Staring into the Abyss

Ok, I finally made a decision about bookcases, and placed an order with *whisper*Ikea*whisper* via their website.

I went for the Markor range, and ordered four bookcases, two of each of the ones shown if you “continue reading”, plus one TV bench (could also be used as a coffee table, but for us it will be a TV bench), also shown below.

Continue reading ‘The Dark Side’

Sometimes the news just leaves me in a state of disbelief.

New sport for the brainless? - toddler baiting.

This one from last week is just stunning - turn sheets over, don’t change them.

Okay, my final shot at getting broadband provided at the house in Wales.  After this, I pretty much give up.

Because The Boy is setting up his own business, we decided that we could attempt to get BT to provide us with a new business telephone line, with a simultaneous order for broadband.  That order has been placed as of yesterday (an hour long phonecall after an hour of trying to actually get through to a representative).  This morning I received a confirmation call with the appointment date for engineer installation.  When I asked the agent to confirm that a note I requested had been placed on the account, stating that we do not want the line if broadband is not possible, he said: “Yes, but that is not important because broadband will be provided on the date the line is installed.”  I asked him to confirm that broadband would definitely be provided to our address and he stated “Yes, definitely”.

So, we shall see.  Certainly if we don’t get broadband provided, I will be writing a thorough account of our dealings with BT, from start to finish, and sending it off to the appropriate people.  I have notes detailing everything.

Keep your fingers crossed, and think positive!  Hopefully this will do it, and it would certainly make me a lot happier.

Oh, I finished Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill.  Wow.  I will be writing about that over on Quixotical.  Loved it.

Also, poking around on the Stephen King message board, I found a thread asking if Stephen King is a racist, because he uses racial epithets in his books.   *sigh*

I’m feeling slightly better. Slightly. More Taken last night, which helped. Sadly I have finished the series now, so will have to find something else to fill the void. I had to go to bed early, just to lie down and watch it - I became extremely tired and down at around half past seven last night, so The Voice of Doom started up again. Miserable bastard.

This morning I woke up feeling rather achy, with a headache and wonky hearing. Not quite so miserable though, so that’s something. It’s now after two o’clock in the afternoon and I’m still in my PJs, drinking tea, reading blogs and trying to get started on a post about Land of Laughs for Quixotical. I think I’ll have a nice soak in a hot bath soon, and then read Heart-Shaped Box. I have a feeling that will help.

Tonight I think I may start watching Firefly again. That seems like a good plan.

My brother is going to the house this weekend to lay the laminate flooring we didn’t get round to. He’s a star. Hopefully he’ll have time to tackle the fencing soon. Fingers crossed. Haven’t heard from the carpenter with a price for the porch yet, but his father did go in for a heart bypass operation yesterday, so that is more than understandable - I hope the operation went well and that his father has a good and speedy recovery.

It seems like the time for bad/worrying/stressful news right now - a friend of The Boy’s family was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the last week, his cousin’s father in law died unexpectedly of an asthma attack, my brother’s work situation is a bit rocky, and then there is all the awful stuff in the news. Here’s hoping for some better news soon.

At the weekend I fell into a black hole. I’d been teetering on the edge for a few days, so I knew it was coming. The fatigue that came with travelling over to the house in Wales, and doing lots of work there, brought it on, fast and heavy.

When I’m exhausted and miserable, my brain just won’t shut up. I have this continual internal drone cataloguing all the things I’ve done wrong, all the things that could go wrong, and all the reasons things won’t work out. That is what happened on Sunday evening - I basically shut down. I burst into tears, I couldn’t eat, and there was no comforting me. People saying “it will be okay” etc doesn’t really help, because in my head the monotonous voice of doom is still droning on. The only thing that helped at all was watching Taken on DVD - I escaped into the story and The Voice shut up, allowing me to finally drift off to sleep.

I’m a worrier. I worry about things that might lie around the corner, things that are happening, things that have happened, things that I have done, and just things in general. The Voice of Doom just goes through all of them, on a loop.

You know what didn’t help? The fact that while I was trying to eat my dinner on Sunday evening, the only thing vaguely watchable on TV (we don’t yet have Sky at the house, although I’m thinking it will be a necessity) was a BBC documentary following Robert Winston learning to play the saxophone. What the hell? I’m sitting there weeping into my pasta, and all the TV can offer me is a celebrity doctor playing the sax. Thanks.

It doesn’t help that a lot of things are very much “up in the air” at the moment. The Boy is trying to get set up so he can go from permanent employment to contracting, with a view to earning more money. I’m no longer working and am too cramped in this one room to get started on anything creative/productive. The house still needs a lot of work, the highest priority being the garden fencing so that the dogs are secure in the garden. BT are still being useless, so it doesn’t currently look like we’ll be getting broadband - we will keep trying, but it looks unlikely. So, I’m just really unsettled, and I guess that really comes out when I’m over at the house since I’m thrown out of my current routine, and the place is very empty. I’d probably get over the internet issue if I at least had a table to put my laptop on so I could use dialup. Not ideal, but workable.

I’m feeling better today, now that I’m back in my routine, and have had some rest. Last night Taken helped again, and so did the first episode of the new series of Peep Show which was just hilarious. I was a little surprised and extremely pleased to note that this, the fourth series, has started out just as funny as the last series. Brilliant. There was a point near the end that caused me to choke on a gulp of water. I like it when that happens. It doesn’t happen often enough, by far.

Something just occured to me - according to the neighbours, the previous owner of the house had a lot of money problems as a result of some people she had living with her. When I’m at the house, one of the main concerns focused on by The Voice of Doom is money. Perhaps there are some bad vibes lingering that are bringing me down. I think that is a real possibility.

That aside, what did we do at the house? Well, less than we expected as we had to leave a bit earlier than we had planned. So, the laminate floor is still waiting to be put down. We cleared a lot of soil from a pile next to the fence in the garden. For some reason the previous owner piled up a big heap of soil next to the fence, and disposed of food waste there. We bagged it up, and will use it in the paddock, or something. Piled up against the fence, it was simply in the way, and rotting the fence (which has to be replaced anyway, but still…SMRT). You can see the bags of soil in one of the photos below.

We tore down some of the rotting/broken fencing, ready for replacement. The wood is all in a heap in the paddock waiting to be burnt.

We filled a Hippo Bag - a cheaper and easier alternative to skips - with all the old carpet/lino and other bits of rubbish. Now we just need to call them for collection.

I tackled some of the bathroom tiles with paint remover, with success. You can see a before and after in the photos at the end of this post. The paint remover I used is water based and non-toxic. No vapours, hooray! I did discover that there are three different types of tiles - what I presume was the original tile, in a very light blue/cream pattern, and then plain white tiles which have been added on to cover the whole wall. This wouldn’t be so bad, if it weren’t for the other tile - a horrid, very dated, floral pattern - and I say “tile” as so far I have only discovered one of them. I’m going to look into the tile stickers you can get to cover these up (we need some for the icky patterned tiles in the kitchen too), but I don’t know how well it will work with the two main types of tile in combination. It may be that I will have to look into tile paint, and see if we can make a better job of that than the previous “decorators” did. We shall see. Re-tiling seems a bit too expensive/laborious at the moment.
My brother recommended a carpenter, who came round on Saturday and fitted a door handle to the back door (it only had a yale lock previously, and no handle), and had a look around at the other jobs we need to have done. He is pricing up the materials for the inner porch we want to have, and all being well, that will get done this coming weekend. So, on Monday morning, we demolished the stone archway to the dining room. The stone was all surface mounted, and actually fairly poorly done. It came off easily with the aid of a bolster chisel and rubber mallet, with no real damage to the walls. The entrance hallway and dining room actually look much lighter for it, and we now have a normal size doorway to the dining room. Photographic evidence below.

What else did I do? I read The Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll, which I will talk about over on Quixotical, and I watched a couple of episodes of Taken, as mentioned previously.

What next? The Boy is taking on the BT battle, as I have had enough of it. We’ll see how he fares. Keep those fingers crossed! Mum is going back to the house next week for about ten days or so, to get stuff done. Then The Boy and I will go over to the house before the bank holiday weekend at the start of May, so he can have a good look at the place and what we’ve done so far, before going down to Devon to see his sister and her family for a few days.

Now for the photos. If you click on the small images, you can check out the larger versions on flickr and see my notes.

Right, I’m off to the house today to see what’s what with the broadband connection, work out the fencing for the garden, do some painting and lay some laminate flooring.  Hooray! Will take some photos while we’re there so you can see how we’re progressing.
If the broadband issue isn’t sorted this week, I have a suggestion from a friend for another tactic to try - so keep those fingers crossed!

Am taking Land of Laughs by Jonathan Carroll and Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill with me so I can get some evening reading done.  Not sure how many days we will be staying, so have also packed The Earthsea Quartet “just in case”.

The whole BT broadband farce is starting to wear me down. Yesterday I phoned them to find out what happened to the update I should have received before Easter weekend. The man dealing with my account was out, so I then had to wait till today for him to contact me. When he did contact me he said that the order had failed again, due to the problem of DACS on the line. “Oh really”, said I, and informed him that I have been told twice that the DACS has been removed. He went away to check with another department, and came back to say that the order failed because there aren’t enough tie pairs in the exchange. He also said that the other department suggested I place another order in one or two months time.

Not. Good. Enough.

I phoned the customer services line a while later, after mulling this all over. I spoke to a very helpful lady, who read out all of the notes on the account (which I noted down on my pad, including dates). While reading the notes, she had to admit that it was all very confusing. In fact, she said “I had expected to look on the system and have a clear reason to give you as to the problem with your order, but that isn’t the case.” One note says DACS has been removed and the order can be reissued, then two days later another says that DACS is a problem, and so on… The last note says that there are not enough tie pairs. Another thing that she said is that when there aren’t enough tie pairs the orders are usually delayed, not cancelled, so that was also odd.

Remember I was told the first two orders were cancelled due to the long length of the line? Nothing about line length issues on the system according to the lady I spoke to today. Nothing. How queer.

Apparently I should expect a call in the next 24-48 hours when she has received a response from BT Wholesale. Ho-hum.

I should also mention here that all the availability checkers say that the line has ADSL installed - this includes the BT Business Broadband availability checker and the checker at www.samknows.com.  The lady I spoke to today said this might be due to an order pending on the line, but at one point the checkers did actually say “there is an order pending on this line”, before changing to say that the line had ADSL.  Riiiight.  The checkers said the line had DACS back in February, and haven’t since that time.  MYSTERIOUS.  I am going to the house tomorrow, and will check the modem “just in case”.  If the line were to have ADSL working, that would be far too hilarious, and my head might explode.

Would you believe that we still have no concrete news from BT about the broadband order?  Nothing certain one way or t’other.  I spoke to a man on Friday that said I could speak to someone on Saturday for more information, but that this third order should go through okay.  I spoke to a lady on Saturday that said she couldn’t find out any information and that the man who I could speak to would not be in until Monday.  So, Monday comes and I get a phonecall.  Still no broadband, but he said that the work had been completed and all that remained was a final check on the exchange - he is supposed to get back to me today - nothing so far.

I just want to know one way or the other.  *sigh*  I wouldn’t mind, but most of the people I have spoken to at BT have been fairly useless - either having no clue what they are talking about, or just being downright rude and unhelpful.  Complete shambles.

Keep those fingers crossed people.  I have this feeling I’m stuck in some weird broadband order Groundhog Day.

Memey type thing spotted over on this livejournal.

True story.

I love receiving new paper and craft stuff in the post.  So, when two packages of paper turned up this week I was super chirpy.  Since I don’t share a lot of my craft related stuff here, I thought I’d post some paper pics.

And, here’s a photo of a card made for The Boy’s niece’s christening:

The letters and squares they are mounted to were cut out on my awesome new toy - the Craft Robo.  Mine is the A4 version.  It’s a lot of fun - took me months to decide to purchase one and now I wish I’d done it sooner.  Has a lot of potential, and I’m already getting lots of use out of it.

Also with the Craft Robo, I made a bookmark for the Once Upon a Time challenge. I cut out the rounded rectangle for the bookmark from cardstock, and then the letters from adhesive backed patterned paper.

I’m going to have to learn some more about programs like Adobe Illustrator to use the machine to its full potential, but that’s part of the fun.

Unlike other diecutting machines, I can cut whatever I want as the Craft Robo connects to the PC.  So, I can cut any font I have access to, which is so useful.