So this morning I saw a girl toss an empty Fanta bottle onto the side of the pavement when she was done with it. And then I read in Metro that there is outrage that a 4-year-old has been fined £50 for dropping a drinks can. But then we live in a society where a lot of children are brought up to not think at all about dropping their rubbish on the street. But no, people shouldn't be fined for that because it is "out of control" and "nanny state" and anyway, there are people whose job it is to clean the streets and it doesn't hurt anyone. *sigh*
I'm cold, I'm tired and I'm hungry. It's taken me 2 hours to get home, only to find that the bin men have refused to empty my green (recyclables according to strict and convoluted rules) bin because it has "household rubbish" in it. What the fuck else am I supposed to put in the fucking thing then? And then in the porch there are bills and 4 tons of junk mail that I don't want. And I'm being pestered by fussy cats who don't want the food that's down for them but something else instead. And I just hit my head.
I'm really not awfully happy right now.
So, I've been doing this job for 2 years and a month now and I've done my penance (18 months of working mostly on cable things). Now comes the "reward". 3 (1 CBT and 2 in-class) Oracle courses (on top of some very rusty database understanding from an applications installation/support point of view) have been signed off for me and my cow-orkers are now referring to me as their DBA. Which I find funny because I'm not a DBA. I've only been on one in-class course for crying out loud! OK, so I've managed not to totally screw up our Oracle, MySQL and Postgres databases over the last 3/4 months, I've installed and configured a couple of new MySQLs and created a couple of new Oracle schemas, and I've stopped some bad things from happening to most of them too, but that doesn't make me a DBA. Yet.
I won't ever become a full-time DBA I don't think, because that job isn't varied enough under most circumstances. I shall continue in my role as sysadmin/support of Solaris, Linux, Win2K (and Interactive Telly and content production stuff of course) and do part-time DBA-like work as about 25% of the role. I'm Windows certified (no sneering at the back!), I'm about to become Oracle certified and I've adminned Solaris for many years and Linux a little less. I've supported enterprise applications, 100% uptime heterogeneous business critical systems, been solely responsible for supporting multiple customers on multi-million pound support contracts and support systems with millions of users (and I don't just mean web sites here). Systems administration and support is too varied, interesting and a constantly-moving target to give up just yet. I don't know it all and I know I never will, but I know where to look to find the answers and I nearly always understand the answers. There _are_ stupid questions and they are the ones asked through not having learned from previous mistakes. I've made mistakes. I've learned. I may have low self-confidence sometimes, but I know I'm worth my salary and I certainly don't shirk responsibility or let the team down through laziness, stupidity or incompetence.
Here begins something new. Something old is the constant learning and long may it continue.
Well. The bill has arrived. And for the cost of the work that has been done I could buy 5, 20" G5 iMacs and have change for an Airport Extreme card. *whimper*
Wrist ache and now I have the door back on and... dan dan daaaaa! A bog roll holder! Coming soon, a towel hoop (once the filler dries).
...of course, now I have to have a shower at work tomorrow morning. And sit on the train/tube on the way in to work looking like a paint-spattered tramp.
The bathroom is painted. The skirting board is _not_ on because the wall is so not flat it is hilarious. There is no door on the bathroom at the moment.
On the up side, the wall and ceiling paint is drying _very_ quickly. The gloss on the wood isn't; or rather is drying marginally faster than gloss used to dry when there wasn't quick-drying paint available.
On the down side. I'm dirty and covered in paint.
Having been a bit ill most of last week, culminating in a day off work on Friday due to my cold having migrated down to my chest accompanied by some exciting coughing and lack of sleep, I've been not being very clever. I did sleep for 3 hours on Friday afternoon, which was nice, but still felt rubbish yesterday. This didn't stop me going nuts with some house stuff today.
I got the extra vinyl floor tiles for the bathroom and set to work. I did the tile edging in the kitchen and painted one chunk of tiles (and ran out of tile paint which _really_ _really_ stinks). Then grouted and sealed the tiles in the bathroom, and around the shelf above the sink. I've filled the counter-sunk holes in the wood boxing and in the door frames and put down the floor tiles in the bathroom.
I need to get some carpet tape to secure the tiles a bit better as they're not sticking as well as I'd like to the concrete floor. Then I can put on the skirting and get painting. Knowing me, I'll just get on with the skirting and sort out tape later.
I ache; my chest and lower back. Possibly I've over-done things while I'm still not 100%, but I've got tomorrow off so I'll more than likely end up over-doing it again.
The building work is complete. All I need to do it put on some skirting board and finish some tile edging in the kitchen where a bit of wall used to be.
Currently I have made a decision on bathroom paint and will need to get that done as soon as possible (I have Monday off to do it as by then the plaster should be dry). The kitchen colour is probably decided on, but not the back "surprise" wall of the extension. All woodwork is going to be white. No messing about with that. And the test patch of white, spray-on, tile paint for the greenish tiles in the kitchen looks good, so that's an easy way of making that look nice. I just need to clean them up first and do it on a day when I can have all of the windows open (hopefully Monday) as it is mightily stinky stuff.
I even have reasonable, light-coloured (and cheap) flooring for the bathroom but I need to get more as it looks like I underestimated the amount I'd need by 50% (*cough* OK so it is 4 packs of £3.98 self-adhesive, vinyl tiles instead of 2). Once the bathroom is painted, I can stick those down and put up the loo-roll holder, towel hoop and bathrobe hook. *bounce*
Builders are coming back tomorrow for a few last bits. I really hope they get one bit of building thing done and 2 pipes boxed in, the rest I can do myself.
Why is it that whenever I start to think about eating less calories in general, I become permanently hungry? That in combination with trying to spend as little as possible at the moment, makes for a difficult selection time at the local Tesco Express. Not selling loose salad veg. is a bugger and individual fruit like apples are 26p, which seems exorbitant to me.
Anyway. I got a little wholemeal roll (20p), a pack of cooked&peeled prawns (£1.25) and a tub of "healthy eating" coleslaw (79p) in place of salad veg. (I really wanted just a big tomato to slice up). So, the coleslaw can go in the sarnie and be a late afternoon snack in place of the dried fruit that I left at home by accident yesterday.
Bah.
It does feel odd to be back at home, rather than being somewhere else and just visiting every now any then to see how things are coming along. Despite having lived here for 7.5 years, it doesn't feel much like home right now. It'll probably gradually feel like home bit by bit. Probably.
I am deeply grateful to J for letting me stay at his flat for around a fortnight, it is a really convenient place on top of everything else.
Having vacuumed madly this morning (after trying to make the vacuum cleaner work better after the builders abused it, to find that it was partly to do with the hair on the brush) it is almost in a state I won't be totally ashamed if people see it. It is by no means finished, but it isn't an utter building site any more.
Oh and one cat is perfectly happy; bullying me and being overly vocal. The other is skulking under furniture and running away from me all the time. *sigh* Why do I bother?
I ache all over and have chunks out of my hands.
I brought the kitties back today. Then started cleaning and moving bits of furniture etc. in an attempt to return the house to normality.
The cleaning is by no means done, but the kitchen and bathroom are actually usable now (after much cleaning, scraping and re-sealing of things); I just need to scrape dollops of plaster off the floor, hoover and mop. The bathroom needs a bit more work and when it is decorated, I'll have a real loo-roll holder, properly fixed to the wall, a towel hoop and a bathrobe/bathtowel hook. Which will be novel. Still not sure what flooring to go for, but I'll need to take the door off and shave the bottom a bit whatever I choose.
There was a lot of block-puzzle furniture moving in the extension so get stuff arranged as it is now, but once some of the junk-to-be-skipped is out of there, it'll be a dining/reading/music(/laundry) room. There is a dining table in there, I just need to get all of the chairs to the table (some are upstairs still). It'll be usable! And there can be music (via Airport Express) and when it is decorated, I might be fitting a foldable breakfast table to the wall which is mostly open to the kitchen, where we can sit on high stools and have breakfast.
The study is taking shape, but I need to get some clever storage into the new airing cupboard and skip some more junk. The spare bedroom... needs a good clean and then the bed moving and a wardrobe putting together - one of those wood and canvas ones - and a bunch of stuff skipping. Of course, when I say "skip" I mean take to the dump.
The under-stairs alcove houses my wine once more, and the little phone seat/table/chest where I plan to keep hand towels and spare loo roll etc.
At one point (about 17:00), I decided it was time to get food to go in my fridge and freezer seeing as they had been empty for weeks and I hadn't eaten since 10. At which point, I went upstairs to re-pressurise the central heating again (I found another radiator that was still empty), keys in hand, and then I took some rubbish out to the bin and shut the door behind me. The keys were upstairs next to the airing cupboard. I wasn't wearing very warm clothes, I was hungry and locked out. J doesn't have keys at the moment, so I couldn't get in by getting his set. No point in going through next door's garden as the back door is locked and no windows open.
So I walked to where I used to see a locksmith's van, not too far from here. But it looks like he doesn't live there any more, so it was time for directory enquiries. Only one locksmith anywhere near me apparently. I called him and he said he'd call back when he'd found someone to come out and get me in to my house. 3 minutes later he called back to say it'd be an hour and a half or so. I said I wasn't really going anywhere so I'd see him when he got here.
Given that the man would want paying, I headed to a nearby cash point and supermarket to get payment and a pint of milk so I could have tea when I got in. And a snack to keep me going as I'd had nothing since 10 and that makes me grouchy and stupid. 15 minutes after the original call, the locksmith said he'd be with me in 20 minutes. When I got home, I stared at the outer front door. I'd shut that one on auto-pilot when I walked out of the porch so now it was 2 doors I'd shut. Anyway. He came, I got in and paid him. Then went shopping.
Of course, once all the shopping was put away, I embarked on more moving of stuff but eventually stopped and made sure that iBook (it's back!) worked OK. Now everything aches, especially my back.
Well, it (the building work) isn't 100% finished. The guys got pulled off my job to do something else. They thought they'd be done with mine by the end of Tuesday, but it wasn't to be. I have no skirting boards on the walls that were done (and walls where door frames were re-done), the bath isn't fully sealed, there's a bit of plastering left to do in the bathroom including a bit on the ceiling that got missed and pipes to box in there and in the kitchen, the bit between the top of the tiles and the ceiling in the bathroom needs grouting/sealing, there're 2 patches of plaster - 1 in the lounge and 1 in the porch - still to do, the chunk of timber on the outside of the extension that still needs replacing, a light switch putting somewhere more sensible than in a cupboard (*cough*) and it's all small apart from the last bit.
I can't really start moving furniture back into place yet because of the skirting boards needing doing, which is a bit annoying, but it also means that the plaster has more chance to dry and might well be paintable before I get cross and move the furniture back anyway. We'll see.
The builders are possibly able to come back on Monday, but not definitely. The cats come back on Saturday. And I'll get told the cost of it all tomorrow morning.
I'm hoping that it hasn't gone up to more than 175% of the initial estimated cost, as that would be rather inconvenient, and I can't see that it would go that high seeing as a couple of things were dropped as well as some things being more involved than initially estimated.
Well, according to the builders, the work should be all done by the end of tomorrow. Yay! Of course, I can't paint on the new plaster for another week or so, but it is drying pretty quickly, especially in the extension.
I have some walls and some ceilings now. Some more walls need plastering and some are yet to be boarded. I now have insulated walls in the extension, which will be nice. Not quite ready to get the cats back yet as the extension still needs a lot of work. Hey ho.
Anyone using webmail served by me: it won't work until some point next week as the builders need to take up the floor in the study. Sorry, but I didn't think they'd need to get under the floor at all.
Apparently I have walls now. I can't wait to see my lovely, newly plastered walls. *fidget*
No new light in the bathroom until I move all of the stuff out my study so the sparkies can lift the floorboards to get to the wiring. But still. *fidget* Wanna see!
With this little toy:- the Logic 3 Dance Mat. Now, the more observant of you may realise that I don't have a Playstation. I do, however, have other things wot I can plug it into. Like an iBook. OK, so I need a USB adapter (3rd one down - EMS USB2) to plug it into iBook and a video cable adapter to plug iBook into the telly, but.
My god they're fun. And I can create step charts for any of my mp3s using any old text editor. Woo!