addedentry and I have the keys to our house! Well, some of the keys. The estate agents gave us the front door keys, & told us that all the other keys were in the house. They're not, as far as we can tell.

I say "as far as we can tell" because it's entirely possible that the keys are lost/buried under the skipload of junk that the seller and tenants have kindly left us. Books, clothes, furniture, bottles of vodka, a broken bong... basically all the cupboards are still full of crap. Ugh.

So, as twittered, we're going to be there on Sunday afternoon clearing stuff out. It's not exactly a party, but if anybody's at a loose end and feels like helping us sort things into piles ("recycling", "bin", "what the holy fvck is this" etc) then they will be very welcome & we will reward them with beer and/or cake (or equivalent local currency). Also, you'll be welcome to take any of the junk if you want! (I'm not promising some kind of treasure-trove here, but, y'know, books is books.)

If you're planning to take up this generous offer :-) please email/txt one of us for the address.

Further to the previous post... I took photos of all the cables and adaptors that were hanging around. I know what some of them are, and can guess at others, but some are a complete mystery. See the full horror on Flickr and feel free to tag, annotate or comment!

The VCR, TVBox and monitor are at the beginning, for those who were asking about those specifically.

addedentry has just bought a coax-to-coax with "standard aerial connectors". It doesn't seem to do the right thing. :-/ Sound is coming out of the video! I think we may have lift-off! :-)

Tags: admin, hardware, lazywebs, video

We exchanged contracts yesterday, so we're most of the way to owning a house. As an absolutely essential part of the packing/moving process, we are trying to connect the VCR to an LCD monitor (this is actually sort of essential - we really want to get rid of the space-consuming TV, but might have to settle for getting rid of the VHS videos). This is proving difficult.

So, ( please help me untangle my cables! )

Tags: admin, hardware, lazywebs, video

Saw the doctor and he was slightly more helpful than they usually are. He agreed that while stress is probably making things worse, being uncomfortable and in pain tends to make people stressed, so let's try to fix the problem or at least the symptoms.

Booked in for blood tests next week, but in the meantime he wants me to cut the following things out of my diet for two weeks: ( foods, gushy and otherwise )

Anyway, at least it's something concrete to try, which is better than sitting on my arse feeling sorry for myself. We'll see what happens.

Tags: food, illness, traces of nuts

addedentry and I will very shortly be handing over an enormous amount of money in exchange for A REAL ACTUAL HOUSE subject to etc etc. This means that we will regretfully be leaving our lovely flat in Botley (ETA: that's Botley just outside the Oxford ring road, not Botley, Bucks!), which means that our lovely flat in Botley will be up for rent. If you're interested in taking it over, now would be a very good time to get in touch. :-)

For those of you who don't know / can't remember the details, here's a bit more information:

* First floor flat (above shops)
* Living room, kitchen (plus extra cupboard/room for fridge/freezer/storage), bathroom, master bedroom, three further rooms
* Balconies front and back :-)
* New double glazing throughout
* Unfurnished (except oven, washing machine, fridge/freezer & a couple of weird glass-fronted cupboards)
* Very convenient for shops - not just the ones underneath :) but full-size Co-op round the back as well
* Very convenient for buses (buses to station/town every 10 mins from literally outside the front door)
* Only 15 mins cycle from the station anyway

Rent is currently £795pcm -- the landlady may put it up but hasn't shown any signs of doing so since at least 2006.

Downsides:
* it is quite noisy at the back at certain times of day (viz. 6am when the lorries unload at Iceland, grrr)
* the decor is all a bit student-shabby
* the light on the (electric) hob doesn't work
* there's no TV aerial socket (this may not be a downside :-)

I can't think of any other downsides! It's an ace flat! We shall be sorry to leave it! Shout if you have any questions.

Tags: admin, botley, flat, j2o-house

I urge my friends list to take a look at the first two pages of Old Silver-Grizzle the Badger by E. T. Seton, because I suspect that many of you will be as delighted by the idea of a dirigible badger as I was. A small cheering thing.

The rest of the book is lovely, but mostly nothing to do with badgers, dirigible or otherwise.

(Thank you all for your kind & helpful comments on my previous post. You are all Better Than Badgers.)

Tags: badgers, icons

This was sent to webmaster:

I enclose an email from the telecoms people. It
is virtually illiterate: is it real?? And why
cant you sort out these sutomated calls that are
so irritating?...please! AD.

Date: Mon, 8 Jun 2009 09:23:23 +0100

Good Morning

You're Administrator will have to officially
request the number change.
I'm afraid there are far too many company's doing
cold calling we can not
bloke them all and they regularly change the
outgoing number. We only bloke
calls in serious cases such a threatening and
abusive calls.

Best Regard
Telecoms

I did laugh at "bloke calls", but note that 'AD' (who also can't type, doesn't understand punctuation, and for some reason thinks webmaster is the person to contact about getting a phone fixed) is a professor.

Tags: stupid, work

I feel like I'm retreating further and further into some kind of shell.

The weekend was horrible, not least because I spent most of it doubled up with stomach pain. Had about 3 hours' sleep last night, agonised about whether to go into work this morning (illness is unlikely to be anything infectious and I'll be in just as much pain if I stay home and do nothing, possibly worse because I won't have things to take my mind off it), eventually decided that if I dragged myself in for the (mildly important) meeting at 9am I could always go home afterwards.

The first thing my office-mate said when I got in was "Good weekend?" ("Not really, but at least it's over now.") I know you're not supposed to tell the truth in response to that sort of question, it's nothing to do with information-gathering, but I'm generally too shattered to think of convincing lies. I suppose I ought to get into the habit of giving a non-committal "Yeah, not bad" no matter what.

Meeting was productive, but the boss thinks that the reason I'm ill is "stress" and thinks I "may be in the wrong sort of job". Yes, I am stressed; being in discomfort and pain a lot of the time tends to make most people less-than-relaxed, I would have thought. But now I'm worrying about getting fired for being ill as well. (Yes, I know they can't fire you for being ill, but in straitened circumstances they're less likely to make an effort to keep the flaky sickly people, & the effect is the same.) The boss probably sees more of my emotional angst than a lot of people, but that's only because I've trusted him enough to talk to him; we seem to get on well most of the time, I've come to see him as a friend as well as a colleague (though I'm wary of using the word because it suggests some kind of reciprocality & it seems presumptuous to assume that). Now I feel like I shouldn't have given that trust so readily, and I worry that it'll just end up being used against me.

When I get up in the morning, I don't want to go to work. (I always do, though, because I know what happens if that starts seeming like an option instead of a necessity.) When it gets to the end of the day, I don't want to go home. (See above.) I am so deeply and bone-wearily tired that the effort of context-switching is just too much. If you gave me a reasonably comfortable place to sit and a simple task that would take 10 years to complete, I would probably just sit there and complete it.

It's getting harder and harder to talk to anybody about anything (online or offline). I feel like I'm watching the conversations from the other side of a pane of glass. There are a handful of conversations which I can have on autopilot, mostly set-piece rants or hilarious catchphrase-trading.

I feel as though I still have something to say but no way to say it.

I'll take a quiet life. Retreating into my shell.

Tags: emo

Hello, I'm not dead. I am a bit more alive on Twitter than on here, because I am consistently failing to find the time/effort to compose a post longer than 140 characters. I'm sorry if anybody was mildly alarmed by last night's despairing tweet; it was just a late-night non-specific headachey emo attack. You can't say "despairing tweet" with a straight face, can you? Thank you to the people who messaged me kind things.

The main thing on the agenda at the moment is that addedentry and I are trying to buy a house. I wish I'd blogged that as we went along, as much for our own benefit as anything else, but I didn't. I did say a bit about it on Twitter, but for some reason the Twitter search won't show me tweets from before the beginning of May or thereabouts even if I explicitly set a since: date. Weird. We are at the surveys stage; addedentry is doing all the hard work, as always.

I am working hard at my actual job, though; I have finally achieved some kind of Procrastinator's Nirvana where so many other things are stressing me out that I can actually use work as a displacement activity from those things. Can anybody say "work/life balance"? No, nor me. Other things that are stressing me out are mostly a) low-level ill-health, and b) the state of the world, neither of which I can do much about. I'm doing what I can: tweaking ways to fix the symptoms for the former, voting tomorrow for the latter.

There is non-stressful stuff too: I am still running a bit, singing a bit, playing violin a bit, volunteering for Oxfam, decluttering a lot (but failing to write it up for unclutter_2009), and reading quite a lot. I have my books and my poetry to protect me. It'll be all right.

On Sunday I will be running the Oxford Town & Gown 10K, again. This lunchtime we did a trial run of the different-but-still-a-bit-silly route round town, minus about a quarter of a kilometre because we wanted to end up back at work, and managed it in 55 minutes without trying particularly hard and while fighting our way round the zombie hordes tourists. ( rambling about running )

Some of you kind people sponsored me on paper at the weekend; if anybody else feels moved to motivate me and help the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, I have made my first ever justgiving.com page and will be trying to convince the people who organise the sponsorship from their seekrit volcano lair house in Witney that the internets is a viable alternative to pen and paper. (If this doesn't work, the charity will still get the money, but I might be saved from acquiring the mrs joyful prize for rafia work commemorative spoon for getting lots of sponsorship.)

Just to be clear, there is absolutely no obligation to sponsor me. Really. I will not think any the less of you if you don't (though of course I will be grateful if you do!). There is even less obligation to come and wave from the sidelines, since I will probably be going huff-huff-huff like a badger with a bellows, and may not even see you. :-} Also, I know lots of you sponsored me for the Red Nose Run not long ago, & I have been shamefully remiss in not emailing everybody to thank them -- so a belated thank you to all of you now! (I should also have linked to the photos of running/silliness and photos of colleges from the event, too.) I won't be dressed up for the Town & Gown, I'm afraid; but maybe one day I will walk a charity race in the boots I wore on Saturday night, though it may take as long as it took the guy in the diving suit to run a marathon.

Now to go and bathe my slightly-achey legs, assuming the man-who-does managed to fix the hot water...

Tags: charity, running, sponsorship