories of feeding arrays of 4ppm primitive laser printers with paper long into the night.

Now we have fast, modern laser printers like this HP Laserjet 4200 with its three-ream paper hopper that can print at 30 or more pages per minute, and speeds up the job no end.

But they get hot, all the more so when you’re facing the electorate in July and your office is cooled only by the odd fan here and there. When the printer gets too hot, the paper coming through starts to curl, which means it won’t go through the folding machine, and in really bad cases has to be folded by hand by the army of clerical helpers.

So when the need to print is not too pressing, someone thought they’d open all the printer doors and let it cool down a bit.

Pretty much all the rest of my photos from Cheadle are of the fantastic views you get from the holiday cottage we were staying at, which was The Hayloft, c/o Three Chimneys, Cobden Edge, Mellor, SK6 5NL, tel no available here. Stockport may not be an obvious place for a holiday, but this really was a gorgeous place.