Barry’s Ramblings

Ski-ing? In June? In Manchester?

Yep, its all true. Matthew and I went to ‘Chill Factor e‘ today. The main purpose was to get Matthew some experience ski-ing on snow. But I enjoyed having a beginner’s lesson anyway.

Had a great time, but as an old timer, I am feeling it now. Back ache and very tired!

Still, I want to go back and have a proper lesson on the full 180m slope. Could be expensive though!

Toxic World

Below my office is a plant room and it is getting cleaned. Due to the usual Health and Safety hoo har, it is being assumed that the muck they will be disturbing contains asbestos or Radium or spent nuclear fuel or something, so they have sealed off the room, built an impressive structure round the door and the clean/dirty trailer and for good measure switched off the fresh air system to the offices. My office should be OK, cos I can open the window, but combined with my general lethargy lately, I am getting sleepy in the office in the afternoons!

So today I decide I will go across campus to another building to replace some old labels. A silly little job, but I took the laptop so I could read my email whilst I was doing it and it got me out of the office and woke me up a bit!

So I am carrying a labeller, my lappy, and listening to a podcast on the iPhone. Some joker phones me! Now this should not cause a drama, except that the button on my earbuds that answers a call does not work, so I have to take out the phone from the holster, unplug the headset, pull out the right hand ear piece from my ear and answer the call, all without dropping my MacBook Pro, or the labeller!

Who is it that dares to cause me all this grief? Carcraft! To remind me that the Peugeot 406 I have already told them I sold needs a service or MOT!!!

I carry on my way!

I get the job done and head back. I have just crossed the road when the phone goes again! I thought “Bastards I’ll give em what for this time, I’ll tell em where they can stick a Peugeot 406!”. But this time it is my daughter’s school, “Hello Mr Dean, Charlotte has eaten some Laburnum seed and is saying she feels sick, can you come and get her from school”!

Laburnum is NOT good to eat! See this paper for details! (I read this en route on the iPhone)

So I rush home, well as fast as you can go on a Number 15 Arriva Bus in Liverpool!

I phonef my Mum to pick up Charlotte early and take her to the walk-in centre and I met her there. I also phoned NHS Direct in case they suggested A&E at Alder Hey! Turns out she only chewed one seed, and spat it out. The poisons unit seemed to think she would be OK, and the triage nurse seemed to think she would be fine as she had not been sick, even after 3 hours!

Well I wanted “waking up a bit”, and that seemed to do the job, kids bless.

Paying for a bus

Bloody buses! Driver this morning is a right grumpy sod. He has no change, so looks at the passengers and makes it their problem.

I don’t think it is unreasonable to pay for a £3 ticket with a £10 note. Not like the bus is under used! It’s standing room only, and we are still picking people up! He claimed he already owed passengers £12 in change!

I still hate buses!

Smashing game …

The children played a game of war in the garden and were throwing gravel at each other, like you do. No children were hurt in the game! But the conservatory door was propped open, and the inner pane of the sealed unit got hit..

Later that same night (the door had been left open all evening) there was a bang, you guessed it, the class shattered!

As luck would have it, my brother is in the Double Glazing business and got me a new unit which we fitted one night.

Kids eh! Always ready to help out their parents!

Appliances fight back

As you can see from some earlier posts, this year has been the year of stuff breaking and costing me money I can ill afford. (I know I bought a Mac Laptop, but some things are essential to life

The Fridge

This is a large Frost Free Hotpoint, and when the motor runs (most of the time), it buzzes. We stick a door wedge between it and the kitchen unit it is built into and it stops. Until it starts again and you have to remove the wedge. I think the wheels are knackered as well.

The dishwasher

This is a Miele, and has many miles on the clock! In our house it is only not running when it is being filled and emptied! It has a special fan drying system which opens only when needed (or in our case is stuck open) so steam comes out when it is washing! It also has a food filter which is bust and a perished seal in the sump! We have this on warranty with Domestic and General so I need to phone them and get it fixed.

Washing Machine

As if it felt left out, the Miele washer door seal has failed! We have to stick a tea towel in the door to prevent the kitchen flooding! Of course we don’t have this on warranty and a new door seal is £70 and almost the same to get it fitted!

Tumble Drier

This is also a Miele and has developed some fault where moisture gets inside where it shouldn’t and water gets into the motor and the house ring main circuit breaker goes! Again no warranty! This is also going to cost an arm a leg and a small child to fix!

The Kettle

That forgot when the water was boiling, so we had to get a new one. Shame cos it was a nice stainless steel one, and now you can only buy complete crap unless you spend over £70! I suppose this is the advantage of Chinese imports! So we now have a “stainless steel” one, in fact it is stainless foil wrapped round a cheap plastic kettle! Was still £25 at half price!

Alarm clock radio

We have a Sony alarm clock radio, has worked a treat for ages. But now you can only listen to Classic FM if you put the aerial on the floor and place your hand on top of the radio. Not very practical for being woken by it in the morning.

DVD Player

We got a Sainsbury’s voucher a while back and decided to get a new DVD player as our old Sony one which cost us £200 was had it. So we opted for a £40 one, instead of a £5 crappy one. What we have discovered is that the £40 one IS a crappy one! It takes regular long pauses during playback, presumably to take a break! It also uses HDMI, which is also toss! We have to “reboot” the telly and DVD quite a bit to get them to talk to each other! I think TV and DVD are dead technologies. I think something like the Apple TV will be the future.

Car again

So since the last tale about the car we have had to get new brakes, pads and disks of course!

Oh and 4 new tyres, tracking (it was so far out it was almost off the scale) and the usual extras.

Thinking that this should surely be enough spending on the car for now, we called the mechanic to look at why it was using water and why we had no heat in the car and the temp always showed cold.

Tuns out we needed a new radiator, new themostat and the air filter needed replacing.

Did I mention that some arse hit the front of our car on a car park and bust the headlight mountings, so we needed a new headlight as well.

So that car has cost us about £1000 so far this year! And now the “Brake Pad” warning has been coming on, when the brakes are fine!

Laptop

The wife’s MacBook failed!

Died!

So we took it to the nice people at the Apple Store Genius Bar in Liverpool One and they have fixed it all up under warranty. Phew!

On the subject of Laptops…

I have been very unhappy with the machine I had to work with in the office. It’s a Dell OptiPlex 745 I think with a Managed Windows XP install that runs slower than a snail with a hernia in treacle!

Then there was this:

Brilliant!

So my wife decided it was time to do something about this. So she bought me a nice shiny MacBook Pro. A 17″ one!

Mine is something like those here.

Now I don’t have anymore Blue Screen’s of Death and I can just use the machine to work!

Water problems

So the United Utilities man came out quite quickly in fact and excavated down the hole and found the on-street stop cock under a large lump of cement!

The emergency plumbers came out again, and fixed the in-house stop cock!

Hoorah!

Just need to get the dripping tap in the kitchen sorted, it’s a “Blanco” and apparently uses ceramic plates to seal off the flow, not a washer, so it will cost at least £20 for the parts!

I now have a worrying patch on the hall ceiling to look into:

More water from above?

Hey ho!

Water water everywhere!

So we have just been on “holiday”, I say Holiday in that way because day one Rebecca had a viral infection and vomited about 8 times, three in the car, nice!

But the best bit comes when we get home!

In 2005 our shower leaked and destroyed the ceiling in the lounge, claimed on insurance got it fixed.

This year in January, shower waste pipe leaks, ceiling destroyed again! However, fixing the leaking shower waste did not stop the leak! Turns out there is a tiny hole in the hot water pipe feeding the basin. Claimed on insurance and got this all fixed…

We get back from holiday on Saturday 30th May, big H shaped stain on the ceiling. Call out the emergency plumber (on insurance), he finds a tiny hole in the cold feed pipe to the basin and toilet, about 4 feet away from the last leak, we now have a new hole on the ceiling.

January hole:

The January 2009 hole.

May hole:

The May 2009 hole

Spot the difference!

To cap it all, the stop-cock for shutting off the mains water is leaking, and the plumber can’t fix that because the main on-street stop-cock is buried too deep to reach, or find for that matter. I looked for it, felt like time team!

Not to worry, United Utilities will send an inspector within 5 days to look at it, then will fix it within 12 weeks!

Ah well, such is life I suppose.

Buses

I hate buses at the best of times. But this week has really done it for me..

We have builders in replacing the cieling in the lounge diner as a result of a water leak. So my mother has kindly offered to feed us at her house. So I have been getting the bus from Huyton to Liverpool, then from Liverpool to Netherley in the evening.

Sounds easy enough! NOT! Buses that are running a bit late, or are nearly full just pass the stop and leave you there! When they do turn up, they are as comfortable as being rolled down the side of the Matterhorn in a barrel.

This morning I was unable to get a bus as I had a £10 note to pay with, clearly not legal tender on buses, so I had to get off again! I decided to walk and get a train, which is marginally better.

I think next week I am going to get the bike out and cycle to work. That way I can avoid the useless British Public Transport fisaco.

Is it me or has Britain gone completely down the crapper?