My hostess can touch-type without even looking at the screen. To test this, I declaimed the following as it came into my head:

How much is that doggy in the window??

The one with the belchily tail?
How much is the square root of an irrational number?
I do hope that surd is for sale.

She was looking at me all the time. Her only mistakes were the repeated question-mark and double-return at the end of the first line.

I’ve already lost count of the times I’ve had to correct my typing in this entry.

The perils of moving in…

Part 1
We have no normal broadband, pending our chosen telecoms company pulling their fingers out of their collective orifice and reconnecting us. Then we’ll be able to get our ISP of choice to supply broadband. The relief in all of this is that SIOJ (my MacBook Pro) has just accepted that it does indeed have a mobile broadband dongle in its USB port and will connect to the interweb. Until about 10 minutes ago, my hostess’s Powerbook G4 would connect via the dongle but SIOJ wouldn’t.

Part 2
When my hostess bought this flat, a minor part of the deal was we kept the white goods, including a not-too-old-looking washing machine. I emphasis ‘looking’ because the machine’s drum came off its bearings the first time we used it. So we hied ourselves to John Lewis to purchase a brand-spanking new one. John Lewis offered delivery, installation and removal of the old one as part of the deal. So I arranged to be in the flat today to receive the new beastie.

At this point it’s worth knowing that the only water stopcock in the flat turns off the water to not just this flat but to the three above us as well. Now there’s power!

When the John Lewis folk arrived, I turned off the water and ran the taps to drain the system so that they wouldn’t get a soaking when they disconnected the old machine. However, they took one look at the place where the old one was and refused point-blank to install the new one. Their reason was that the old one had been connected to the water supplies by extension pipes and they weren’t allowed to install except directly onto the mains supplies. ‘No problem’ I said. ‘I’ll disconnect the old one, then you can take it away.’ So I grabbed a washing-up bowl, held it under the connections between the old machine’s pipes and the extension pipes and undid the standard fittings. The John Lewis-ites then picked up the old one and took it away, apologising for not being allowed to do their job because they weren’t plumbers and promising that my hostess would get back the £25 she’d paid for the installation.

About this point I noticed that the new machine only had a cold-water input. The old machine had had both hot- and cold-water inputs so I was left with a fateful choice: either keep the whole building’s water supply off or turn it back on and flood this flat. I also realised that electicity had reached the old machine via an extension cable whose outer sheath was missing in places. Water and electricity isn’t that good a mix. So I really couldn’t care less about the £25 and was rather glad to see the back of the unhelpful deliverers. As the saying goes, ‘if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the precipitate’ and who needs that all over the place?

So I thought I needed a plumber to come round and rapidly cap the hot-water supply. (The cold one could of course be connected to the machine.) At this point, the above-mentioned lack of internet became an issue – I couldn’t google for Edinburgh plumbers. However, I could phone someone who did have the internet: my dad. (I have a jPhone, I could have googled on it, I realise now but consternation appears to have fuddled me.) While dad was twiddling, I started to apply thought – or at least curiosity to the issue. The extension cables disappeared into a wooden home-made cabinet fixed to the wall. I found I could lift the lid off it and trace the extension cables back to the mains supply. And much to my relief the mains supplies each had their own wee taps. I turned them off, then restored our neighbours’ water-supply for lo! I am a benevolent weevil.

Meanwhile my dad had been googling away and had found plumbers within half a mile of here. He’d also discovered that while gas is a third of the price per energy-unit than electricity but most makes of washing machines only have cold-water inlets. (This has boggled both of us. Surely it would be sane for washing machines to get whatever hot water they need from gas-heated boilers. If the hot water is too hot, surely it’s not beyond the wit of Miehle, Bosch, etc to dilute a suitable amount of hot water with cold water and hence use the minimum amount of cost/energy? After all, most modern heating systems involve combi-boilers [such as the one in this flat] which heat water on demand, rather than heating up a tank of water which is then left to go cold if it’s not used straight away. I can’t believe that two-thirds of the heat will be lost between the boiler and the machine. [Well, maybe I can in this flat!])

So now the wave-form of the above moral dilemma collapsed into a two simple questions:

1. do I connect the new machine directly to the mains, or shove the new machine into the under-stairs cubby where the old machine had been and continue to use the extension pipes?
   Leaving the machine where it is now takes up a lot of utility-room floor area but actually frees more floor area that had been inaccessible behind the old one. Putting the new machine back into the under-stairs cubby would necessitate continued use of the extension pipes and would risk scratching the sides of the new machine.>
2. who can permanently cap off the hot-water supply so that I don’t have to rely on a wee tap?
   I have a potential solution to this one: I’d also phoned my hostess’s piano teacher because she was likely to be in, likely to know decent trades-folk and had a brain. She suggested that her husband (who also has a brain and a wicked sense of humour) could do the job, having done the same sort of thing several times. At the very least, he’d be strong enough to help me move the machine into the cubby if my hostess decided on that option.

So now I have tidied all of the stuff that had been in the utility room into the I-don’t-know-where-it-goes-yet-atorium, mopped up the drips, installed hanging-rails in the wardrobe , removed an unwanted mirror from the bedroom wall, got back onto the interweb, written up notes from a visit by a sparky (but that’s another story).

And a big thank-you to my dad for being such a star!

Now I’m comparing the merits of Lochranza (a blended whisky from the Isle of Arran distillery) and Black Bush (Bushmill’s blend of their own grain and malt whiskeys) brought by my hostess who was in Belfast this week. So far the Antrim contender is ahead on points…

On Monday, my hostess took me to an wine and cheese evening at a church on York Place. My hostess had been invited by her boss, a Director-General in the Scottish Government and a stalwart of that congregation.

No matter that I don’t eat cheese, do not recall ever encountering pleasant-tasting wine and am an atheist (as is my hostess).

During the evening, I was introduced to a Scottish chief constable and we shook hands. I managed not to incriminate myself and we moved on.

On the bus home, I phoned my parents to tell them about the evening. I told my my dad that I’d shaken hands with a chief constable. Without any pause, he replied ‘did you count your fingers afterwards?’

I fell about laughing. Dad, that was bloody fantastic and I love you for it.

Today I ventured North on an overcrowded train to meet my hostess at Kingussie. (She was on her way back from Torridon and other places in the far west.)

We stopped at Newtonmore to watch the Waltzing Waters.

I wouldn’t recommend going up there just to see it, but if you’re in the area anyway, it’s sufficiently amusing to while away an hour.

Never, never, never let users tell you what to do.

A typo when entering a URL lead me to this.

Did palms have internet connectivity in 1999? Probably not but this is vaguely interesting.

Would you really want to embarrass your friends in an online, public, forum about a pizza-debt?

My hostess and I are currently minding her piano-teacher’s younger two boys while the teacher is on a course and her husband has taken the oldest boy sailing.

The boys we’re minding are happily playing with plastic spiders so I started on the sub-task of trying to sort the older boy’s PC. (It’s in a bad way and beyond my waning powers.) I pulled out my new laptop to look something up and then cursed because I hadn’t asked the piano teacher for her wireless network password.

It turns out that my cursing was premature and un-necessary. The new laptop is two weeks old and has never been to this house before. However, my Pismo laptop and jPhone have been. Also, before I erased Pismo’s hard disk last week, I synchronised it with my dotmac account and then synchronised the new laptop with dotmac so it could learn all my calendars, contacts, etc.

In the process, it also picked up all the passwords I had locked up in my ‘keychain’: this set included the wireless network password and so I’m able to bore you with online inanities as they happen!

I’ve now been summoned to go cycling up and down the boys’ drive…

I’m rather emotional about this and this.

Sorry there’s been a delay in posting this – I’ve been out of the country – but there is good news. On the 15th of April, dad sent me the following text:

Axis have backed down. No severance charge & incorrect charges to be credited to my account.

Huge thanks to folks out there for advice and encouragement.

I’m currently in Worcester, taking a break from working through the following tasks: