Author: Steve

It’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick

Its always been a bit of an odd phrase really hasn’t it?

It’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick

I mean why would you compare anything to a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?

Well I now CAN compare things to being poked in the eye with a sharp stick because the other day I did just that.

I was tidying up the back garden yard when I managed to somehow twang a branch up into my face which led to eyes full of leaf mould and a sharp stick poking me in the eye. My right eye to be precise.

So I went into the house and washed my hands and rinsed off the leaf mould and looked at my eye. Well it was still intact and I could see through it and everything was OK apart from the fact that it hurt like hell.

So I decided not to go to casualty immediately. I was due to drive to Birmingham the next morning and the alarm was set for 6am. At 6:40am I was in Cheltenham General A&E waiting to see someone. I was still there at 8:10am despite there being no-one else waiting. My eye hurt a lot and I was convinced that there was still something stuck in there

They put numbing drops in (niiiice!!) and then Fluorescein eye stain and they checked and said that there was no foreign matter in there but I did have a nice hole and a cut in my cornea and some scratches

Treatment? Sorry there isn’t anything we can do. Try some non prescription antibiotic eye ointment which will make things slippier and less likely to irritate. For the pain.. no, no nice eye drops, just use normal pain killers.

It will start to get better in about 24 hours and take up to 7 days to heal and things like wind will make it hurt.

It does, and so does bright light, especially headlights after dark.

But its healing now and just itches from time to time now.

So now the next time something bad happens I really can say  Well It’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick and I know exactly what I’m talking about

Alone

Its very odd how you don’t realise just how much you miss someone until they are not there.

Kathy flew out to Maine on Saturday to spend Thanksgiving with her family. Its the first Thanksgiving since her dad died and she just had to be there for her mom. I usually go over but the cost of the tickets and things at work got in the way. As it turned out I had no job and some money so we could have tried to get a ticket at the last minute but we’d no-one to look after the cats and so I didn’t go.

Saturday wasn’t that bad because the morning was taken up with driving over to Heathrow and seeing her off and in the afternoon I helped my brother move a sofa bed – we were going to use his car and his roof bars but instead we slipped in into the back of the 95 Estate and delivered it to the Sea Scouts.

Then we went to The Greyhound and had a couple of pints which were both very good. You dont often see Dorothy Goodbody’s Wholesome Stout very often and so Nick just had to try it.

After that we stuck our head in at The Sudeley Arms which has been going through a rough patch recently, where we had a perfectly decent pint of Pride.

Then we made our way over to The Railway to meet up with the rest of Richard’s Stag Night party. We had a couple of beers there before heading to the Everest and then onto The Swan for a few final beers.

So Saturday sort of passed in a haze and Sunday I didn’t really do a lot because I was just tired. But last night it started to hit me and going to bed alone with just the cats keeping me company / waking me up, really got to me.

I had a lie in this morning and then spent some time tidying up the TV/HiFi cabinet in a vain attempt to rationalise the wiring in there. I repaired one of the doors which suffered from an unexplained breakage when mum and dad last stayed here. Not sure what happened but hopefully the glue will hold.

Kathy then phoned to chat and it really hit home then. It probably would be so bad if I was working but I’m not and I didn’t really have the motivation to do stuff today and it all piled up on top of me. Of course I know I can’t just sit round all week. I’ve got stuff to do round the house and if the weather holds up I might venture into the back “garden” and get rid of the leaves and some of the weeds.

This Hoover Sucks

Back in 2002 Kathy and I bought a Hoover AAA 140 washing machine.

Hoover, a good name, so its going to be a good washing machine. Might last as long as my parents Hoover washing machine (aeons) or their Zanussi (not quite as long but still pretty good).

How wrong we were. Within a couple of years it needed its drum casing replace because the idiot designer at Hoover (who probably didn’t even have a degree in anything but stupidity) decided that they would use plastic for the outer drum casing and then they would secure the concrete ballast weights to it using rather thin semi self-tapping screws/bolts with no locking plates.

So what happens over time is that the bolts start to vibrate loose and then the concrete starts bouncing and suddenly one day there is a big bang as one or more of the bolts shears and the concrete flaps around inside the washing machine.

So the engineer comes and fits a new drum which has bigger mounting bolts and bigger mounting lugs and metal lock plates to stop the bolts vibrating loose.  So I guess some engineer looked at the original design and having hit the first idiot round the head a bit came up with a new design.

So its been pretty OK since then, well apart from the the fabric conditioner tray syphon not really working and the tray fills up with gloop and you have to keep taking the soap tray out to clean it and then of course the spring loaded handle falls off because its made of plastic that is about as robust as a CD Jewel case hinge.

Then the other day it started spewing water all over the floor.

So I check the obvious things, I look for loose pipes, I look for loose seals on the outer drum, I check that the door seal is OK. Everything is fine.

This morning I get a big torch and I really have a good look because frankly at the moment I do not want to have to replace the machine.

I find the problem.

The pipe from the soap tray that feeds water into the washer has a hole in it. Why does it have a hole in it? Well its simple – it has a hole in it because the pipe sits about 2mm away from one of the drum mounting springs so when the drum moves on the springs during washing it rubs against the pipe. So over time it wears a hole right through the pipe wall. Hello?? HELLO? That is not bad luck: its a shaped pipe – its in the only place it can go. This is lousy design pure and simple. Vibrating springs and rubber pipes do not go together… even I know that, so it looks like the curse of the idiot Hoover designer strikes again.

So Its all wrapped up in tape for the moment and I might just buy a new pipe (apart from the fact that you probably can’t get them) and then of course its just about impossible to get the pipe on and off the soap tray because there is a large block of concrete in the way which stops you getting both hands to the pipe (one holding the pliers that hold the spring clip open, and the other to move the clip up the pipe).

So yes, this Hoover sucks.

Things to do when you are unemployed

Well I’m still sort of offically employed : my last pay cheque arrives this Friday but I’m laid off.

So I’ve been using an old Toshiba Satellite SA30 laptop running Ubuntu and its OK but its only a 640*480 display and it was getting a bit unreliable. You know when the disk drive starting making twanging noises that its not a good sign.

So I went and bought a new Toshiba Satellite : a L300D-13S. Very nice, 3GB RAM 150GB HD, widescreen, AMD Turion X2.

All well and good but it comes with Vista Home Premium. What a pile of crap.

How can something like that take so long to boot up for Gods Sake. It takes forever to get to the password screen. It drove me mad, and dont even try to work out why applying system patches is rather like watching paint dry underwater.

So I decided to dual boot it with Ubuntu which at least uses the 64bit extensions rather than the 32bit Vista.

So I got that working after fighting with the partitioner and everything was fine. Until I booted back into Vista when the Wireless card didn’t work. Couldn’t get it working so I guessed I’d somehow screwed things up. Rebuilt it using the recovery DVDs which I’d made. Wireless came back for a bit then stopped again.

So I go round and round in circles. Ubuntu works fine on the Wireless. Vista works once then craps out on me each time.

So I dig round and what do I find. Its nothing I’ve done wrong. Its Vista being a total pile of shite.

I used WEP encryption with a 128 bit key on the home wireless. OK I know its crap but its better than nothing and the old 11b PCMCIA card in the SA30 didn’t like WPA.

Of course some moron at Microsoft screwed the WEP encryption on Vista and it looks like it just doesn’t work with 128 bit keys and truncates them at 64 bits. I did seem some advice that says “Upgrade to a Vista compatible wireless router”. I’m sorry? I end up buying a machine with an O/S that I have no choice over and now I’m told to upgrade my router to something that works with Vista because someone somewhere didn’t code something properly.

So I switch everything over to WPA and accept that I’ll have to use a cable to connect the old SA30 to get stuff off it.

Everything is fine until I really push the new laptop which then gets DNS failures and the only fix seems to be to restart the Wireless Access Point. So I drop back to WEP and it seems to be OK but of course Vista wont play. Then I manage to get the same problems under WEP. So I do some digging round and find that my new laptop is running IPV6 which seems to cause problems with the router.

So I turn off IPV6 on Ubuntu and its OK now so tomorrow I’ll put everything back on WPA and see if it goes wrong again.

OK so the Ubuntu stuff is not good – quite why it comes with IPV6 turned on by default I do not know but I’m sure it will be fixed soon. The router is old and I guess it can be excused not working very well. What is totally wrong is the fact that Microsoft can’t cope with WEP using 128 bit keys on Vista. OK I know WEP is broken  but that is NOT the point. WEP is a standard and once again Microsoft have decided that that they know better.

MOT

Well the 93 failed its MOT.

The exhaust is leaking in the flexi section so that needs replacing and the offside front road spring is broken. So that needs to be replaced, and of course you change them in pairs so thats £120 just for the springs then you need to add labour on. Its not just a small break either:

The missing bit of spring
The missing bit of spring

I’d actually found this on my brother’s drive way a few weeks ago and wondered what this rusty chunk of iron work was. Now I know!

So the plan is to bring the 95 back to life.

Worcester

We had a good day in Worcester yesterday. As it was quite some time since the Gloucester pub Crawl we’d decided that we needed to do another pub crawl because they’re such good fun. We were supposed to be going to Bristol but the train service was a complete mess and so we went to Worcester instead.

Worcester proved to be quite a good choice for a pub crawl. Paul has picked a set of pubs but we threw him off the rails from the start by finding a pub that he didn’t have on his list. But we got back onto his plan after that pub and he’d managed to find a good set. We made a couple of adjustments and found another pub that he didn’t have on his list which did 4 very good beers including a “custom” brew from Mavern Hills.

We decided to head back to Cheltenham and have a curry and when we got to Shrub Hill we found that the train we wanted didn’t actually exist on the printed timetable and it had been cancelled anyway. But they did put us in a minbus which dropped us as the top end of the Gloucester Road back in Cheltenham. We headed off to Maheks for a curry but it was closed so we went to the Everest where we had to wait for a while but the food was good. It says something about the state of the world when the waitress in the Indian Restaurant is Polish!

After that Nick and I headed home and stuck our heads in at The Sudeley Arms where we had problems getting a beer because they were “closed” at 10:50. It seems the Landlord and the Brewery are not seeing eye to eye on something. So it may be that this pub closes again only a few weeks after re-opening which would be a great shame

When Endowments go wrong

Back in 1993 I bought a flat in Cheltenham, a nice flat it was too. OK when I bought it it didn’t actually exist and was just a muddy swamp but I saw it being built. I stood in it when it was an empty shell with no internal walls and over the weeks I saw it grow from mud into a nice first floor one bedroom flat.

It cost £39,377 a tidy little sum in those days. I took out a mortgage with Barclays and the financial advisor “sold” me an Endowment policy to repay the mortgage. The premium was £51.56 a month and I was assured that this would pay my mortage off. All seemed well for the first few years, the first progress report showed that it was doing so well it would actually exceed the £39,377 I needed.

But then, like the wayward child who stops doing well at school and ends up staying out all night drinking, my policy went off the rails. A small excess turned into a small deficit, which turned into a bigger deficit.

By July 25th 2008 with 10 years left to run and having given them £9280.80 my policy had a value of £10,967.91

So I’ve paid them £9280.80 in installments and they have turned this into 10976.61 which means the wonderful people at Legal General, those people who know the stock market have increased my investments by 1687.11 in 15 years.

Over the course of 25 years I would have paid them £15,468 and the last estimate my Endowent could “at worst performance” figures produce a return somewhere between £14-15K.

So I’ve cashed it in today. I’ll take the money and stop pouring money down a hole. I would have been better off just putting £51.56 in a bank account every month for the past 15 years.

Someone, somewhere hates us

Early Friday morning (about 01:55) our car alarm went off.

I went down stairs and found that the windscreen had three holes in it. I deactivated the alarm and went and phoned the police and gave them all the details.

Got up in the morning and got a new windscreen booked for today.

Also booked a hire car because we were supposed to be going to Wigan for my parents Golden Wedding Anniversary.

Found that there is also a hole in the roof. The psychopath who smashed the windscreen also rammed a screwdriver or similar pointed object through the roof.

So I phoned the police and updated and did sort of say that as I’d phoned 999 in the middle of the night (which is what the police had told me to do) I was a bit surprised that no-one had been to see me yet.

Police came round and talked to the neighbours and one of them heard our alarm go off, heard a car door slam and saw a white car leaving the estate at speed.

So the scum who are targetting our car aren’t even locals.

Police want to know if we’ve upset someone. We haven’t as far as we know but as the previous residents of this house are still telling places like Morrisons Supermarkets that they live here when they are stealing petrol from them it wouldn’t surprise me if they’ve told someone they owe money to that they live here and we’re being picked on. So if you’ve got a grudge against a member of the Green Family who run pubs.. THEY DO NOT LIVE IN MY HOUSE AND THEY DO NOT DRIVE A SAAB 93.

Of course my insurance company are being total bastards. Tesco say that the two events although they are obviously linked are totally separate and so that is TWO claims. Each claim has a £300 excess on it and will wipe out 2 years of my no claims.  Taken separately they probably wouldn’t count as enough to write off the vehicle but together they would.

So come February I’m moving away from Tesco car insurance because they’ve frankly taken the piss with my car insurance once too often.

Oh No. Not again!

Those were the thoughts of the bowl of petunias in The HitchHikers Guide to Galaxy when it suddenly came into existance miles above Magrathea.

Oh No. Not Again was what my wife and I said when we came out of the house this morning to find that someone had vandalised the 93.

Not the windscreen this time.  Much more damage than that. They’ve taken a screwdriver to it by the looks of things.

The whole passenger side is damaged. A big deep scratch following the line of the front wheel arch, several scratches on both doors and a large scratch and a deep gouge on the rear wing. They’ve even taken the screw driver to the passenger door window and scratched that deeply and its special heat reflecting glass. As the car is metallic silver its not something I can patch up so someone will be picking up a very large bill, and knowing my insurance company who seem to find any excuse they can for not paying out for anything (I’m sorry – the sun came up this morning so we can’t pay out) it will be me picking it up.

The police will be coming round this evening to look at it but have already admitted that “There is nothing they can do to stop this happening again”. Well there is – they could actually start treating the scrotes round here as criminals rather than giving them a little slap on the wrists and saying “Don’t do that again”