With a lot of help from the wonderful Ms Curteis…

The bedroom is complete apart from buying the new mattress, duvets and sheets and buying, then clipping into place the TV cable (along with the phone cable).

The bathroom is complete apart from buying and hanging the shower curtain and either removing the old sealant and putting new sealant in its place or finding a way of removing the stubborn mould from the old sealant. I’d prefer the latter since removing sealant is a pain and putting new sealant in its place will be a right pain due to the large gap between the tiles and the bath. My dad recommends Cillit Bang and Sandra Skeldon recommends Dettox.

I fear Cillit Bang will attack the bath as well as the mould and being more environmentally unfriendly than sniffing my armpit.

We’ve also touched up the hall, including repainting all the doors and their surrounds.

Tomorrow (er, later today) I’ll venture forth to try to buy lots of stuff and take the first loads to be recycled.

Meanwhile I get to sleep in my bed, in my bedroom!

I footered about before tackling the bathroom because I knew it would be the mankiest part of the whole proceeding. The lounge and kitchen will take longer but they’re nowhere near as manky.

I started by trying to clean away the layer of brown/black mould on the ceiling. Uurrggghh! Some of this mank doesn’t shift, even when attacked with sugar soap and bathroom cleaner. I think I’ll let it dry tonight and then paint over it.

I then washed the painted walls, the sink and toilet and took a break before starting on the shower/bath area. First thing was to dismantle the shampoo stand so I could later clean behind it. Then I took down the shower curtain rail, dismantled it and cleaned the components. The utter worst was balancing on the edge of the bath, clean the grouting between the tiles above the bath. I don’t think the mank nestling in the angle between the wall and top of the bath will shift, so that’s going to be covered with opaque filler/sealer.

Tomorrow I’ll need to paint the ceiling, the windowsill and retouch the walls where paint has flaked away. I also need to buy a new shower curtain because the old one is ripped and manky past redemption.

I think that’s enough for today!

I’ve repainted the Mystic Mauve (light blue!) bedroom walls completely. There wasn’t enough Green Parrot to even begin to cover the other two walls, so I just rotuched the parts where a TV cable had gouged paint off the wall.

I realised I didn’t have a hope of replacing the connector on the TV cable that goes from the lounge to the bedroom so I decided to replace it. Removing the old one destroyed 4 of the cable-clips that held it in place, so more will be needed, along with a 15-metre TV cable so tenants can place a TV almost anywhere in the bedroom.

I wonder if DIY stores will be open tomorrow. Meanwhile time to eat, put some furniture back in the bedroom and then attack the mank on the nathroom walls and ceiling. Uurrgghh…..

Bedroom floor is swept.
Bedroom walls have been washed with sugar soap, rinsed and are now drying.
Bedroom floor has been mopped and is now drying.

From what I can see, one of the walls I feared needed repainting doesn’t. However I was too energetic in a few spots and so some bits will need touched up. I’ll make a final judgement in daylight tomorrow.

Meanwhile time to curl up with Inspector Rebus and the Pismo, working out how much I’ve spent on what this year.

Back from the pub, I phone a friend. In the middle of the conversation, I notice that my washing machine has hardly got through the program I set off just before I went out. Switching off at the mains, then on again and restart doesn’t help. I think a fuse may have blown but the plug is right behind the machine and getting it out is a 2-person job.

So I return to the attack on the bedroom. Removal of the dust reveals patches of nasty sticky stour on the floor. I’m at a loss to explain them: suggestions please. So I will need to wash the floor as well as the walls.

Meanwhile I have an excuse for not washing!

My dad’s subscription to Norton Anti-Virus had just expired. He was advised to buy the latest version, rather than simply renewing his subscription. So he handed me the new box of Norton installers and asked me to uninstall the old version, then install this.

Uninstalling is no problem. Installing the new Norton Internet Security (Anti-Virus plus firewall) goes smoothly. So does live-updating to the very latest set of virus definitions, etc.

Next in the packet is ‘Norton GoBack’. It appears to enable you to take your hard disk back in time to just before you did something fatal – a very nice idea but one in which I just don’t believe. Unless it makes multiple, date-stamped, on-the-fly duplicates of all your files, which appears not to be the case, how can it know what to restore? I consult with dad and on the basis that we’re not sure that it is a bad thing and trusting Norton to do things at least tolerably well, I install it. It goes OK, apart from demanding installation of .NET.

Finally, there’s Norton Ghost, which appears to do a very similar thing to GoBack but goes back to user-defined recovery points. The restart after installation is a nightmare. It spends forever ‘removing old GoBack’ data from the hard disk, then gets as far as trying to display dad’s desktop, then hangs. Restarts don’t help. All I can do is restart, use the grace period before Windows boots to choose not to invoke GoBack, then continue the Windows boot and uninstall Ghost and GoBack. The PC’s boot is now much slower, I’ve spent 4 hours on this installation, at least two of which were waiting for Ghost to do things to GoBack data and engendered a big yucky Norton icon on the system tray.

I eventually braved the Birmingham experience: the Pismo and I arrived in the Bullring on the 28th December.

The vodaphone salesperson in their ‘business store’ couldn’t have been more helpful. She got me a 3G card and software CD, discussed the issues with me and then we started to install it. The instructions on the leaflet were “Insert the CD, then double-click the Mac installer in the window that appears…”.

No window, no sign of the installer anywhere on the CD after 30 minutes of manual and spotlight searching. The CD only contained PC software (which is the reason for this entry’s tag). So an end to that visit.

I then went to the AppleStore to consult with their ‘genius bar‘ about whether 3G cards had ever bene known to work in macs. The genius I spoke with said that vodaphone’s offering did work: they’d omitted the mac software from their installer CDs but it was available on their website. He’d installed it for a customer that week.

The subgebius was ignorant of all things Pismo-ish but his colleague overheard my questions and recommended I try Newertech for a replacement battery

I now have the installer on the mac but am still wondering whether the line rental and cost per megabyte make this worthwhile. If I can find a modem cable for my battered but brilliant Nokia 3310 and a modem script, I think I’ll be satisfied.

(from 22nd December)
My dad has BT’s ‘Broadband Basic’ service. I phone BT to ask about upgrading to a service that can be used with a router.

The first BT-serf I speak with tells me that their lowest-cost but router- and mac-friendly option is ‘BT Broadband option 1’. It’s the same cost as Basic but with a higher download limit. I ask whether there’ll be any changes to my dad’s service apart from this, i.e. will his email address stay the same? The BT-serf doesn’t know so passes me onto one of her colleagues. He doesn’t know either and passes me on again, to “Mark James” who assures me that it’ll all go fine and that there’ll be no interruptions to Dad’s BT service.

Mr James asks dad to confirm that he’s happy for this changeover. Dad does so: he and I are both happy that it costs no more and, apart from being passed a couple of times until I actually get to speak to the operator who has use of the BT braincell today, I’m pretty pleased that it appears to be going so smoothly.

I then ask the killer question: ‘this is purely a change of permissions and billing, not a hardware change?’
‘Yes’
‘So you can do it today?’
‘I’ve just commissioned the change’
‘And it will be done by…?’
‘3rd January’

Maybe I’ve misunderstood the complexities of the task. Maybe BT are just covering their backsides. (Better not to promise something unless you know you can achieve it.) But 14 days … ? I end the conversation politely and walk away trembling… This means I can go back to Scotland for Hogmanay and to rent out my flat, then bring my router back here, rather than buying a new one for Worcester, but if BT stuff up, I’ll be in Scotland when they do and not due back here for at least a fortnight to sort out any mess which BT create but for which I’m ultimately responsible.

Before that, I walk into the vodaphone shop on Worcester’s High Street. I tell them that I’m interested in upgrading my contract to get a treo handset. (Even though I don’t like keyboards on Palms, I think it’ll be the best way to stay online while I’m in India.)
‘Sorry, we’re a “High Street” shop. For this product, you need to visit one of our business customer shops.’
‘Where’s the nearest?’
‘Birmingham Bull Ring’
For those of you who are lucky enough never to have been there, Birmingham is the UK’s second-largest city. It’s far better than London, principally because Brummies are on the whole decent folk with quaint accents who (at least until recently) make things. However, it’s still a concrete shit-hole, of which the Bull Ring is the epi-smegging-bastard-bollock-features-centre. Think of the Wellgate magnified by carcinoma to fill all of Dundee. No chance!

However, the vodaphone person was very helpful. He tells me that my current, much-travelled and apparently bomb-proof Nokia 3310 will work in India and just about everywhere I intend to visit. He also tells me where I can buy a battery for it. So kudos to him but sucks to his employers.

Sucks too to Carphone Warehouse who tell the same story.

This is what I have to do to get Mycelium Mansion rented out:

• tell my bank to refund money they owe me and set up a savings account for the majority of my redundancy payment
• clean bedroom & repaint at least 1 wall
• clean bathroom & retouch paintwork where damp has hassled it
• get new shower curtain
• clean lounge & retouch paintwork where I’ve hassled it
• clean kitchen & retouch paintwork where I’ve hassled it
• clean hall & retouch paintwork where loft ladder has hassled it
• replace lounge curtains
• clean and hem kitchen curtains
• give stuff back to to folk I’ve borrowed it from
• sort my paperwork. I have a huge filing box full of bank statements, etc. It’s all filed by type but there’s a lot of out-of-date stuff and the types could be grouped much better.
• check loft
• find a tenant or get a letting agency to do so
• deal with any effects of the flat being let on the mortgage, buildings insurance and my relationship with the housing association who own the rest of the building
• sort contents insurance because most of my stuff is at my parents and the rest will be in the care of a tenant
• create an inventory

So far I’ve just about emptied the bedroom – only the TV and two chests of drawers to go, then I’m going to the pub for lunch.

I’m writing this on Thursday 22nd at 1pm. I have no idea when it will be posted because my parents’ broadband is the cheapest deal BT offer: it’s fixed so I can’t put a router in place of the BT-provide ADSL modem. There are mac drivers for this modem but I can’t be bothered moving the slaptop into my parents’ study and guddling with my dad’s cables. So later today I’ll talk to BT and get them to upgrade the service, then buy a wireless router and get all the computers in the house online properly as follows:

• my mum’s 300 MHz blueberry iBook wired into the router in the study
• my dad’s PC wired into the router in the study
• my Pismo wirelessed into the router
• my sister’s powerbook 2300c wired into my Pismo while both are on my desk. This might be a challenge because it runs OS 8·1 and I’m not sure if OS has TCP/IP networking. When the 2300c migrates to my sister’s room, I’ll string a cable from it to the study.

My Quicksilver is in its box in the loft and will probably stay there until I have a place of my own. Poor bugger will end up hating me for spending most of 2006 in a cold box. I wonder if my dad will notice if I substitute his PC for a real computer?

Meanwhile, as you can see, I’ve successfully migrated to Worcester. The drive was easy (at least for me) and I think Ian was happy with it. We lost a bit of time stuck behind traffic on the A68 but were able to pick up his kit from Catterick without any drama and the tool on down south. I dozed through most of Yorkshire – it’s huge – and almost before I knew it we were pulling off the M5 into Worcester. Total journey time around 8 hours 30 minutes for 400 miles, using £70 of diesel.

Not long after arrival, I went with dad to meet mum, Susan, Patrick (one of mum’s pupils) and Taryn (his wee sister) from a pantomime at the local theatre. While waiting for them, I was called by Louise and was still nattering with her when mum and Sue emerged from the theatre. Patrick and Taryn were shy and incredibly polite. I could learn from them!

Yesterday was unpacking day. I think I started around 9 am and had most of my kit packed away, washing in the machine and the Pismo as near to up and running as it can be without internet access by about 8 pm. This included building the great wall of Bruce-stuff in the loft, rationalising the use of drawers in the room here (I must remember that it’s not just mine: Ian has as much right to use it as I do), packing a book case with only the essentials (installer CDs, blank media, movie media and reference texts and re-learning how to fit into family life. So far no bust-ups!

Also yesterday, my mum’s new car arrived. It’s an exact replacement for the car that was totalled a few months, except it’s a pleasant red rather than the mundane silver-grey. Even better, her cheque from her insurers arrived this morning so she can refill the hole in her savings she dug to buy the car yesterday. The only unfinished part of this episode is that the insurers wouldn’t pay out the full replacement cost of the old car. So her solicitors are about to start legally working over the clown who wrote off her car for the ‘missing’ £1000. I hope the legal bill doesn’t erase the gains.

Just now I’m about to go into town with Ian and dad for some almost last-minute christmas shopping … waiting on my brother arriving.

Meanwhile I’m rediscovering why I like Roy Harper so much. I don’t think I can hear Stormcock too many times – there’s always something new there. However my current favourites are Glasto and The Monster on The Dream Society.

(Eventually posted via a Wifi network in Coffee Republic – who also serve soya milk. Yeehah!)