May 2007 – Steve's Blog

A few days on the boat

Well if all goes to plan we are off to the boat on Thursday night for a few “relaxing” days away from work. I say relaxing because we haven’t quite decided how much to push. If the weather is lousy too hot me might not go far, if the weather conditions are just right then we’ll push on a bit.

Smokey is coming with us as are Bandit and Pixie because we can’t leave Smokey at home by herself due to her diet and Bandit and Pixie would just reduce the house to a complete wreck if we left them for 4 days.

Here’s a picture of Bandit and Pixie looking innocent:

Cable

When we first moved into the house back in 2002 there was a Telewest cable installation. We had it re-activated and used it for a bit. When we came to re-arrange the living room we asked Telewest how much it would cost to move the isolator box. They told us it would cost approx £100.

So we told them where to go and moved to Sky.

Sky installed the dish and everything was OK. Then over time the picture deteriorated. Sky came out and looked at the install – their response was basically “which idiot installed this – the dish is in the wrong place and the cable run is all wrong”. It was all ripped out and re-installed with the dish wedged right under the eaves and the picture got better.

That was a couple of years ago and the picture slowly deteriorated – blacks got very pixellated, signal went whenever it rained heavily, box kept crashing and rebooting.

So we ‘ve moved back to cable ((and having been told that I was “cutting off my nose to spite my face” by Sky I’ve no intention of ever using their services again)) … picture quality is spot on – no pixellation of blacks, no visible artifacts…. bliss.

We’ll probably take the dish and the box and see how well it works on the boat… will give better reception than the aerial! 😉

Smokey – a cat on a diet

This is Smokey – a middle aged Manx cat.

Smokey’s lifestyle seems to be based on that of Bagpuss and she loves nothing more to lie around all day doing nothing except eat, sleep and, of course fluff!

Anyway she was a bit overweight – OK so she was a lot overweight, like overweight by a couple of Kilos.

Today I took her along to her regular monthly weight check in out at the vets and she’s now under 5Kg : weighing in at a mere 4.9Kg.

The photo above was taken when I lived in my flat – which means its at least 5 years old now. She put on weight after that photo but now she’s much more svelte and I suspect she now weighs less than she did when the photo was taken.

Updated:

Here is a recent photo, taken when she reached her “target” weight:

Shes now decided that my side of the bed is one of the comfiest places to lie. The other is, believe it or not, on the back of the chair (often when I’m sitting in it)