helen-louise's journal

I have finally got round to uploading the pictures of the past few days.

Ever wondered what 120 years of dust looks like? On the left, accumulated dust and debris going back to 1881. On the right, a clean underfloor for comparison. Fri 27 October 2006, 22:23:00

I should, by the way, quite justifiably give major props to the Vax VS-191 Swift HEPA you can see in several of the photographs. Despite being designed as a normal household cleaner, it has coped admirably with many, many litres of rubble and rusty nails (seems funny to measure the volume of solids in litres, but whatever!), needing only an occasional emptying of the extension hose when it's become blocked by sheer quantity of unsquishable junk. We were going to buy or rent a specific workshop cleaner, but haven't needed to. I am ridiculously impressed, and considering writing a testimonial to the makers. Unfortunately, it's not suitable for use on hard floors, so we're going to have to buy a new vacuum cleaner. You can bet Vax will be at the top of my list.

The floor is still nowhere near done - it's half-laid in the front room upstairs. Realistic estimates suggest we should be able to finish it tomorrow night and then move furniture back into that room, ready to start on the bedroom on Wednesday. Realistic estimates also suggest if we work on it every single night, we might only have to sleep in the front room for a week before moving back into the bedroom. I haven't got as far as working out when we'll get the landing done, that's too far in the future! I realised today that it's Richard's birthday in 10 days, and I haven't got round to buying him anything yet - oh well!

I feel like I should post to say we're all still alive here. After five days of work, we have slightly less hole and slightly more floor. I was going to upload a bunch of photos of the Floor In Progress, but I think we've lost the little box that camera memory cards plug into, and I'm way too tired to annotate them anyway. My lungs are basically ok due to the amazing protective features of THE MASK, though I think I'll be cleaning black bogies out of my nose for weeks ;)

Currently wondering just how monogamous people manage to get anything done in their houses, let alone single people. It's taken both partners & me five days to do this much, and we haven't exactly been slacking off (they've been working from noon to 11pm every day, except Wednesday which was a crappy day for so many reasons - I've been here as and when inbetween work and menstrual gnomes). I think people who live alone and achieve major DIY projects must be superheroes!

Anyway: there is a damp Amazonian Alexa in front of me, and Richard's downstairs making coffee, and most of what I want to say won't make sense until the photos are online, so *yawn* *stretch*. We would appreciate people coming over to have a Furniture-Moving Party on Sunday afternoon/eveningish. Anyone who's feeling vaguely strong can come by & help us shift stuff. (Lots of it isn't heavy at all, just annoying, like bags of paperback books looted from the bookshelves before we moved them.) I will feed you! Shout in the comments here if you're coming to make sure I have enough of the right types of food.

I'm in a crap mood. It seems that the "spare" USB keyboard (that was originally intended to be the input device of the MythTV box which Richard started to build then gave up on) has finally broken. Now, it's not exactly surprising that it's broken, as I'm very clumsy and drop it on the floor several times per day - one of the reasons I have an external keyboard, as it's cheaper to buy a new keyboard than a new laptop - but it's bloody annoying timing - as it's way too hot to hold the laptop on my lap, and I'm too broke to buy another keyboard right now. So I guess I'll just have to not talk online much for a few days :/

Also went shopping for clothes today, and that always puts me in a bad mood due to all the looking at yourself in the mirror & resulting wrestling with body hatred that goes on. ( Blah - 'weight' 'loss' triggers maybe. ) I think even if you enjoy shopping for clothes, it sucks when you have no money and are putting it all on the credit card. Bah.

I hope that I will have money tomorrow. If not, I'll have a lovely three days at home on my own, without Richard, who's off somewhere "near Bournemouth" for the weekend, with £20 to my name. Oh yes, and I'm "supposed" to be getting some house work done. Meh!

Anyone want to do something on Saturday?

I knew I had more content yesterday.

So there I was, stirring up paint that had severely settled, and I had some lumpy bits to get rid of. Wandering into another room to grab some more newspaper to wipe it off on, I discovered that a Conservative Party election flyer had been put through our door, and David Cameron was grinning at me from the doormat. So I grabbed that and used it. Mr Cameron is now thoroughly pinked.

[Poll #707758]

I should also mention one of those funny if you know me things. I have a tendency to get distracted by anything with words on, including cereal packets and newspapers in languages I don't even speak. (Several times on trains elsewhere in Europe I've been reprimanded by Richard for reading someone else's Dutch newspaper over their shoulder.) This has led Richard to keep a couple of newspapers. Every time I finish painting, he collects up all the paper that's not completely saturated with paint. Thus I am now painting over news from last April. The advantage of this is that I have already read those pages about 20 times, so it's less distracting than fresh words. Hmmm.

In other news, it has been decided that what Richard & I need is a giant katamari. Yep, if we had a katamari in real life and not just in the game, we could push it around the house and have it sweep up all our crap, and then the King of All Cosmos could toss it up into the sky where it'd become a star. Wouldn't that just ROKK?

I need to buy a load of stuff from CD Japan. Between the Pokemon anime (the Japanese version gets the most AMAZING J-pop and J-rock songs!) and now the damn Katamari Damacy songs, imports Will Be Mine.

The wuzzie is away for 4 days with his other woman [*], so I have the house to myself. I also have a reasonable amount of energy, so I have a load of plans involving cleaning, laundry, painting a shelving unit, filling holes in walls, rubbing down the filled plaster, washing down walls & painting them. I might also put some stuff on eBay. So much to do! Back at work now too, but I only have 4 students. I'm not taking on too many just yet, because I'm still having enough bad days to need to have lots of space in my timetable.

Also have to go to Sainsbury's because - and anyone who's ever seen The Carbohydrate Cupboard will probably die of shock at this point - we are OUT OF PASTA! Yup, there is no penne, conchiglie, fusilli bucati, fusilli tricolore, or pasta bows. There's just a box-and-a-half of lasagne sheets (which gives me a good idea for what to do with the left-over bolognaise sauce from the weekend) and 100g or so of wholewheat spaghetti. By the way, I have a confession to make: the vegan dairy-free cheese-flavoured sauce with a mere 0.4% fat is in fact edible. It doesn't taste wonderful, but it's more noticeably cheesy than any vegan cheese sauce I've had before. It is by a company called Free & Easy based in West Sussex, if you want to try to find it. Trying to decide if it will be sensible for me to take the trike to Sainsbury's, because it takes me an hour to walk there & back, and I have heavy stuff to carry. Might leave it 'til tomorrow when I'll have a bus pass.

Better stop waffling and get on with stuff now. btw, Take Part In Scientific Research: How many nipples do YOU have?. Enquiring minds want to know :)

[*] Paintball.

I had a bad feeling about the new drain guy when he drove up in a van which said, among other things, "Plumbing, Drains Cleared, Locksmith, Burglar Alarms Fitted". It seemed like a rather disparate collection of trades for a single person to be undertaking. But perhaps he was something of a trades polymath, I thought.

He couldn't find the drain, despite instructions. Note that our garden is all of 8 feet long, or 2.5m if you're metric.

Then he refused to believe that the drain really was blocked. Because on lifting the manhole cover, there wasn't an overabundance of flowing poo. He said "Many people think their drain is blocked when it isn't really". He made me take him upstairs to the bathroom, and flushed the toilet a few times. Only when it overflowed into the bath did he acknowledge that perhaps there was a problem.

So he decided that the way forward was to flush the drain by blocking up all the other possible exit routes. In other words, forcibly holding the plugs in the bath and sink and covering up the overflows, so that the water had nowhere to go but down the blocked pipe. I don't think it takes a degree in engineering to realise this is a bad idea. Then he poked a long rod with a plunger on the end down the toilet, spraying days-old poo and limescale all over the bathroom floor, and flushed the toilet a few more times. Unsurprisingly, it overflowed into the bath as soon as I stopped holding the plug down.

So we went back downstairs and he pondered where the waste pipe from the bathroom would lead. So I pointed at the large black thing attached to the side of our house which the previous plumbers referred to as "the stack". I said "I think that pipe must be blocked again, if there's no problem in the drain itself". He contemplated this, and declared, "The only way to clear that would be to unscrew the bottom of it". "That's what the previous guys did", I told him. He contemplated this for a few more minutes and said "But there's nowhere for it to go". I replied, "The other guys used a pump to flush it all out". He said, "But it would run all over the garden". I said, "Yes, it did - and then they pumped it all into the drain". It transpired that he did not own a pump, or indeed a high pressure water jet - the only piece of apparatus he'd brought was the long rod with a plunger on the end.

Have I already mentioned the bit where he accused me of causing the problem by flushing "women's things" down the loo? He suggested this twice, and as the second time we were in the kitchen where the laundry rack was up and covered in clothes, I was so tempted to grab one of my rather old, stained washable sanitary pads and shove it under his nose - if just to get him the hell out of my life.

After he spent 10 minutes arguing with me that the drain at the back of our house wasn't actually the one where our water went (an argument I won by running the water in the sink and demonstrating it ended up there), he decided to try shoving his rod up the pipe that leads across our garden from the drain. Funnily enough, it met a blockage. Then followed the pièce de résistance:
"What does your boyfriend do?"
I gave him a strange look - having not actually mentioned a "boyfriend" or anyone else I might share a house with. Eventually, wondering if he was going to accuse Richard of being the person who's been flushing non-existant non-biodegradable objects down the toilet, I answered "He's a computer guy".
"Ah", replied Mr Dinosaur. "When he gets in you should get him to dig up this part of the garden so we can look at the pipe".

Then, thank God, he buggered off - citing a need to get to another job, and the belief he'd had that our job would be quick and easy (where the bloody hell he got that information from, when I'd told him we'd had three lots of plumbers come out already, I don't know). He didn't ask me for any money, or write me an invoice - and if he tries sending me one in the post, you can bet I won't pay it. He is fortunate that he left then, as otherwise I might have been forced to kill him.

Instead, I went round to Wickes, and bought a ripsaw with lots of teeth, and had a happy 2 hours with my ripsaw, crowbar and garden fork: killing the evil decking of hell, digging up the ground underneath, and throwing the rubble around. Very therapeutic. I recommend it to anyone. By the time I had to leave for work, I'd dug up everything he'd suggested I should "get my boyfriend to do" - and more. I then took a shower... and this time the bath wouldn't drain At All.

So I believe we are, once again, looking for someone to fix our drains. Any recommendations? ;)

Just as an update to the EEEWWW situation of l'autre jour - the problem turned out to be nowhere near as major as previously thought (!), and the plumbers ignored the original quote & just charged us for what they actually did (!!). I'm still in shock, I can tell you. If you have ever wondered what would happen if you mixed sewage with engine oil, wonder no longer. The whole thing sets into a black-brown mess that is as thick and solid as concrete, but a lot more smelly. Our entire drainage system going all the way back to the connection with the mains sewer was full of this stuff.

It is obvious where the oil has come from - from the garage at the back of the house (yes, the same garage whose presence and "increased fire risk" made it almost impossible for us to get house insurance). The manhole covering our connection to the sewer is at the back of our property in a piece of land where they dump rubbish - in bins - but the manhole cover was broken so some of it leaked through. Apparently everything was "compacted" to such an extent that it must have taken years to build up to the point where it was causing us problems!

So all the yuck has been pumped out, the drain has been flushed out, and we just need to buy a new manhole cover. To further please us, the plumbers went round to the garage and spoke to them about the problem, thus saving us the need to do so! I'm just... really impressed. If you live in south London and need a plumber, call Maintracts Services - they rock!

Tell you what, though, I've entirely changed my mind about retraining as a plumber so I can charge people £110 +VAT per hour instead of the measly £25 an hour I charge for science tuition. Just the contents of our down pipe was enough to put me off - and that was our down pipe! I think the extra £85 per hour is perfectly justified as a tax for dealing with excrement. Hell, even the contents of the U-bend in the kitchen are disgusting enough...

I have been doing battle with entropy. Before you start getting all Second Law of Thermodynamics on me (that's a phenomenally cool geeky link, btw) it's important to work out whether or not our house is a closed system, and how much help entropy gets from absent-minded wuzzies who take things they need to other parts of the house and then forget where they put them. All in all, I think a score of h-l 1: entropy 1 is pretty good - and we're going for best out of 3.

I don't like plumbers. Before you accuse me of unfairly maligning an entire class of hard-working if expensive tradesmen, I should correct that to "I don't like situations that require us to call out plumbers at 8.30 on a Saturday night". Ye-es. Chalk up another point of utter crapness to our house survey and stuff it missed. I think we can't be arsed to try to sue the surveyor (frankly, we have enough complication in our lives without adding more), but I'm certainly going to tell our financial adviser how crap the survey was - and if a large IFA company decide to take their business elsewhere, that could be a major incentive for the surveyors to improve. Maybe. Apparently we might be able to claim for the remedial work that needs to be done on our buildings insurance, but the problem with that is the extent to which a £400ish claim will whack up our premiums next year. Advice not really needed, but I'm sure people will contribute some anyway :)

One of these days we might actually be able to have the house-warming party that we were going to have in June. Argh!