BOFHJournal - February 2010

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January's Journal

08/02/2010 [14:25] An early entry today. This is because I'm off shortly to see the Tax Man (or as it may be, Woman) in a few minutes to work out just what the hell is going on with my tax code for next years (April 2010-April 2011). I've got all the documentation I can find as well as two proofs of identity and my actual National Insurance Card (something I've never ever needed before in the 'flesh' as it were). More on that tomorrow when it's all hopefully sorted. The bathroom work done last week has been 50% successful. The toilet cistern no longer leaks but the drain trap in the sink still does so we're having our new best plumber friend back on Thursday to completely replace the plugging mechanism with something which doesn't suffer the same issue. This weekend gone Kris and I blitzed the house in preparation for friends visiting and staying the night after a big meal out with lots of people, only for them not to be able to make it due to illness. It did mean that we had an awesomely clean house though so having run another 5K race beforehand we felt perfectly justified in not doing much else for the rest of the day. The meal in the evening was great (having already paid for it out of money left over from the Salcombe holiday we'd all been on in 2009) even if the kareoke after we'd finished was almost enough to bring on indigestion. Sunday, being our last full day together before probably some time in mid-June (me visiting Kris in the States notwithstanding) we spent relaxing, catching up with some rather good television we'd been saving up to see together and cooking an amazing leg of lamb. Basically, close to the perfect day (although there are many variations on that both more and less energetic). I think that's everything to report at the moment. I'm back erging this evening, Kris continues to work on her dissertation and write packing lists and we have climbing, a date out and lots of quiet time together still to go before she leaves very early on Friday morning. As soon as she's gone I intend to start counting down to when I go over to visit (although I may go more than once depending on how long she's over there for, and then there's what happens if she gets the job) and blocking out segments of time to do small but important bits of DIY to the house which will be perfect for filling up the quiet evenings and weekends that I'll have for the next little while. I will keep busy, productive and useful, especially as whatever happens the house needs to be in excellent shape for the autumn.

05/02/2010 [16:50] Tentative yay! Kris rang at around 11:00 this morning to tell me that the wonderful new plumber (here's hoping he stays wonderful) has fixed and/or dealt with all the issues we'd written down on the bit of paper we'd both be noting issues down on. Hurrah! This could be the last you have to hear about it all. Double hurrah! Lunchtime was another 8km run with the person I'm helping train for the London Marathon trailing behind me slightly the whole way around. Somehow, despite it feeling slower we seemed to have clocked her in at the same speed per mile as Wednesday. We'll have to see what Monday brings, especially as it reckons she ran further today over exactly the same course. Well, 50m further, which I really can't believe. I've been struggling to get my Firefox 3.6 working with all the plugins I have at the same time as helping a web developer find out why every time his script runs the development Xen box he's working on has a sudden onset of OOM (out of memory). Both seem to have been solved through dilligent work and brute force on my part which means there's no real reason for me to still be here. Have a good weekend! I intend to spend it running (tomorrow morning) with Kris, enjoying a mostly free meal with friends, brunch with Kris and some good friends on Sunday and then a little more time with Kris. Monday is work and Tax Man day. I really don't care how the tax thing works out (unless I'm lumbered with more tax to pay than right now), I just want it sorted. Oh, and the hole in the back of the house is now full of expanding foam. I imagine someone'll come along on Monday to slice it smooth and plaster over it.

04/02/2010 [16:55] It looks like the work done to the house yesterday was pretty neatly done. Concrete cut back, edging put in, gravel laid down and soil dug away from the house, big crak repointed and cracked bricks replaced. The guys even filled in my apparently useless vent in the rear of the house. Of course this meant that they shoved the pipe inside the vent back into the house in a small explosion of plaster but one of them's come over for the first of two trips to fill the hole with expanding foam in preparation for coming back early next week to slice off the overflow and then skim some plaster over the top. This is good as I needed to break out the paint for that wall again anyway to go over the water staining from when the gutters overflowed a few months ago. I was waiting for the wall to dry fully, that's why I didn't do it sooner. Honest. We've got the new plumber coming tomorrow morning. I've 'authorised' Kris to be as nice as she wants to him (within reason, even if he may be making everything better again and saving the house from slowly flooding and helping make sure the money I spent on the bathroom wasn't a total waste). I imagine there will be offers of tea/coffee and her chocolate and carrot torte (which is truly fabulous). Work today has been fairly OK. I didn't have to make lunch as one of our longest-serving staff members had his retirement party today. I've done some patching written some documentation and caught up on some newsgroups and tech blogs and things. I think I should go home and see some more of Kris. There's a Thursday tonight. It's the day after Groundhog Day, but I still think we should watch the Bill Murray classic.

03/02/2010 [15:45] We had the builders arrive this morning at about 08:00 to do the work to the back of the house which should help lower the damp problems affecting the house a little more. I think I mentioned that the concrete 'patio' which had been laid for the house behind mine when mine was being extended actually came up above the damp proof course in some places thus leading to cold and slightly damp brickwork when the weather was bad. Well, they were here to deal with that as well as hopefully slap some waterproofing on some other bits, scrape out and repoint the major crack in the rear wall and replace some bricks which the crack had gone through rather than round. I'm going to head home in about 30 minutes to catch them before they go and make sure everything looks OK. They're going to have to come back to deal with some minor damage they did to the inside of the house as they filled in an unncessary vent but I don't think that's going to be an issue (at least I hope it isn't). Kris, as per, has done a sterling job of dealing with the builders but I need to be there to, you know, deal with my own house now and again as it's really not her job (no matter how brilliant she as at it). I've been trying to log and have dealt with a failed hard disc with the company who supplied the kit. Unfortunately despite them doing a complete audit (with their personnel) last week all of our details seem to have vanished from their system. Every single serial number, all our addresses and our representative persons (like me and my team) have vanished. Unhelpful. I just hope we get a replacement disk out before another one fails. Damn, now I'm on hold when I need to start preparing to leave.

02/02/2010 [17:25] Toilet's leaking again. We've resorted to turning off the water to it and emptying (flushing) the cistern at night to make sure it doesn't soak the floor while we sleep. Hopefully Kris had a call from the replacement fitter and plumber this afternoon when she got back from working in town and then having lunchtime burrito with me. If not, well, he's still apparently due out to see things on Friday. Here's hoping anyway. In other news the other work to the house is apparently going to take place tomorrow. This is good. Kris dosed me up with decongesting thingies and dripped other things on my pillow last night and I honestly think I had the best night's sleep I've had in about a month. And today I think I've only sneezed three times and blown my nose twice. This may be the shortest-lived cold in recorded history. It's a shame we're not going climbing this evening on account of our driver being ill and Kris' wrist being a bit painful from the bike fall she had on Saturday morning. We've opted to have our date tomorrow evening rather than tonight given the weather. I hope this turns out to be a good idea. I'm sure we'll have a wonderful time at home tonight anyway. I've managed to solve my weird warning error deprecation warning thingy on the RHEL5 servers which were exhibiting it. It turns out it was all do to with shared libraries and Oracle and LD_LIBRARY_PATH. It took me a while and it required the use of strace (which I guess was cool to do) but hopefully it's all sorted now. No, I have no idea why it happened. Anyway, home time I think.

01/02/2010 [17:00] The year is no longer new. We're into the second month where everything starts to settle down and get serious. Serious things which have happened since last I spoke is that Kris and I discovered another issue with leaking things in the bathroom (leaking pipe in the sink), the loo cistern which we thought we'd fixed and therefore told the fitter we didn't like not to come today is still leaking (luckily only very very slightly) and the Tax Man has really confused me with regard to how much tax I may or may not owe for the tax year 2010-2011. I have arranged for an appointment next Monday afternoon to Talk Over all the documentation I have in an effort to try and get my PAYE reset to the normal, standard and completely unspecial tax code that most people have. This weekend was pretty good actually. Saturday I did lots of little tiny house DIY things including finally putting the first coat of the actual colour we want in the bathroom and doing some filling (sanding to come). It feels like every single floorboard creaks in the house at the moment, every crack is huge and every problem is massive and insurmountable. I'm probably not helped by the lack of sleep I'm getting at the moment and the variety of other things on my mind right now. Saturday morning Kris and I cycled out to take part in a regular-from-now-on 5km run at a local park. I managed to get a little lost owing to finding myself in a hole between packs of runners and ended up doing about 860m less than the full distance. I wasn't the only one though so there're plans to make the signage better next week. We'll go and run it again before I head back to rowing again and Kris heads back across the Atlantic. It'll be there whenever we have a free Saturday morning, which is cool. Sunday was much more relaxed. We'd have cycled somewhere but the snow from the previous day and the thick frost was going to make the roads just a little too 'exciting' for us so we opted to stay in, do housework, bake cakes and generally be moderately achieveful. I have to say Kris is just the most awesome person ever. There's too many things I could tell you with regard to what she does for me and my life. I'm not going to go into them because of that and because some of them are wonderful and personal. Actually, I will tell you one thing; she handled dealing with the whole bathroom issue(s) stuff today after I had a bit of a minor meltdown with regard to all the things I feel are on my plate at the moment. But there's so much more to it and her than that. And that's why she's Just That Wonderful. Anyway, I should go home now as I seem to have developed a torrential cold (yes, that means exactly what you think it does) after returning from my 6km lunchtime run. Maybe it was getting up early this morning after a poor night's sleep so I could come to work, get my payslips and then cycle over to the Tax Office to spend a fruitless hour finding out that I needed another hour's worth of appointment to... never mind. I'll just tell you when it's all over. Like Kris did when she emailed me just past 09:00 this morning to say she'd Handled Things with the bathroom people. Totally awesome, that girl.