Published on
February 14, 2010 in
Home.
One of the early lessons I’ve learned of house ownership is that small jobs seem to breed; some breeding into many small jobs while others produce mutated bastard offspring many times the size of the original job. After today the latter has now happened to me twice and it’s pushing me to the edge of despair!
The first time this happened was after having finished re-painting a wall in the kitchen, the paintwork began the bubble and with little encouragement began to come away from the wall leaving plaster as naked as the day it was skimmed on! It’s become apparent that after the kitchen was renovated by a previous owner the paint was applied too quickly after re-plastering and without applying a primer which would’ve provided a key for the paint to hang onto; and so the paint is coming away revealing lots of lovely mould from the damp that’s been trapped. On the bright-side, this problem could be a lot worse but the dark-side is that two rapidly and extremely decomposing bags of flour now indicate possible mould growing behind the kitchen units. These units will now need to be removed for the walls to be stripped of paint, primed and repainted and then the units can be reinstalled. This job will soon be photographically pinned to my personal definition of “Pain in the arse”.
Meanwhile upstairs a routine clean of the winter mould appeared a lot more pronounced that it should be, removing the wallpaper has now revealed a dodgily concreted-up flew from an old gas heater that was long removed which seems to be sweating behind the wallpaper, hence the mould. This will need repairing but I’m not yet sure how. In the mean time the wall has now been stripped to bare plaster. I never liked the wall paper anyway, it was pretty horrific, it was going to go but I was hoping it didn’t need to happen just yet as is life.
I won’t go into the leaky bathtub, that’s another bundle of fun I don’t even want to know about just yet…
Although I don’t do resolutions as such I do have some plans for this year..
I have not discussed some of these themes in my blog before, something that I might correct in the near future but if you follow my identi.ca/twitter feed they will sound familiar from my ramblings in the last few months!
I suppose to start with is Open University study which is now registered and paid for and starts in May. If all goes well this could be the start of a much longer programme of study, so long in-fact it scares me but I think will be valuable for developing myself in many ways both personally and professionally.
I plan to take my Python programming to the next level (or two) after achieving far more with it in the last few months than I ever could have dreamed. I have a bit of experience now writing command line programs in the good old black box but I can take this into new realms like GUI and Web development which I plan to do this year probably through PyGTK and Django, respectively. I may even contribute to an open source project for one of the many Python-powered applications I use frequently.
On Friday I resumed my piano lessons following a small hiatus over Christmas and my house move and by the summer I hope to be ready to do my grade one piano exam. It’ll be a lot of work but my teacher believes in me and assures me I’m learning very fast so who am I to argue!? I’ve upped my formal tuition to an hour a week which will at the very least ensure I have at least an hours’ practise a week even if I don’t have any more time to give to it.
I want to get outdoors more this summer, more time in the garden, more time riding my bike, more time walking up mountains, more time photographing the world. Now I live in an area that doesn’t suffer from permanent light and air pollution I may start doing a little astronomy, it’s a field that interests me a lot but I’ve never had the chance to pursue on my terms until now. I would also like to try starting a grape vine in my back garden, it’ll be a challenge but if successful could result in a new extremely limited edition organic northern wine in a few years time! It’s been done before so why can’t I??
I could go on but I’d just be setting up more things I won’t have time for. It’s been a shaky start to the new year which isn’t all that unusual but it’s improving and maybe, if I’m lucky, I might just achieve a few.
Here’s hoping.
Published on
January 27, 2010 in
Home.
When you’ve been spending a few hours familiarising yourself with ancestral family members and calculating ages from dates in the 18th century, then you look at your computer’s clock to check the time and see “2010″ at the end of it, you can’t help but be amazed you’re in the future! (xkcd was so right)
Because your database has corrupted, virtually every event in your family happened in Reddish, Stockport. You start to wonder whether Reddish actually contains an anomaly spewing time and space itself.
Browsing a census list for an 1841 prison (out of morbid curiosity) you see ages of 13 and 14 years old in-mates and babies born to prisoners only a few weeks old still with their parent, in prison. You wonder, where did society go wrong after this?
Going back to the 1700’s you see names become warped and contorted as your journey through time travels beyond the barrier of universal education and standardised spelling. You compare this with the average sentence written by a modern teenager and can see how there were 200 years of light where English made sense and worry that now we’re heading back into darkness..
Even years into your research it’s still surprising how infant mortality was so high it must’ve been a fact-of-life up until not really that long ago at all, so strange you can’t really get over it. You can’t imagine any 4/5 years olds your know just dying from “normal” causes now but it happened all the time, to almost every family.
It pains you that you owe years of work you’ve been saved from to a guy who still updates an immensely comprehensive and useful web site hard-coded in HTML 3.0 as it was when he started 15 years ago! How can any website that looks like it was a Geocities throw-back be so damn useful!?
You wonder whether in 200 years time someone will look you up in the census and plan your 2011 entry accordingly. Is it “Jedi” this time around or “Metal”?
Recent Comments