Previous
Not shopping:
hoiho and I had been vaguely planning to go to London for Camden-ish shopping, but sensibly decided that this would be silly when we're both trying to save money. Okay, so we did shop a bit online instead, but I think we probably spent a lot less than we would have done in London. And (in my opinion at least) did more interesting stuff instead.Not working:
Managed to find lots of jobs to apply for -- now all I need to do is, er, apply for them. This is always the hard bit. Fortunately several of them are the sensible sort where you can just send a CV and a covering letter, rather than trying to cram details into a badly-designed application form.
I also sorted out a few more clothes to sell -- stuff that no longer fits me, stuff that never suited me, and stuff that I just don't think I'll ever wear. Having browsed eBay's clothes section a bit though it doesn't look like selling clothes on eBay is terribly successful, so I'm not really sure where to advertise them. (I haven't had much success with shifting clothes on ucam.adverts.* in the past, either.) None of the stuff I'm selling is likely to make much money, so minimum effort preferred...
Minor matters:
I was determined to find time to wash
pto452 on Saturday, as she's been looking very dusty; but when I went to start her up so that I could move her inside the gate for easier washing, I discovered that her battery was flatter than the proverbial pancake. There then followed a lot of faffing with insufficiently-long jump-leads, insufficiently-close cars, and insufficiently-easily extractable batteries, before I decided that the simplest solution was just to go and buy a new battery for my car. I also bought a battery charger (saraphale, I really should give yours back!). By the time we'd done all this, of course, it was too nearly-dark to start washing cars... In the end we washed her on Sunday afternoon, though; so she is now much more shiny, and has a working battery.Ideal home:
Helped
sion_a shuffle the furniture in his room into a more sensible configuration -- it looks really nice now! -- and unpacked a box of kitchen stuff that hadn't been touched since I moved out of Oyster Row. It's always fun unpacking stuff you haven't seen for ages; it's almost like getting presents. Particularly pleased to rediscover my Bagpuss shot-glasses and my South Park mugs which I'd completely forgotten about. (You know, maybe I have too much stuff...)Oh, and for no particular reason (except mangoes being cheap-ish at Tesco) I had a go at making mango lassi. It came out a bit weird -- not really tasting much of mango, for a start. It just tastes of slightly sharp and faintly fruity yoghurt, really. I suspect that the (American) recipe expected "plain yoghurt" to be sweetened; maybe next time I'll try that. Or just make it up as I go along and add more stuff until it tastes the way it's meant to. :-)
Retrogeek:
Since
hoiho had found an old BBC Micro in his garden (as you do), we decided to spend Sunday evening trying to cobble together a working machine or two out of that and the three half-working BBCs that sion_a and I had acquired. Hours of fun grobbling about in computer-innards, and frantically Dymo-labelling everything in a desperate attempt to keep track of the bits. Anyway, thanks to hoiho's l337 hardware skillz, we eventually ended up with three working BBCs, all with working disk-drives, and two working monitors (one colour, one greenscale). That's what I call a roaring success! Now all I need is to find a way of getting all the games I want to play... at the moment "steal them from my sister" looks like the easiest option.Still loads of things I didn't manage to do of course. Like getting in touch with all the people I owe emails to. Part of the problem is if people say "Let's meet up some time!" the answer tends to be "That would be good, but the next time I'm free is some time in October", and that just sounds rude. Mind you no email is probably ruder. :-/
