Catch Up and a Trip Down Memory Lane

Things are definitely looking up!

The garage is sound! No leaks!

The wall ... the one with the cracks in it ... this one in fact ...

Lower right of window

Upper right of window

... has almost dried out to the point where it could be reinforced with steel rods.

The bathroom, which wasn't originally on my "To do" list,  is about to be ripped out and new fixtures and fittings installed.

All-in-all I reckon nearly £4000 of my money has evaporated into those two projects.

Now, knowing everything is either finished or well in hand, I can

 

Now, let me take another of those trips down memory lane. Indulge me, if you will, as I recall an incident from my childhood.

It was in 1971 and I was 12 years old.

Memory is fickle and my recollections of this time are sketchy to say the least, but at 12 years of age I do recall that I very nearly committed suicide.

There are many ways of doing such a thing; many involve pharmaceutical product of one kind or another, arriving on low places at speed or firearms.

In my case it would have been suicide by Margaret Middleton.

Margaret was a big girl.

She stood a good five inches taller than I did and, in times of trouble, she was perfectly built for several people to hide behind.

One day, just after my twelfth birthday, a note was passed to me in class.

It read 'Meet me after school at the gates! Margaret'  

It was a note that struck fear into my heart and made me yearn for several hours of detention.

You see, Margaret always got her way and she was quick with her fists when she didn't. If she didn't get you, her two brothers would.

I spent all day in school telling my friends that she didn't scare me and that she'd have to wait until the world froze over before I'd go out with her.

But I was quaking in my boots!

I therefore decided that at the end of school I would run like hell across the sports field, climb the fence and take the long way home.

As I was halfway over the fence I heard a voice say "You little shit! I thought you'd leg it this way!"

It was Margaret!

She punched me!

Several times!

Then, to my surprise, she gave me a curly-wurly (a chocolate covered toffee bar) and told me that she only wanted me to get my best pal, Les, to stop sending her notes asking to take her out because she was going out with Tom 'Knocker' Powell.

It was like a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I felt like I was almost floating. I was in the clear!

Oh and the up-side of the story is that she gave me a handful of notes, all in the handwriting of my pal Les, which I was able to use for many weeks as a means to torture him.

But I was brought back to earth with a stern warning from Margaret.

She said "If I had wanted to go out with you and you'd run away from me like you just did, I'd smash you face in!"

Now that did scare me. After all, she'd just punched me in the nose and fattened my lip. I dreaded to thing what her version of a smashed in face looked like.

This is the first time that I have ever admitted that it was she, and not her brothers (as I told everyone it was), that beat me up.

I do so in the full knowledge that none of my school friends will be reading this ... I hope.

Blogging with the Speed of Light

I remember, as some of you no doubt do too, the days when a PC was a box with a slit in it and a monitor.

Those where the days of 700 odd megabytes of memory and no hard drive.

Days of constant disk swapping and slow processing which, never the less, made us proud because, back then, we were pioneers; we belonged to the few who ventured into new and promising future.

Now, having ditched the antiquated device which once masqueraded as my laptop, I have find myself once again at the cutting edge ... well, almost ... of home computing technology.

Please say hello to my new 2.7 Gigahertz Samsung!

Yes, yes.

I know you can't actually see it, but it is indeed there ... or here ... and performing like a dream.

47 second boot and ... hahahahahahahahaha! Sorry! I get excited! ... and I can access all the sites and do all the things that my old (deceased) laptop would not allow.

Happy?

Damned right I am!

So ... let's play catch, shall we?

The garage wall and roof:

Negotiations are underway for it's repair. It's going to be far more expensive that we first thought, but at least we are nearer to the job actually being done.
As for the wall ... we will wait for about six months to allow it to dry thoroughly before having it braced with steel rods.

The house roof:

I haven't mentioned this one yet, but we are getting that done too. Moss removed, guttering cleaned and firmly secured.

My car:

Well I have a new one, as I have already mentioned, but it is now mine ... ALL MINE!!!

The fence:

It's an on-going thing, I'm afraid. I have bought the remaining panels in order to complete the job, but the wind has saved me the trouble of removing the older panels by spreading them evenly (and in small pieces) throughout the neighbourhood.

Oh, there is so much more to tell and, no doubt one day I shall get around to reporting it all in detail.

But for now, I intend to try and find out how Windows 8 can piss me off even further.

It may (if reports from others are to be believed) be very good operating system but for an old DOS man like myself, it's going to be hard work.

Catch you later!

The Story So Far

It seems to me that my destiny is to be the ‘eternal sufferer’.

No matter what I do; what precautions I take, things are just meant to go wrong.

There was the long saga with my rust-bucket car (deceased), the fence (twice), the guttering on the house (I haven’t told you about that, have I?), the laptop (throws tantrums like a petulant teenagers) and my desktop PC (oldoldoldoldold!) and now the garage wall.

Let me tell you about that wall…

It is an old … very old ,,, crack in the brickwork that dates back more than fifteen years, which is as long as my wife has lived here.

It was never repaired properly (according to the surveyor) but was masterly disguised by someone with an artistic bent.  When the missus bought this place it had been made to look just like any other wall.

Now, after all this time a rather large leak in the garage roof has revealed this wall to be, in fact, a forgery!

Ok. It’s too late to run to the previous owner (long dead,I’m afraid) and punch him in the face, so we braced ourselves for the worst.

Our  garage has an outer and an inner roof. The inner is just a number of one inch boards sealed together and fixed above the joists supporting the whole roof.  Above that is the outer roof. This one is also made up of one inch boards but water proofed, leaded and tarred. It has a life span (so I’m told) of up to fifteen years.

Sadly, it would appear that that fifteen years has long since passed and our waterproofed roof has gone to ‘garage roof heaven’ allowing all of the roof boards to slowly soak up water.  It has taken a long time but now the water, seeking an escape route, has begun to destroy the previous owners artwork allowing us to see the damaged wall.

Quotes fro the repair work are coming in thick and fast!

The work the are specifying ranges from stripping the roof down to the rafters and totally re-roofing to simply applying a heavy duty one-piece rubber sheet.

The rubber sheet seems to be favourite price-wise but, on the other hand, for £1900 we could have a new roof.

What do you think?

To other news now …

You may have heard that snowflakes have been seen in Britain!

The ensuing chaos has been widely reported and once again made us (Brits) look like bunch of idiots.

        Snowflakes here,
        Snowflakes there,
        A Country in chaos,
        Every-f***ing-where!