Croaking Frogs

One of the features of our new garden that surprised me when we first saw the design on paper was the pond.

I don't remember explicitly asking our designer to include one, yet once I saw it on the plan I quite liked the idea. We had a pond here when we moved in, but it was a sad little effort. Hidden under the large acer planted in the border between us and our semi-detached neighbour, it had clearly suffered some damage to its liner as it never filled up beyond half-way and the half that did fill was always choked with weed. Notable mainly for its brief occupation by a drunken party guest on the evening of our housewarming, the pond nevertheless proved to be home to a small population of frogs. When we dug it out and filled in the hole in April 2009 the frogs disappeared, only to reappear again one by one whenever we moved a large rock, wooden sleeper, or pile of twigs anywhere in the garden.

So I had great hopes that once garden construction was complete and the pond had become established it would attract back some of our original colony. As we moved into Spring and the water lost its winter chill this did indeed prove to be the case. We caught the occasional glimpse of a pair of eyes gazing at us from just above the still surface, and while watering the garden early one morning during the recent hot spell I disturbed four adult frogs with the hose as they slept in the damp patches under the leafier shrubs and bushes. It appeared we had succeeded not only in attracting back the originals but adding to the numbers. Until things took a turn for the worse.

We began to find bodies. One or two only at first - a dried-up husk on the path and a pale, mottled corpse lying on its back in the shallows near the pond edge - but having disposed of these they were soon replaced by others. The area is occasionally visited by a heron, so initially we wondered if this had been attacking the frogs. Or maybe one of the many local cats was to blame? But in all cases the frogs appear not to have been injured and in the majority of cases they die in the pond itself, their ghostly pale bodies often floating upright with their back legs resting on the bottom so they appear to be standing up under the water. One awful weekend morning I fetched four bodies out of the water.

These aren't pets, of course, but I must admit to feeling sad at their demise, along with a nagging feeling of guilt in case we're somehow responsible for the deaths. It's nice to have somewhere for the frogs to live, but I didn't expect or want it to become a death trap. I've started mentally referring to it as the Dead Pool.

The sides of the pond are fairly steep, and the exposed liner is slippery when wet. Added to this the recent hot spell meant water levels became quite low, so it occurred to me that the frogs may not be able to get out once they'd jumped in. Is it possible for frogs to drown? Amphibians breathe, at least in part, through their skin, so I guessed that if they were trapped in water that had a low oxygen concentration (which our pond almost certainly has, with no submerged oxygenating plants or other means of replenishing the levels) it could be possible they were effectively asphyxiating. As you will have noticed from the photo, I've added a rudimentary "frog ladder" to the pond to help them get out. They're still dying.

Brief research online suggests the problem may be a slow-release fertiliser in the baskets of the pond plants that is toxic to frogs. I don't remember seeing any dead frogs before the plants were installed, so this is a possible cause, but there again the plants arrived fairly early in the year, so I don't remember seeing any live ones before then either.

My research also pointed up that, since amphibians absorb much more than oxygen through their delicate skins, they are a kind of "environmental indicator" species that will be affected by any chemical pollution. So maybe it's that. Discussions with neighbours who also have a pond have revealed they too are suffering from frogs that croak in the less traditional sense. I don't take much comfort from the knowledge that we're not the only ones this is happening to.

Money! (It's a gas)

After almost exactly two years, I'm finally getting to the bottom of the eBay pile. Maybe I'm overstating it slightly in the title. There has been money, of that there is no question, but for the most part it's not been a gas. Much of it has been mindless tedium; there's been some rumpling disappointments (that's like a crushing disappointment but with lighter weights) mostly in the areas of postage - either miscalculating the cost of it or fragile things getting broken in transit - but also more general stuff like items not selling for what I thought they were worth, and some buyers being worse than moronic; some dogged determination (it took 22 attempts - almost a year - to sell that damned walker for instance); but there have been some highlights too, some of them even approaching exciting.

I could bore on for hours (or pages, since I'm writing) but to avoid putting you to sleep I'll choose two examples from each side of the eBay boxing match*. In the red (for excitement) corner, the highlights include:

The Biscuit Tin

When my Mum died in 2011 we spent well over half a year emptying her house ready for sale. We threw away loads of stuff, naturally, but I'd already had six months' examples of what would sell on eBay (ANYTHING), so things that I might previously have binned I decided were worth "having a go" with on eBay. Into this category fell the old biscuit tins that had lain gathering dust in the outhouse since my Dad died in 1993. He kept nails and screws in them, and I don't think my Mum ever went near a nail or a screw in her life. She certainly wasn't going to start after he'd gone. I thought there was a chance they might be collectable, so I took a photo of all of them - there were 5 - and put them up as a job lot for £7.50.

The next day I woke up to a message from someone requesting additional pics of one of the tins - a Huntley & Palmers one with a motif of common birds. In the original photo you could only see the lid. My initial reaction (that it was a bloody nuisance) gave way to a feeling that I ought to play along, so I posted pics of the other four sides. My interested party turned out to be a French collector of British biscuit tins:
"In France it is very hard to find good tins. British tins are so beautiful and elaborate."

After exchanging a couple of messages, the lady made me an offer:
"We are interested only in the HP tin (we like tins with birds) and wondered if you might be prepared to accept an offer of 85£ for it plus postage."

I had to read it twice. Eighty-five quid?? For one tin??? Was she serious? Did she mean Euros? No, she was serious and she was bidding in Sterling. Crikey. Later (once the tin arrived safely in France) she was kind enough to send me a photo of it nestling in her collection. It had been spruced up, polished and burnished, and sat proudly on one of the glass shelves that line her apartment (almost certainly a bijou apartment, being French and all). I got £25 for the other four tins in the end too.

The Buffalo Nickel

Word was, this is a very collectable coin. Not being a numismatist I had no idea, but a quick Google suggested it could be worth anything from $50 to $150 (most if not all the sales being in the US). I stuck it on for £14.95 - have you ever tried to take a photograph of a small coin so that a buyer can get an appreciation of the condition? - and watched excitedly as a bidding war started that saw it sell eventually for over £100. I sold an Indian Head penny the same week. Between them these two coins fetched £150. As always with these things, I end up wishing I'd had a few more!

Contrasting with the above examples, in the blue (for disappointment) corner, we have:

The Very First Thing I Sold. 

An early lesson in the black art of setting your starting price. The 14" portable TV with built in VCR that provided the majority of my entertainment in the apocalyptic days post-separation and, later, was all Nikki & I had room for in our first flat. Listed (before I'd learned to wait for Zero Listing Fee weekends) for 99p and sold to the only person who showed any interest for... 99p. So that's 89p after eBay took their cut.

The Ceramic Plaque 

I'd bought this as a Christmas present for my parents during their heraldic phase (a brief period following our holiday discovery that the Beresford family have a crest, and a coat of arms) and it hung on the living room wall for over 40 years. I never really did know whether they liked it or whether it was tolerated because it was a present. One of those things you hardly even notice is there after a while.

It sold for £46.50, which I was pleased with. I was less pleased that having survived 40 years with the Beresfords, less than 4 days in the company of Royal Mail was enough to break it into two pieces, requiring a full refund and a total failure of their "compensation" scheme (yes, I did make a claim and yes, it was denied). I think the guy who bought it was even more disappointed than I - it was the third one he'd had arrive broken.


So there you have it. I'm glad I've done it, but I'm glad it's almost over. The crates are all gone (well, they've reached the bottom of the stairs. They're on their way to being gone) and I took a load of cardboard boxes and other packaging material to the tip this weekend, so the study is returning to a semblance of order. By the time I've sold these last half dozen items we'll have made almost five grand in those two years (although "made" is another overstatement - you can hardly count it as profit when you sell, for instance, three grand's worth of bedroom furniture for 500 quid), which has bought us some nice new furniture for the revamped living room and allowed me to be unusually generous when sponsoring mad friends who walk, run, bike, or grow moustaches for charity.

*See what I did there? Boxing match. Things get posted in boxes. Eh? Eh? Sometimes I even make myself laugh.

The fish move in (with video!)

As I'm sure you remember, our ocellated barbs were in the vanguard of fishy occupancy in the new tank having moved in last month. Apologies in advance for the photo quality. They only sit still for about one shot in twenty. On a good day.

It took about three weeks for the biological filter to establish, so the weekend before last I mastered my trepidations (a process not too dissimilar from mustering up my equipage) and reached once again for the net to capture the cherry barbs.

We thought there were ten of these. You might imagine in a tank as small as a BiUbe it would be easy to count fish, but the cherries move around very quickly. They're also past masters at finding hiding spots. They rarely all shoal together and even then they're gone again before you can start on the fingers of your second hand.

So as not to distress them TOO much, I transferred them in two groups of five with a short rest between, having previously removed all the vegetation and the central volcano from the BiUbe's bubble tube so I had a better chance of snaffling the little buggers. All in all it went pretty well. "No fish were harmed in the making of this transition." They were soon exploring their new home, getting very excited at the vastly increased space and the downward bubbles from the filter inlet. A new experience, since in their world bubbles had previously only travelled up.

I'd already decided to leave the BiUbe running for a week or two. Recently the cherries have been breeding actively. I was concerned that eggs on the verge of hatching would be left behind and it seemed a shame to lose them. This proved to be a lucky decision, because our count was off by one. On the Sunday morning, while eating breakfast, I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye. A lone cherry had spent the night in the rather apocalyptic-looking tank, now totally without decoration, and also without any company for the poor chap. Or chapette, actually, since it was a female.

Reaching once more for my trusty net I soon had the straggler in hand (well, jug) and poured her in to join the rest of her family. And then, for once, I *didn't* ignore my little voice. Check that old tank again, it said. So I did. I stared for several minutes into the supposedly empty tank. My patience was rewarded with a swim-past by the smallest cherry barb fry I've ever seen. Barely half the size of the first one we saw in the tank almost three years ago this little guy/gal, immediately christened Tiny Kev, was no longer than 3-4mm. Dilemma! I was not at all sure I could retrieve such a small fish undamaged with the net, but it would be weeks before he/she (let's say she) grew large enough to net. Weeks alone in a tank that resembled an aquatic prison cell. Only one thing for it: I had to drain the tank to the point where I could dip Tiny Kev out with a small plastic beaker. And that meant removing all the ceramic substrate so there was no danger of squashing her.

It took more than an hour to remove the noodles (no really, that's what they're called) one at a time with a set of kitchen tongs. Going very slowly to avoid squishing TK in the event she couldn't swim away fast enough, or panicked and swam the wrong way. Once most of the noodles were out I started sucking out the water gradually, with a turkey baster (I'm very well equipped, aquatically speaking. Can't say the same for the kitchen. Any more), into my all-purpose fish-transfer device (3 litre plastic measuring jug) and carrying it through to the kitchen where I let the muck settle to give me chance to check for Tiny Kev before pouring it down the sink and returning for another few litres.

On the third such trip, TK emerged from the muck like Voyager traversing the intergalactic dust cloud. She had inadvertently been sucked into the turkey baster and survived not only that, but also being squirted out again into the jug. Not apparently any the worse for the experience I'd soon poured her into the main tank where we lost sight of her for a worrying couple of days. But it's OK! We spotted her again eventually, eagerly chasing a small flake of food and managing to avoid being eaten herself.

So here they all are, twelve cherries and five ocellated barbs, happily enjoying their new home. It takes a minute or so to get going, but if I stand very still they think I've gone and come out of hiding...

What happened on November 14?

Apart from our garden project starting, that is, of which more in a later post.

No, I'm talking about the extraordinary explosion in my blog activity. Page views to be precise.

I haven't really paid much attention to this in the past. I know who my main readers are (hi people! Kiss kiss) and I also get a bit of passing traffic, but I'm never going to be in anyone's "top ten" blog list, or make enough to live on from the revenue generated by any click-throughs on my ads, so I only visit the overview and stats pages two or three times a year out of interest.

However, when I started the 100 Theme Writing Challenge, I started to check on the stats more frequently. I was interested in whether having some free story telling would drive my visitor count up. And it did, a bit. It went from a daily average somewhere in the high 20s, to hovering in the high 40s/low 50s most days, with a small domed peak at weekends when occasional readers caught up. This would occasionally reach into the upper 60s. Then yesterday, this happened

I did a bit of a double take to be honest. At first glance it looked like most of my readers had evaporated. Then I noticed the scale and realised Blogger had adjusted the graph to cope with the new peak. 293 page views in a single day.

I have no idea what happened. Is it one new reader (hello!) catching up with several months of posts? A handful of people all catching up with a slightly smaller backlog, but all at once? Or a large number of people attracted by some unknown publicity all paying me a visit and reading a couple of pages each? I just don't know. But whoever you are... don't go! Pull up a chair. Sometimes it gets quite interesting around here :0) Especially if you like decorating.

The only inkling I have about what caused that enormous spike is that I had recently advertised War of Nutrition on a "local interest" Facebook page. But I only posted that Amazon link, so anyone spotting it would have had to click through several pages or do some research to find this blog. I can't believe 293 people all did that! Weird. It's back to normal now though, as you can tell from the graph.

The Acid Test

Hard to believe that it will soon be three years since we first installed our BiUbe aquarium. During those intervening years, we've added to the shoal of cherry barbs to replace some that died, and they've been pretty successful in adding to their shoal themselves, too. In fact since that first spate of fry, we've had two more separate birthing occasions, so it's now entirely possible that we're on our third generation of fish bred solely in our tank.

We branched out into ocellated barbs about 18 months ago too, just for a bit of variety, but as yet there's no sign of them breeding. We're not even sure if there's a gender mix among those five fish to be honest.

Anyway for the whole of those three years I've kept up with my regular water tests - ammonium, nitrite, nitrate and pH - and on those rare occasions when anything has appeared to be going awry in the water quality department, I've been able to address the issue fairly quickly. But among all those tests one - the pH test - has never varied more than 0.5pH from neutral. Until about a month ago when, for the first time ever, the test came out something other than green. It was yellow - the water had become very slightly acidic.

I have no idea why; we haven't changed our routine at all. Not the food, or the water treatment, or the frequency of filter changes. If anything the gravel bed was cleaner than it has sometimes been, and stock levels hadn't changed since those ocellated barbs were introduced, so I was at a loss to explain it. However, since barbs like their water somewhere in the range pH6.0 - 8.0, I wasn't worried. Until, that is, I did another test last Sunday. For one reason or another I hadn't tested the water for four weeks (I used to do the tests every week but when the results don't change from one week to the next for over two years, it's easy to relax the schedule a bit) and on Sunday the pH test came up orange.

That's pH 5.5. Yikes.

Fish didn't seem too bothered. A little more active, if anything, which apparently is normal at lower pH, but not distressed. And another tiny Kevin appeared a week or so back, so it can't be THAT bad. Can it?

Anyway after some rapid Internet research I decided ocean rock was the way forward. Our water is so soft that it doesn't register on a KH test at all, so attempting to correct the pH with chemicals would have been tricky (and I don't like that approach anyway). So off I went in search of a chunk of ocean rock, boiled it and baked it for the prescribed times, let it cool and with some trepidation, dropped it in.

A day later the pH test colour had relaxed from orange to yellow, and 24 hours after that it was lime green, so we're at something like pH 6.5-7.0 now, and it's taken two days to make that change. Which is good, because while fish can adapt well to different pH levels, what they don't like is RAPID changes in pH. I'll be doing another test tomorrow to check the tank hasn't pivoted over to alkalinity, but with luck I'll be able to leave the rock in there permanently. The extra minerals will act as an acidity buffer and help to keep things on an even keel from now on.

Happy Birthday!

It was my birthday last week, and I was amused to receive two greetings emails from forums I've signed up to in the past which have stored the date and programmatically fired off happy birthday wishes to me at the appointed hour.

One is from a writers' forum I've used extensively in the past (although shockingly I haven't been back there much at all this year, since writing - even blogging - has taken a seat at the back of the bus while we've been on our magical mystery tour of home improvements, illness, death and... er... no. No famine. Yet.

The other made me laugh out loud. Because although I recognised the *name* of the forum in the email, I absolutely couldn't remember the subject. Until I checked it out. It's an online home for various distributed computing projects (like protein folding and SETI@home) that I hooked up with back in the day when Nikki's Dad was recruiting spare CPU cycles to his protein folding team. An unexpected, but not altogether unwelcome, blast from the past for my birthday.

Leaky

When we arrived home, having taken a slight detour to Bolton en route, Nat was at work, so there was no-one available to explain the towel on the kitchen floor.

Dropped by accident? Left over from the last load of laundry? Who knew. Didn't take long to discover it was there to soak up the water seeping out from under the corner of the cupboard unit housing the oven. But where was it coming from? It continued to seep out slowly overnight, so the following morning we called Kitchen Guy. He was round within the hour. Removed the plinths, revealing evidence that the water had been there for some time. Wet footings under the tumble dryer and washing machine, but which was at fault?

And why had it taken so long to manifest, when neither machine had been used for a week?

He pulled out the dryer and sat it on a table protector to avoid damaging the floor. We ran a programme through the washer. Nothing. We dried a wet towel in the dryer. Nothing. We let the dishwasher run an empty cycle. Nothing. The mystery remained.

After an hour or so he had to leave, but we agreed it was sensible to leave the dryer out and see what transpired. The answer was... pretty much nothing. We'd brought a suitcase full of laundry back from the Lakes, so Nikki attended to all of that - three loads; washing and drying. No further leak. We loaded up the dishwasher with the Sunday pots. No leak.

The dryer sat in the middle of the kitchen through Monday, Tuesday, until on Wednesday morning Nikki discovered a small puddle on the dryer's mat. On closer inspection the puddle was larger than first thought, having seeped under the mat. I tilted the dryer to let Nikki wipe under the wet side, and more water pissed out on the other side. Where was it all coming from? The dryer hadn't been used since Sunday!

I checked the configuration of the drains and spotted what I thought was the problem. The dryer was connected to the same outflow pipe as the boiler condensate. I figured there was some siphon action going on when the boiler was pumping out. We called the plumber. He looked sheepish, and extended the home-grown standpipe he'd installed to take the dryer output, so that it had more than 1" of head above the condensate outflow. Sheesh.

For the time being, we've left the dryer out to prove the solution, and I'm left wondering if we'll ever have a job done in this house without something going wrong :(

Christmas is coming

For a few years now - pretty much since our first Christmas in the last house - we've been decorating the Christmas dinner table with all sorts of gold sprinkly bits. We've gone through flying cherubs, "Merry Christmas" banners (which were a bit useless as they tended to get bent and clump together), snowflakes, etc, but the favourite by far are those little gold stars.

They're easy to spread about, and they tend to stick together when they're new, in clumps of between two and seven, so you can while away the time between cracker jokes separating the clumps.

Their only drawback is... they get EVERYWHERE. And it's a standing joke in our house the way they keep turning up throughout the year, in the most unexpected places.

But this year has to be a record. 1st November yesterday, and I found this one on the stairs. From last Christmas.

Leave to take Leave

On the morning I was due to return to work - Monday 17 October - I logged in to find a reply from my manager to my urgent email informing him of our emergency visit to Toronto and that I'd be off for the rest of the week. Company guidelines in the event of the death of a close relative allow five days compassionate leave, but in view of everything that's happened in recent months, he had replied that if I needed longer I should just take it.

This falls into the category of "things I don't need to be told twice." I replied with thanks, reset my Out of Office message, and logged off for the rest of the week. And since we were due to spend all of the week after THAT on holiday in the Lakes, I'll have been off for three weeks by the time I go back. Sadly, Nikki's firm aren't quite so generous when it comes to compassionate leave.

Ups and Downs

I'm in danger of writing more apologies for hiatuses (and possibly apologies for incorrect plurals of 'hiatus') on here than 'real' blog posts this year. It's been a year for interruptions. Or to put it another way, a shit year. One with the usual ups and downs, but where the downs have tended to overshadow the ups. Which only underlines the seriousness of the downs, because the ups - especially where our house is concerned - have been huge. First the shed (whose saga fell in the middle of the Great Blogging Hiatus and hence has never been told) and now the kitchen.

So when we left the kitchen, we were knobless but otherwise to all intents and purposes complete. The appliances plumbed in and working; cooker and hob connected and working; fridge and freezer back where they belong; lights all shining brightly. All that remained was to empty the contents of the dozen or so plastic crates piled up in the dining room which comprised the totality of The Kitchen Before (crockery, dry & tinned goods, etc), decide where it would live in the new scheme, and follow it up with everything else we own that could possibly, legitimately, live in a kitchen (glasses, decanters, bottles of booze, candle supplies, the old Kenwood chef - hardly ever used - that has been languishing in a forgotten cupboard since we moved in, ...) thus freeing up space in the last ground floor room to be given The Treatment.

And that's how we spent our time for the whole weekend following completion. In between cooking on The New Hob, we washed and dusted, carried and discussed and packed away, opened and closed the cupboards and drawers with their temporary handles (wood screws covered with masking tape) until by Sunday afternoon the dining room was looking much more like a dining room than it has for the last three months, and everything was put away. Not that I could find anything, but it WAS all put away.

Inevitably there was some jousting for position. No, we can't put the bean-to-cup coffee machine under there because we can't get to the reservoir to fill it with water. No, we can't put in on that side either, because the water level indicator is against the wall and we can't see how full it is. And so on.

That was an Up, that weekend. We got a lot done, felt very happy with it all, and excited about the new kitchen. The following morning, Monday 10 October, just after I'd returned from ferrying Nikki to work I took a phone call from Paul to say their Mum had passed away. Downs don't get much bigger, or come much quicker, than that.

Kitchen fit: Day 14

A day of surprises. A day that, I thought, would be wall-to-wall painting, but which turned out to be hardly any painting at all and other much more exciting things like downdraught extractors, induction hobs and putting the fridge and freezer back into place.

Neff induction hob, with de Dietrich extractor (in "deployed" mode). Ooooh. Finally, after all the waiting we can... er... boil a pan of water. But! Never was boiling a pan of water *quite* so similar to being on the bridge of the USS Enterprise. Touch sensitive surfaces and a whizzy little dial thing that is held in place with a magnet and taps and spins to control the hotplates.

The extractor raises itself out of the depths with the touch of a finger and sinks back down again when it's finished sucking.

All this more than satisfies my life-long fascination with knobs and buttons.

Nice to have the fridge and freezer back in the kitchen too, even if it does mean that for the next three or four days we'll be performing a reversed version of the dance we first started back in July. Now the usable cooking facilities are in the dining room and all the food is in the kitchen. Back then it was t'other way round. Not for long though.

Well, I SAY not for long, but as we discovered today it'll be slightly longer than expected. Here's a photo that gives you a bit of a clue, even though the main reason for including it is to give you another perspective on the lovely new hob (purr, purr)...

See the problem? Yes, that's right. No knobs. No, I mean on the cupboards and drawers. The hob is supposed to be knobless. The drawers aren't. Slight delay in delivery. Slight as in "the week after next."

Well, we can't wait THAT long to get into our new kitchen, so the fitter's going to come up with some Heath Robinsonesque solution involving screws and masking tape apparently. Lovely.

The cat burglar

1.18am, and I become vaguely aware of a house alarm blaring away in the distance.

Nikki: "Is that our alarm?"
I listen more carefully, in my sleep-befuddled state.
Me: "Don't think so. It *is* close though."
I get out of bed and plod over to the window. When I pull back the curtain I can see our alarm box flashing its blue light angrily.
Me: "Fuck! It IS ours!"
As I open the bedroom door and the internal alarm becomes clearly audible, several thoughts crowd my still-not-fully-awake mind.
Should I go back and get my baseball bat?
Should I turn the alarm off BEFORE I check downstairs, alerting any intruder to the fact there's someone awake?
Has someone noticed the appliances being delivered and decided it's a good time to go on the rob, while they're all still in boxes?
I quickly decide plenty of light and an aggressive demeanour is the best approach to scare the intruder away. I cancel the alarm, turn the lights on and start downstairs.
Halfway down, I hear a noise in the kitchen. Bloody hell. How have they got in without making a noise?
I reach the hall, turn all the downstairs lights on and march boldly into the kitchen with a no-nonsense face on and the most don't-mess-with-me posture I can muster. I come face to face with the intruder.

A young tortie-and-white kitten, cowering at the other end of the kitchen.

She utters a frightened miaow and scuttles under the nearest cupboard unit.

Then I remember the fitters have just the day before completed coring out a 15cm hole in the wall for the ducting. A hole that presumably, from the outside, looks like a cat flap.

I retrieve the keys for the patio door, prop the kitchen door in the doorway to prevent the kitten escaping into the rest of the house, open the outside door and persuade her to go and burgle someone else, by which time Nikki has come down to check that I'm alright. With around 16 gallons of adrenaline pumping around inside me, I decide going back to bed isn't an option, so we set the coffee maker going and settle down in the lounge for some (very) early morning telly.

A-building we will go

But first, a-shopping. To somewhere I didn't even know existed: the Northern Computer Markets held at Bowlers every Saturday. How, you might ask, can any self-respecting geek live in Manchester for ten years and not know that was there? And you might ask. I don't have an answer. But I know it's there now :o)

Wandering round trying to stop the drool from soaking into my beard was hard enough. Then we smelled the bacon and egg baps. Then we looked around a bit more, worked out a buying strategy and started spending. A Gigabyte 3DMars case, power supply, a 22" LG LED monitor (just the one for now), a 2TB hard drive (Western Digital of course) 8GB of Kingston memory, BD rewriter, Gigabyte motherboard, i5 processor, Nvidia graphics card, card reader, wireless card, new keyboard and mouse (why not?) and we were done.

Back home on the double to start assembling and by about 4pm the machine was assembled, booted first time, and I was busy reinstalling software. Bloody brilliant.

The old machine, stripped of its disks (the 1TB to keep, the 250GB installed just long enough to suck its data off) is over there, pretending to be a door stop.

Print this

A 6-month-long experiment concluded today. The experiment, if it had enjoyed a title, would have been called something like "How long will printout continue to be usable in the face of dire warnings regarding ink levels from the Lexmark print dialog?"

Some background: Four or five times a year, I print off a set of posters for the Chorlton Players containing groups of the photos I've taken at dress rehearsal. Six pages of A4 in total. Back in January when I was printing the panto photos I had the first warning from Lex (the American guy who makes such handy announcements as "printing started" and "printing complete" just in case, you know, you hadn't noticed that the paper had started being fed through the machine, or stopped, respectively).

"Colour ink is low!" he declared in his pleasant, mid-Atlantic tones.

Well I was near the end of the run back then (why am I talking like a Texan in my head? I almost added "y'all" at the end there) so I didn't worry about it, and I don't print much colour stuff normally anyway. Just those nice little green Asda vouchers that pop out almost every week as a result of their "10% cheaper than every other store" claim.

So I continued to ignore the little red "X" in my colour cartridge silo, until it came time to print the next set of Players' photos, in March. Way back when I first started to do these posters, I'd reckoned on getting 3 sets out of a colour cartridge. The panto posters had been set #3 and that little red X had been glowering at me for a couple of months. But then I figured hey! Paper is cheap. Ink is expensive. Why don't I just carry on printing stuff out until it starts to fade? That way, I've only wasted a sheet of paper, and I'll have made sure that ALL the ink is used up.

The more quick-witted of you will probably have reached this conclusion several years ago. Sometimes, in prosaic matters such as these, I can be a bit slow.

Players Posters Set #4 printed off, in their entirety, without incident. I'd checked the little box to stop Lex warning me weeks before, so not only were the posters just dandy, but I didn't get nagged either.

Fast forward to the Players' annual comedy sketch show (normally known as the Hotpot show, but this year featuring a specially written farce cleverly embedding several sketches within it) and by this time there wasn't much black ink left either. So little, in fact, that I'd been warned several weeks previously that the cartridge was now on its reserve tank! Order your new cartridges immediately!

Naturally I'd bought replacement cartridges several months before, but I'd got the bit between my teeth now. No way I was replacing those damn cartridges now until they'd been bled completely dry. Dagnabbit!

The posters for Hotpot, aka Players Posters Set #5, printed off, in their entirety, without incident. Now THAT was a surprise, I can tell you. By the end of the run the little colour ink marker had been swapped out for a diluted, faded version no doubt intended to offer a compelling visual clue to the impending colourlessness of my printing. The black ink "X" had long since disappeared altogether, the black silo showing completely empty and devoid of any X, faded or otherwise.

That was back in May. Finally, today, I printed a letter and the last paragraph was illegible. So that's an expensive lesson learned. If I'd swapped out the cartridges when first warned, assuming there wasn't enough ink left to complete a poster run, I'd have missed out on almost half a year's worth of printing.

Paper is cheap. Ink is expensive. I'll remember that from now on.

Manchester calling...

*tap* *tap*
This thing on?
*cough*
Hello!
Welcome back. To me, that is. You've probably been here all along, wondering where I was. Turns out *I* was here all along too. Just not saying much. Shit happens, they say. And shit is pretty much what has been happening. I might even write about it one day, but not right now.

So, when last we spoke, Nikki & I were in Toronto. April 26. Good grief! Was that really the last entry? That's almost three months ago!! *slaps wrist* Well that pretty much puts the mockers on my usual "chronological" approach to blogging. As regular readers (if I have any left!) will know, I like to keep things in order. Even if I'm writing the entry two or three weeks behind the event, it'll still have the real date on it. The date it actually happened. That's not so bad if I'm only three weeks behind, but three months? No. I'd never catch up, and besides one of the reasons for blowing the dust off this cobwebby part of the Intertubes is a pointed request for pictures of our CURRENT project. If I wrote up everything (significant) that has happened in the interim then the kitchen would be finished before it even got started, if you see what I mean.

No the only way to do this is to package up the last three months into a little box and leave it over there in the corner. Over the next few months I might open up the box and take one or two choice pieces out for display purposes, but for the time being we need to get started with what's going on right now.

Although perhaps, before we get to that, I should tidy up the news from our Toronto trip. I wouldn't want to leave us hanging there, so to speak, having apparently only just been lunching in the distillery district and then magically transplanted three months into the future back in Manchester. Here, then, are the rudimentary details of the few draft entries I'd queued up covering the remainder of that trip, with their prospective titles drummed into service as headings:

Man-daRIN
(Family joke). Shirley & Neil took us for dinner at the Mandarin all-you-can-eat restaurant. Now, we have AYCE outlets in Manchester - the ones we visit most often being the No. 1 Chinese buffet, and the Nawaab Indian - but even though they are both firm favourites and very good value for money the quality is nothing like Mandarin. Wow. Absolutely fabulous Chinese food, lots of it, masses of choice, and everything tastes as fresh as if it had been cooked to order. This place became a firm favourite almost on the first mouthful. We'll definitely be back.

My fortune cookie for the evening: Accept no other definition of your life, accept only your own.

How apt.

Kensington
Shortly before our return, Paul took us for a wander around Kensington market. We lunched at Big Fat Burrito (delicious) and picked up some cool Christmas presents from the various shops and stalls.

That evening we had dinner at the Tulip steak house, which surprisingly (the place looks a little run-down and basic) proved by popular acclaim to be the best steak we had all holiday. And also, after a little persuasion, the best rack of lamb!! (*ahem*)

JB @ JB
After a last minute trudge around Walmarts to pick up those few essential items that just aren't available in the UK, we returned to Jawny Bakers for dinner. Hard to beat for atmosphere and quality (in my opinion - but I admit to being completely biased since this place holds very fond memories for me), it ran the Tulip a close second for steak quality but it's somewhere I couldn't imagine visiting Toronto without going.

Pack it in
Packing for the return trip became interesting, and a little Dickensian:

Suitcase #1: 25kgs

Suitcase #2: 20kgs

Allowance: 40kgs.
Result: misery.

Ah, but... at this stage, Carry on #1 weighed 2kgs and carry on #2: 2kgs, with a carry-on allowance of 10kgs. So after some judicious redistribution of contents...

Suitcase #1: 20kgs
Suitcase #2: 20kgs
Carry-on #1: 4.5kgs
Carry-on #2: 4.5kgs
Result: happiness.

I was also going to post something humorous about the pharma ads on Canadian/US TV. Honestly, if you haven't seen one check it out. Little beats them for unintentional black humour. I might still do a post on that at some stage. (Probably during our next trip, when I'll be exposed to them again :o))

And finally...

I just read this back and realised that I've waxed lyrical about all the wonderful meals we had OUT, but nary a mention of all the many wonderful meals we had IN. So many grateful thanks to Shirley for repeatedly proving that home cooking easily beats bought. Amongst numerous other successes, a roast turkey dinner to die for - or, at least, worth travelling 3,000 miles for!

Bee hive yourself

Amazing what you can learn while ripping up privet. Yesterday, on my return from carrying a chunky stump to the discard pile, I found a bumble bee sitting quietly on the soil beside a bumble-bee-sized hole.

She looked pretty dopey. I thought how lucky she had been to avoid being squashed while I was yanking the privet stump back and forth to dislodge its roots, but until then I hadn't realised that bumble bees hibernate (a fact later confirmed by our resident Keeper of the Zoological Knowledge - aka Nat).

Their post-hibernation warm-up routine was fascinating to watch too. A few minutes of abdominal exercises (a slight pumping action visible) followed by a couple of tentative - and very short - hovers, only a few millimetres above the ground, to warm up the flying muscles. And then a lazy figure-of-eight flight, gradually increasing in both height and area as the long-unused wings remember their skill and strength, until eventually sufficient altitude was gained to make it over the low wall (see photo on previous blog entry) and cross the lane to the conifer hedge on the other side which at that time of day was in full sun.

The bee sat on that hedge for well over half an hour, soaking up the rays. Clearly a much easier way of warming up than all that tiring flying, especially when you're running on the food reserves that have brought you successfully through a few months hibernation.

Nature in the raw - in our front garden! Brilliant.

New newels a-coming

Our mental schedule had the new stairs being fitted after May Bank Holiday, so it was a surprise to receive a phone call last week to say all the "product" was ready and they had a fitting appointment free next week.

Fortunately I'd been pressing on with the decorating so that we would stand a chance of being ready whenever they were, and the intervening weekend gave ample time to complete the last phase of the painting - the top coat on the woodwork (at least around the stairs area) - before the joiners arrive on Tuesday.

I set to yesterday morning with a brand new tin of Dulux Satinwood - my "gloss" of choice for many years owing to its classy satin finish, but by teatime I was beginning to worry that it was taking an awfully long time to dry. A tentative touch in an out-of-the-way corner gave a surprising result: it was dry already. Dry and glossy. Not what we wanted at all.

At first I thought Dulux had suffered a manufacturing wobbler and packaged regular gloss in a Satinwood tin, but as usual Google is your friend, and a quick search threw up several references to DIY and professional decorator forums where everyone was bemoaning the new paint mix - light on volatile organics as per new EU regulations, and consequently taking much longer to dry out properly than it used to.

"Don't worry," wrote one professional long-time user of Satinwood, "you'll see the difference after 24 hours, but it can take a couple of weeks before the satin effect is completely there."

Sure enough this morning the high gloss sheen is already toned down a couple of notches. Phew.

Time slips by

One thing that's always bugged us about this house is the stairs. They're quite narrow but there's not a lot we can do about that without an extortionately expensive and invasive replacement. Width isn't the main gripe though. Worst is the newel caps, which are large and square, and just the right height to catch your upper arm as you climb past, leaving you with a sore arm at best or occasionally a bruise. Next: the creaks. Pretty much every tread creaks, some much worse than others. And finally there's the look. Tatty, old and cheap. Painted pine. Very definitely a bargain basement kind of staircase.

So we found a refurb company and decided to go ahead.

Couple of days later, I got to thinking. It's always best, I find, to do your thinking after the major decision has been made. That way any additional work created by said major decision has to be done. Immediately. It can't be put off. My thinking went something like: "the whole hall, stairwell, and landing needs redecorating. I don't want to be splashing paint everywhere when we've had thousands of pounds worth of staircase installed." My next thought was even more buttock clenching: "If we strip this paper off and the walls need replastering, I definitely don't want that doing post-staircase."

We got started with the stripping the next day, the walls did need skimming, I called the builder and he's coming tomorrow. But all of that isn't really the point of this post. It's just the background to why, this morning, the central heating timer/thermostat was balanced on the bottom newel post.

In preparation for the plastering, I'd removed everything removable from the walls. Since it's a wireless transmitter, that included the timer. But it's also the thermostat, and we soon discovered that position was critical. I stuck it on top of the burglar alarm unit at first. The small amount of heat rising from that was enough to keep the thermostat from activating the boiler. We sat shivering in the lounge until I realised what was going on, and moved it onto the microwave. But the kitchen is by far the coldest room in the house. The boiler fired constantly but the stat never reached its target. In the lounge, we sweated.

After several more attempts, we found just the right non-wall position for it. On top of the newel post. The perfect place for me, coming downstairs in the dark and reaching for support, to send it flying.

It hit the hall floor and with that unmistakably expensive sound of shattering electronics, broke into a million pieces. Well, fourteen. Only I didn't know that when I turned the light on. I only found 11. The case, the circuit board, the display, its mount and its clear plastic window, the battery trays (2 off), three of the four batteries, and a little rubber thingy. I had no idea what that was.

I carried the bits into the kitchen where the light was better and took stock. The first thing obviously missing was the fourth battery which I found, after a very brief search, under the hall radiator. Then I panicked. I'd only ever seen this device - it's called a digistat - looking like this:

It didn't look much like that now. But how damaged was it really? I took a closer look. The circuit board was still in one piece. No cracks, or displaced components. The display didn't appear to be broken, and its connector - a single strip protected by a rubber sleeve - was still attached. I discovered two other rubber thingies on the circuit board. The shape of a leprechaun's hat but only about four millimetres tall, they have a tiny carbon plunger inside. Sitting beneath the switches, when pressed the rubber deforms allowing the carbon plunger to touch the circuit board and make a connection between two half-moon shaped gold contacts. Clever stuff. I attached the third rubber dude and then panicked again. The unit has four switches.

I went back and searched the hall. Amazingly, since the gaps in the floorboards are easily wide enough for these guys to drop through, I found the fourth hat. It was then I noticed there was a hole in the case where the fourth switch should be. The one with the "+" symbol was missing. Until then I hadn't even realised the switches were separate pieces, as the "-", "SET?" and "SELECT" buttons had stayed with the case. Another search of the hall failed to turn up the last switch, but I caught sight of it under the coffee table by the living room door. It had bounced six feet further than any other piece.

OK. Battery trays slid into place. Rubber hats all attached. Display contact positioned above gold contact strip, and plastic insert in place to keep the display level. Window clipped over that whole assembly, switches all pushed into their holes, and... align... and... press. No click. Ah. You can't close the case when the battery trays are inserted. Remove battery trays. Replace rubber hat that's dropped off. Replace switch that's fallen out again. Align. Press. CLICK!

Breathe an initial sigh of relief. Now for the real test. Insert batteries.

The display lit up and showed 12:00. Setting the time worked. Setting the temperature worked. Switching the mode to "timed" made the boiler fire up. Success!

Later this morning our plumber arrived to service the boiler and I told him the story. "You did well to get that back together," he said. "I've never seen one out of its case - I wouldn't know where to start."

"And they cost about £120 to replace."

A long, hard slog

Anyone who has been around the Internet for even a short while will be familiar with spam. Even after the well-publicised fall in spam in December of last year from its historic highs of around 80 billion emails daily, it still accounts for almost 80% of all email traffic, and signs are that it's on its way back up again, as new botnets compete to fill the gap opened up by those that have been shut down.

But this is all going on in your Inbox, right? And in the hidden wars over at your ISP, with ever more sophisticated spam filters that can get rid of 99% of the crap before you ever see anything?

That's what I thought, until I received a letter recently offering me longer harder erections. Yep - POSTAL spam. Incredible.

Sorry?

I was due a broadband upgrade before Christmas, but at the eleventh hour the upgrade was postponed owing to some technical glitch or other.

The email informing me of the delay was very polite, until it came to the final sentence.

"Sorry for any incontinence," they wrote.