Let’s get this straight first up. I’m a driver. Perhaps not as first and foremost as I used to be, but I’m a driver. I love driving my minor* and am going to insane and ridiculous lengths to ensure that a car built in 1969 will still be viable for the next 40 years. I’m also a motorcyclist, and loved my MZs with my heart and soul, and suspect that my Kawasaki, when I spare the cash to get her going, will be graced with my favour, and that riding will bring back that urge to grab the bike and run, far, far out into the countryside. I’m not, generally, someone who fits into specific boxes well. I drive, but I like bikes. I can be very butch, I can be fairly femme. I am all blurry and fuzzy and screw up people’s nice little boxes. I say that because whilst I still consider myself to be ‘a driver’, I am now also ‘a cyclist’.

I’m a cyclist who pulled over more than once today to enjoy just being outside on a bike.

And apparently, I’m lucky enough to live in the UK’s first “Cycling City”. I grant that I’m a relatively recent convert to the cycling cause. When I learned to drive, I promptly stopped cycling and have rarely even contemplated it as a serious means of travel since. Not helped by the fact that my old bike made my knees hurt if I even considered riding more than a few hundred yards.

But Molly, my fine new steed** is a fine bike, and whilst I haven’t steeled myself to look at the BSA 3 speed hub (because it currently works on one speed, and I fear taking it apart and it no longer working on any speed), and I have to adjust the brakes at least once a week because the tired and slightly rusty rims devour brake blocks (and occasionally give me entertaining failure to stops, like today’s where I pull hard and retardation is minimal because the adjustment was just a bit out for the amount of wear), I deeply enjoy riding.

Well. I deeply enjoy short bits of my ride.

See, Bristol is Britain’s First Cycling City.

First, is perhaps the most important word. Because Bristol, despite the great fanfare is a largely lousy place to cycle. Some bits are really nice. Some bits are a delight; the bike lane is separate from the cars, meaning that when I’m driving I don’t get pissy with cyclists, and when I’m cycling I don’t get pissy with cars. Also, I don’t have to avoid nutcases who think that cyclists are a pain in the arse, and that they should be run off the road.

It’s a win-win.

But then there’s things like cycle lanes that just stop or disappear. Cycle lanes that lead you to massive complex junctions and leave you there. Cycle lanes with trees or lampposts in them. Cycle ‘lanes’ where the road’s not really wide enough, and since they just consist of white paint, the cars pootle happily through the lanes making them pointless. Stairs. No, I’m not kidding. One cycle route has fracking stairs in it. I mean, what now? Are they unaware of the basic limitations of your standard town bikes*** – and the tradition that going down stairs on bikes is restricted to youfs in hoodies on very small BMXs?****

Also, today’s favourite, a bike lane that ends at a pedestrian crossing with no indication of where they’d like you to go afterwards.

This is the best Britain has to offer? Our finest town planners and traffic routing engineers have come up with this and this is the best? Really? Seriously?. To coin a phrase:
Fuuuuuuck.

I know that it’s difficult. Britain is an old country, we have narrow mediaeval roads, and narrow Victorian roads, and twisty turney rolling-English-drunkard roads*****. We have an incredibly densely populated country with incredibly densely carulated roads.

But we’ve got to do better. It’s terrible. This is lethal.

When people discuss the future of transport they often talk about their pet mode of movement. The car lobby defends cars, the railway lobby defends the pathetic, sad remnants of our chaotic and confused railway system, public transport groups defend the needs of buses (which I’m led to believe do exist, contrary to my experiences of trying to catch them), and cyclist’s groups defend the cyclists.

But that isn’t going to work. We need to all work this out as one group, not all fighting our little petty battles, but instead trying to work out how we unify the whole transport system.

Because at the moment, it’s just pathetic, and it doesn’t work for anyone.

* Well, when she’s not destroyed her diff.
** For values of new including approximately 80 years old.
*** Or indeed 80 year old vintage bicycles.
**** ;)
***** The rolling English Drunkard made the Rolling English Roads, I’m led to believe.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So, the plan for today was to pop the wood for the bookshelves through the thicknesser.

However, imagining that the hire place would probably have one in, I rang this morning and found out that it was in Bath. Then had a moment of astonishing idiocy when I went to confirm rental for next week’s joint-day-off (for there is only one such day in any given week, at best), and thought 150mm was 15mm and err, yeah. Less said the better.

Anyhow, it’s rented for next week, and I suppose we could buy the backing piece too, if we were feeling enthusiastic. Which would mean we could assemble the two bookcases, and the office-come-spare-room called (optimistically) “The Library” would be pretty much complete.

Which would be good.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So, today my good friend John headed over, a day of chilling and chatting was planned (at least in my head) and that’s what occurred. John showed me some of his latest projects which reminded me why I used to love dinking with computers and electronics, and also prompted me to think more about the finishing touches for the Minor which will, when it’s electrically powered, need some information displays…

We also had a dink with the official Dead Bug Jumping record deck.

I somewhat prematurely (it appears) declared it working this morning. But further playing with it revealed that it wasn’t working well at all. The drive was slipping too much – but we took it apart, and spent some time cleaning the drive mechanism and the underside of the platter. Reassembly demonstrated that it wasn’t happy still – and then John noticed that the spindle (which turns in a bearing of some sort) was incredibly stiff. The manual declares that this is a self-lubricating system requiring no further lubrication. This may have been true in 1966, but today it was a system of very dry old oil that had turned into a substance not unlike glue.

I need to pick up some sewing machine oil, clearly, but the solution applied for the minute was to mix proper penetrating oil (Plus Gas) and engine oil (10W40). After a little while the bearing freed up, and the turntable now starts promptly and turns smoothly.

That’s not the only problem with the deck though. We also tackled the speed adjustment, using the neon light off an extension lead to provide the 50Hz flicker (I am in awe of John’s MacGyver tendancy). Unfortunately, the motor seems to be running a little tiny bit fast, but 33 ⅓ rpm is fine. 45rpm is okay… 78 rpm is a smidge fast, and I can’t quite get the adjuster down as far as it needs to go. 16 rpm is an unknown quantity, because the stroboscopic disk doesn’t include a 16 rpm adjuster.

So, it’s now in a state were getting a cartridge is worthwhile. However, the tone arm is not happy. Clearly there was a design flaw in the headshell, where over time the contacts got dirty and the deck got noisy… and soldering’s happened and the cartridge mount’s got deformed, and then wires have been soldered to replace broken connectors, and we’ve ended up with this:

So there’re some wires that need replacing, but I need to decide on a cartridge first…

Also, the deck has no earth (ground) at all. So that also needs fixing. Sadly, the preamp doesn’t have a ground either, so I’m going to have great fun creating an earth tag on the amp and a run from the deck to ground… Audiophiles would be horrified :)

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So, this was going to be a happy clappy selfcongratulatory post. I was going to glee about my desk a bit more (and I’ve managed to find the phono adaptor, so I just need to actually make the record deck work and get it a stylus), and I was going to glee a bit about the path:

I’ve also found the Mic, which means that once the record deck’s working there’s a possibility that I might, just might, do a new Dead Bug Jumping in the not so distant future.

And all that glee was shiny.

And then I lent back in my 1900s office chair. I lent back, the spring took the weight happily, and… I looked up.

We had the ceiling replaced in this room because it had water damage. Despite weeks and weeks of rain, the plaster on the old ceiling had remained dry. There was no evidence that it was still leaking, and every suggestion that it’d been repaired. I looked up at the white strip of the wall above the picture rail.

I looked up and there is a streak of dirty brown dried water-related evidence. It means getting up in the attic and grovelling around in the newly laid glass fibre. It means trying to work out where the water’s coming in. It means expense getting someone in to fix a roof*, because that is beyond my skillbase.

Arse.

* I’m presuming. But I want to know what’s wrong before some lying shite tries to tell me the whole roof needs replacing. Irritatingly it’s near enough to a valley on the roof that it might be that… feh.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So, the desk is built. It took me most of the morning to shift the boxes in the spare room over to the other side of the spare room; pausing en route to extract a few random bits of desk ephemera. I now need to go down to the garage and extract one of the surge-protection extension leads so that I can actually power the desk top stuffs.

The stuff laid out is mostly for show only at the moment. The RiscPC’s keyboard has had keyboard storage death, and a few of the keys don’t work now. I also have yet to find the box that contains it’s wireless network adaptor (which should also be connected to the printer lurking under the desk).

The record deck is not (a) working or (b) connected to the phono input box. This is because the phono input box is also in an unknown box, somewhere in the room. However, as a desk it does appear to work. I’m typing this on my ergonomic keyboard which, despite needing a clean, is still working. Sadly the trackball appears to have largely died. I’m not sure why, if any bit was expected to die it’d've been the buttons which may have been accidentally pressed whilst in storage. But no, ironically it’s the actual trackball sensor which appears to have bitten the dust. So I can click but not move. It’s more upsetting because they’re fricking expensive compared to mice.

Anyhow, onwards to cable-finding. And I might go play in the garden for an hour, since it’s a pretty day and doing the desk has pretty much cost me all of it…

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So, 2 nights at my new hospital trust. The second night ended on that special kind of high available only when a drunk/high patient attempts to assault you. You’ve got to be quick to work in the ED, and thankfully, last night I was quick. Their kicks and punches (for there were two of the delightful souls) never connected.

I then cycled home. Two 12 hour ED night shifts, and I’m proud to say I did not shirk my cyclingsponsibilities. I cycled to and both of them, and after a couple of weeks of use the brakes are finally starting to work fairly well and I’m not needing to adjust them after every ride. This is because the wheels are starting to look somewhat smoother, although the small amount of chrome that the rear wheel was sporting has started to flake off in some areas (other areas are disconcertingly shiny). The one frustrating thing is that a company in the states sells the ‘salmon’ Kool-stop brakes on rod-brake shoes, which is not something I’ve seen over here. And I remember the Salmon coloured Kool-Stops for their effectiveness on my old mountain bike. However, I will say that the Fibrax brake shoes are a hell of a step up from the unbranded ones I picked up first.

Anyhow, so I cycled home, cut the two final chunks of scaffold pole for my desk and painted them (I decided on the same 1829 Antique White of the skirting, rather than Bachelor Pad Black), and tided the kitchen. Then I chilled out, had a bath, and then wandered down and applied the second coat of paint. Then I started laying the path down the garden. This is a depressingly massive undertaking, the path not being a simple straight run down of about 40ft, oh no. No it curves down the garden and has a split off to a path that will run parallel for part of the stretch. Fortunately for me, I’m not a big fan of perfectly flat and smooth brick paths. Uneven is something I rather like, so I don’t have to get it all perfectly flat before laying the bricks. Nor am I terribly hassled about pulling weeds up from the path now and then, so it’s basically cutting a roughly flat channel through the grass and getting the bricks bedded down roughly flat. Curves though, now they’re an unthought-of evil.

Anyhow, Kathryn then got home and we headed out to Riverside Garden Centre, where several plants wanted to come home with us. Quite a few of them. As did a big pile of earth. The reason for this was that we’ve been intending to turn one of the pallets on which ‘something’ arrived into a vertical planter. And after much delay today we did that. Photos to come. Then Kathryn planted more plants, I dug a big hole and we planted the Gooseberry (which has been stuck in a pot for an entire year). Kathryn weeded, I laid more path.

Then we started digging over another bed-area.

Then tiredness struck, and now it’s time for bed :) Still, 30 hours awake and still vaguely coherent, that’s quite impressive :)

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So I finally got around to putting down the plastic sheeting, digging out the steam stripper and set to on the final downstairs wall. Well, apart from the teeny one next to the kitchen door. Now, prior to this job, on every wall (I think) the sockets had not been refitted when I was steam stripping. Whilst they were attached, they hung from the walls like alien eyes on stalks. This time, however, having had children and animals in the house, the sockets were neatly up against the wall. This is important. It is, as we shall see, Chekhov’s gun.

When steam stripping, water often runs down the wall. To avoid it pooling on our nice new floor I ran plastic along the floor and taped it to the skirting (base) boards. I did nothing about the socket. I merrily set to with the stripper (uh, err, the steam stripper) and scraped the grotty yellow paint/glue mix from the walls. Mostly it’s been done, this is a final run past before I start liberally throwing filler on the walls and sanding them smooth(ish).

The water ran merrily down the wall and onto the plastic sheet. Yay, I did say, as it pooled there.

I danced my way along the wall (as I’m prone to, when working on the house) and stripped the paint until… Click.

Oh arse, I thought, as I looked down at the socket and across at the RCD*. The water had indeed merrily run into the socket, which, positioned as it was, properly against the wall, meant that the water had actually run into the socket.

I unscrewed the wall plate and dried it off externally, blowing air through it. No dice. After some more rounds of cursing my idiocy and wafting hot air at it from the hair drier (connected to the ultra-long 15A extension lead I made a while ago), I decided to just stuff it and finish stripping the wall. I did so. I wafted more air at it. I blew in it. I waited. I tried again. And again. And finally spent even longer heating it with the hair drier and blowing in it.

It worked. Yay.

Only I actually spent more time on the bloody switch than I did on the actual stripping. Still, that said, the wall is ready to be filled. And sanded. And filled. And painted!

* Residual current device (trip switch, earth/ground leakage switch)

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So, the house is actually progressing. And I did, with some effort, persuade myself to do work on Chester.

Chester, as you may recall, had a failed water pump. I fitted a new one, however, I made a pig’s ear of it. Indeed, possibly more of a dog’s breakfast of multiple pig’s ears. It leaked, not a lot, but a bit after installation. This annoyed me because it was, in essence, a fairly simple job. However, not to be defeated I took the damn thing off again this morning and found that I’d made a hash (of that dog’s breakfast of pig’s ears) of installing the gasket. Somehow, despite my care and attention, I’d managed to ruck the gasket up making a gap (which I’m astonished sealed as well as it did). So, I took the whole lot off, cleaned up the mating surfaces and replaced the gasket with instant silicone gasket. Not best practice but it saved me trying to find the stanley knives* and going to buy some gasket paper to cut a new gasket.

At the moment it appears to have worked. We’ll see, though. I’ve less faith in myself than normal, because I’m waaaay out of practice with this**. Anyhow, it didn’t leak when I refilled it. I will now spend the next two weeks checking coolant.

And then, thanks to a quick tweet to @aminorjourney I found out the height of her desk, which whilst I was dogsitting I noticed was almost exactly 1cm to high for me, which allowed me to do lots of complex calculations about how high my desk legs should be***, then to cut them (I didn’t have the energy to cut the desk supports to the right length). Having done this I sanded and primed them. I’m torn now, because I was originally going to spray them white (or blue to match the walls), but I’ve got a can of black paint sat there, which is a bit bachelor pad, but at the same time, is ‘free’.

Meh.

And now I’m going on a quest to find plastic sheeting (which I know we had somewhere), so I can strip the final section of wall and start filling and sanding in preparation for painting.****

* All of which had disappeared, again, until I finished.
** But if I’m going to build this soon, and since I’ve made a deal to buy a whopping great motor and controller, I suppose I better had, then I best get back into practice.
*** Simple calculations, but a surprising number of them, because it’s made from scaffolding and I needed to work out how much height the joints add.
**** You may be asking about my uni course. Me too. It says my module started on monday but there’s nothing on the course site, there’s no discussion from other students. I have, however, I think got clearance from my work to do the audit; so yay.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So, despite the hideous weather and a real inclination to light the fire, sit inside and let the rain fall all day I’ve not done that. I’ll grant I was slow to get going, but once I was moving I’ve been productive, useful and frankly, good.

Having done a little favour for my friends I stopped en-route home to buy some more smoke-free logs for the fire (these are made of compressed wood waste). While they appear to produce an awful lot of carbon low down (the fireplace is really black), I have to say, looking at the top of our chimney, you’d be hard pressed to tell that the fire was going. While it’s a bit of a bugger having a fire going and the upstairs does start to smell a bit smokey, it’s very nice to be heating the house with a CO₂ neutral form of heating. Although it’s only really the lounge that it affects…

Then I got home and inertia set in. I sat and planned an afternoon of activity whilst watching the world go by (in the wet). I poked at my dissertation and e-mailed a person at work that I think is the right person to pass audit requests to. I sat some more. Thankfully, then, Kathryn rang with a task. A sad task, but a task none-the-less. Our 1950s iron has been, forever, tripping the breaker. My response to this having checked it over was to decide to slap a trip-switch in the way of the main RCD which meant at least, in general, it wasn’t throwing the house circuits off.

I also hunted for a new baseplate, on the basis that the rest of it is adequately insulated, and I suspected that it was the heating element that was on its way out. Well, this morning it passed from on its way, to out. It didn’t collect £200.

Plugging it in now leads reliably to instant trippage, and a brief examination of it (having stripped it down) shows nothing untoward that’s visible. I was going to dig out my multimeter and test it more, but then realised it doesn’t really matter which bit is faulty. The only spare you can get for it is the thermostat (it astonishes me that you can still get that), and so pretty as it is, the iron is dead.

I texted my beloved with this sad truth, ate lunch and wandered to the garage to continue progress on the desk. The desktop has been sat irritatingly close to finished for ages. The difficulty being that I needed to sand it some more and hadn’t, well, found the energy to do so. And I was wary of sanding it so far as to lose the “story” of the bits that make it. They are ex-scaffold planks, and despite the weird looks I got for saying I wanted to keep the reinforcing metal strips on them, I wanted to keep the metal strips on them, and the end tags that state the max loading / distance of supports. All of that was stuff I wanted, and I didn’t want to clean them up so far that they just looked like hunks of wood. What’d be the point?

So with some trepidation, and having measured the rough size of the record deck that’s got to sit on top of the desk, I headed down to the garage (in the rain), stuck on the gas heater, and started work. Having attached the three scaffold planks together I then hacked most of the third one off (really, I needed about 2 inches of it). I then set to with the various sanders, before finally cleaning and varnishing the beast:

That’s just after the first coat, I’ve popped a second coat of varnish on now…. but first, the good.

See, we needed a new iron. That much was clear, normally this would be the cue for me to hop into the car and burn rubber. Well, okay, gently warm some rubber. Instead, since the rain had stopped (for the minute at least), I adjusted the brakes on Molly, grabbed my bag and helmet and headed off to Gardiner Haskins. Now, I was debating getting a second hand iron, but I’m not that fit and riding to the second hand places was a bit more of a treck than I really wanted. But I did cycle to the store, fought (thankfully successfully) with the box of the new iron and rode back.

I’m quite proud of myself. I know it’s only a little thing, but I’m hoping it’s the start of me being more healthy.

I also managed to squeeze in 2 loads of laundry, so I’m really feeling like I’ve been very, very good. Sadly the sun’s now gone in, but I think I’ve done my bit for today :)

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So, for the past week and a bit I’ve been suffering from absence of laptop. My much loved MacBook (not a Pro, just a plain MacBook) had a teensy bit of a screen problem. In that about a 1.5″ wide strip of the screen was intermittently not working. I did, unintentionally sit on it ages ago, which may have had something to do with it. Otoh, the problem didn’t show up until a long time after the sitting episode, so I’ve no idea if they were connected.

At any rate, it was out of warranty. Which meant that I put off the repair as long as possible. I took the main body apart and reseated the display connectors in the hope that this was, in fact, a display connector problem. It wasn’t. And having looked at the instructions for stripping down the display (HEAT GUN! HEAT GUN POINTED AT MY LAPTOP SCREEN! ARE YOU BATSHIT INSANE?) I decided that discretion was the very much better part of valour (if it was my old, 8 year old, tatty and battered laptop, then sure. My barely 3 year old computer? Jeeze, no).

I struggled with wiggling, twisting, pressing and poking the screen into working to finish my essay and dissertation proposal before taking it for a bankingly painful trip to the Apple store in Brizzle. And now she has a shiny, shiny new screen. Sadly they didn’t clean the rest of the computer, which I’d've rather liked them to do, but I’ll give it a good blow out with an air duster when I replace the HDD, and upgrade the memory, which is the next task.

Unfortunately, the day after the laptop went to be fixerated, I decided to become super-viral-woman. I don’t know what caused it, but I’m going to bet it was a combination of not quite clearing the last virus, working a ridiculous number of hours, switching from nights to days, stress about my course, stress about work (starting a new job) and switching from a very sedentary lifestyle to cycling ~30 miles in a week (normally I’m expecting to cycle about 22 miles… it would have been 38 miles had I have made it through without falling ill).

Oh, and it rained. Rained a lot. I got quite wet, got to work where I worked a full on shift (no, really, it was more full on than I was expecting. It was like they took my imaginings and went “Yeah, the ED would be more exciting if it was like that, only MORE”), got on my bike and cycled home, where after some sleep I discovered I had a temperature of 40 degrees C (104F). I didn’t enjoy it.

I then didn’t enjoy the next 4 days at all. Most of them involved temperatures which are not wont to make you feel good. I couldn’t really eat. I felt constantly nauseous, hot, tired and unwell.

I haven’t watched so much telly for a loooong time. I vaguely wanted to read stuff, but any attempt was met with my brain slothing about the place telling me that if I wanted it to do anything it’d damn well better get cooler in here. My poor beloved put up with me whinging constantly (and complaining, and whining). I don’t do ill, at least, not in any way that makes me reasonable to be around.

Thankfully after a lot of resting I’m now back up to…more or less full strength. I’m a bit tired today – but I think that was me angsting about my course – not having my laptop with all the papers on it meant that, well, there’s not a lot of point me looking at the course website because I can’t comment on / achieve much. And despite picking up my laptop yesterday (mmm, shiny new screen) I didn’t quite get the nerve to look. I did a lot of cleaning yesterday though, which was good… :)

I looked today. It appears to be a 2-week hiatus in between modules. Had I known that I might have tackled building my desk today, well, doing a bit of work on it. But in all honesty? I should be resting which is kinda what I’ve ended up doing.

I did my errands, I went to the supermarket*, I dropped off my Doctor’s letter at my old job and my time sheet, and gave my old uniforms to someone who asked for ‘em. I went to lunch with a good friend…

So Sunday? Sunday might be desk day, and it might also be a day for recommencing work on the house, which has got a bit, well, it’s stopped.

* It’s BULK shopping day! We now have 22 packets of fruit juice and about 12 packets of cereal.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

My poor car managed to ferry me to work and back for a week despite an increasingly sickly diff. I was aiming for breakfast this morning with Nikki & family. As I pulled away from a set of lights there was a noise. Well, more a succession of noises. If you imagine putting grit and metal into a blender and a mangle simultaneously, and then simultaneously taking a scaffolding pole and hitting an old metal rubbish bin every 10 seconds or so then you’ve pretty much got the sound that the diff is now making.

I limped home at about 10-15 miles an hour. Thankfully, early on a Sunday’s not a bad time to crawl slowly down even fairly major roads.

Also, fortunately, it was this side of the stretch of motorway between ours and Nikki’s house.

So, we are currently without a car. I’ve got the parts to fix Chester (but I need some sealant and some not sleep deprived time). The bits to fix Rebecca are a bit more of a problem. I’m just waiting to hear if it’s still under warranty – milage wise we should be fine, but most recon parts don’t have a warranty of more than 6 months :(

We’ll find out…

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So, *BREATHE*. I’ve not been this stressed for a while.

The 3000 word literature review I’m deeply unhappy with. The underlying research is…not appropriate. I should have spotted it when I started reviewing it, but honestly, I reviewed it in between shifts and on trains and didn’t quite twig that it was such utter shite and that I should extend my review to find more primary research. I kept finding papers and going ‘oh, that doesn’t quite fit’ and discarding Randomised Controlled Trials or Cohort studies and didn’t realise that all I had left was reviews and meta-analyses. It’s a bit of an all round disaster, really, but I’ll attempt to make it as good as I can and we’ll see if I can scrape a pass.

Kathryn’s kindly read through it and given me lots of cuddles to try and help me find my calm centre* as opposed to my beating the crap out of myself for moronicism** centre, which I find startlingly easy to locate.

My dissertation proposal is progressing somewhat better. This is the 10 minute break between sitting down and ‘appraising’ all the papers I’ve got (I’m still short two, but I can’t really help that) and actually writing the review of them. I usually like a few days for it to slosh around in my brain and allow my subconscious to connect dots (it works surprisingly well). However, I’ve not got that freedom, so I’m having ten minutes, a cup of tea, and attempting to put some of the stress I’m feeling far away.

It’s not really working. I’d forgotten how stress feels. No, really. I mean, stress that’s not job*** related. Job related stress I can deal with with a motorbike, or a run down the river, or a chat with my beloved. This stress lurks in the pit of my stomach and runs around inside my head screaming unhelpfully. It makes me clean the kitchen, do laundry, have an urge to do anything to distract me from it. It brings out my worst prevaracatory tendencies, and then shouts at me internally for not working.

Anyhow. Wish me luck, I’ve an essay to write and then a 16 day stretch of shifts****.

* Ha. Like I have one. :)
** moronisism? Meh.
*** Not as in ‘sick patients make me stressed’ because they don’t. I get an adrenaline hit when I’m preparing to look after someone sick, and run round inside my head mentally trying to collect all the things I should be doing, but the actual work, no. What makes me stressed is not being able to do my job properly (when it’s uber busy) or staff-relation stuff. That makes me quite stressy.
**** Well, I finish at 7:45am from a night shift then start my induction the next day, so I’ve kind of got a day off, ish, at day 8. I don’t really count it as a day off though.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So. I’ve got 1500 words to write through this next week (in which I’m on nights). Those 1500 words? They are on a subject that I know about in loose, nursey, I know how to treat it and roughly what the guidelines say* way, but not in a deep ‘I know what the papers say and where they are strong / weak’, so…uh, yeah, I need to read them. Now. Fast. Also, I need to know about audit. I know approximately >< that much about audit processes. I mean, I know what it is and roughly how to carry one out, but I don’t know how to pick one audit method over another. And the book I need? In the post. Maybe. *WAIL*

On top of which, I start a new job in 11 days time****, to get to which I need to ride my bike (to get it out of the garage, I need to go through a gate that currently has no handle). So it would be useful if (a) My bike had a reflector on it (being as it’s legally required ‘n all) and (b) the gate had a handle on it, so as I can open the gate in the morning to get to work.

Also, I need to proof read and improve (it definitely needs some improvement) the 3000 word literature review that I’ve written (on a different topic to the 1500 word one, obviously).

And…our illustrious Volvo has, having destroyed its radiator and been fitted with a new one, decided that at 100,000 miles he’d rather like a new water pump. So the expensive nice coolant I bought to fill the brand new radiator is now slowly gracing the road surface outside our house as it drip-drip-drips its way out of the car. The new pump was only 12 quid (including delivery) – and wasn’t difficult to source – but is, I suspect, going to be an arse to fit and will, I suspect, require a chunk of time that I don’t currently feel I really have available to install.

On top of all that…my beloved minor’s rebuilt differential, which has always been a little whiney, has decided (I suspect) to shred at least one of its bearings. She’s very, very whiney now and I changed the oil a few days ago wondering if I’d cooked it or it’d leaked out or somesuch. Normally diff oil is pretty much the same colour as it went in, but more runny**. It’s normally yellow (and smells pretty foul, EP90 does). It came out opaque grey. Opaque grey is not a suitable colour for oil coming out of a diff. Nor is the noise it’s making. All that grey used to be ball bearings.

I’m waiting to find out if it’s still under warranty or if I’m going to have the fun and excitement of getting it re-rebuilt locally (we won’t think about that).

Oh, and I *was* planning to have my GT550 up and running so that I could use that to get to work in a pinch. Have I done that…? No.

As the final little set of stressors, I still have no desk, my laptop’s screen is getting flakier and flakier (once I’ve done these two essays I’m going to bite the bullet and take it down to Apple), and the house is no further along than it was a month ago. I am, as it were, ready for the world to chill out a bit.

Right at this moment I’m feeling a teeeeensy tiny bit stressed.

* Although, having just read the most recent Cochrane review I’ve just discovered, as with so many things in medicine, we’ve been doing it wrong. See, we (as in the medical profession) largely seem to have assumed that when people are sick sick (Looky here) we should throw all the antibiotics in the universe at them to make them not be sick. New research says, uh, don’t. It says yay to antibiotics but boo to the kitchen sink approach. I need to read it more thoroughly, but my glance at it says giving people multi-antibiotic therapy (which is what, I think, all the protocols I’ve ever seen say) is worse than just giving them one specific kind of broad-spectrum antibug. Basically, you roger their kidneys***. Like with oxygen, and so many other things that seem sensible, when you actually test it turns out you’re wrong, wrong, wrong. Arse. Also, the Number Needed to Harm is 4-5 patients. So of the many, many people I’ve given that to over the years….oh lord. This is the problem with doing research, it’s depressing.

** This is because the long-long-long chains that make up the thick goopy stuff that goes into a 1960s differential slowly gets chopped into teeny, tiny, shorter chains. But there’s no soot (which is what turns the oil black in an engine).

*** As in screw them, permanently. This is bad.

**** While it’s the same job, at the same pay, in the same kind of department I now get ‘Senior’ in my job title. Wahey!

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

I may have used that title before… err, so, if I have, put it down to a lack of imagination and too much Queen.

So, I actually made good on my promise to go down to the garage. My bicycle now sports front and rear lights (although the front light is somewhat interestingly placed). I also discovered that my old ‘Mt Zefal’ pump will actually fit on the bicycle’s pump mount (that I discovered today).

And thus, she looks slightly more like a working bike:

I’ve not yet got around to constructing the skirt guard, but that’s more through a lack of motivation to go and find appropriate nylon string (waxed cotton may indeed be more authentic, but less rotting is my thing).

I also spent some time switching out the old brake blocks (which were probably 1930s) for new ones (which are less well made). The new ones had a marginally larger screw to hold them on. After some thought I decided that making the hole bigger was probably reasonable as I’m more likely to buy more new brake blocks than get NOS ones – and carefully drilled out the holes in the brake assembly by about 0.05mm. It was just enough that I couldn’t *quite* get the screw through, even with jiggling and force. I doubt it’ll make much difference, and Molly is, at the end of the day, a working bike.

Having done this came the joy of adjustment. The rear brakes have a nice screw-thread / double locking nut / knurled nut thingie which is fairly easy to tweak and actually very quickly made the back brakes way more effective than they were with the old blocks.

The front ones, however, I initially had less luck with. They appear to have just the one adjuster which is where the rod coming down from the brake lever meets the tube going up. Where the rod enters the tube is a nut which you can slacken and then adjust the amount of insertion and tighten back up.

The new shoes are slightly thinner than the old ones were, so this needed adjusting up, but try as I might I couldn’t actually get it so the front brake really did a lot.

Then I struck the brilliant idea of putting the brake on and wedging it in the ‘nearly on’ position (with a screwdriver handle, because that’s obviously the proper tool). The screwdriver inserted between the n shaped brake shoe carrier and the wheel would, I thought, hold the brake there so I could slacken the adjuster, reposition the lever in the ‘not applied’ position and…. tighten it. Then when I applied the brakes they’d start from only-just-off and the lever would actually pull them with some force against the front wheel.

Yeah. No.

What actually happened is the brakes gently pushed the mudguard (against which the screwdriver was resting) downwards, and little changed.

After several attempts I finally hit upon

- Gently wedge (always a good start, gently wedging something) a screwdriver handle between the tyre and the mudguard.
- Apply brakes as hard as you can
- Gently wedge a second screwdriver between the n shaped carrier and the mudguard (which is now pressing against that first screwdriver)
- Slacken adjuster
- Move handle to brakes-off position
- Tighten adjuster
- Gently apply brakes and slip out upper screwdriver
- Release and remove lower screwdriver

And lo; the brakes actually work. And way more effectively than when she came back from the shop.

Lights, Brakes, Pump, Gears (well two of ‘em, apparently). Ladies and Gentlemen, I think we have a bicycle.

Oh, and before I sign off for the night, one thing that I thought was terribly pretty that I’d not noticed until today, and is just a sign of people who actually care about the finished product…

As a side point, if anyone’s wondering where the BSA Service Sheet for the early 3 speed BSA hub, it’s here.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So, I should be writing and editing my paper, although I’ve set aside tomorrow to do that, while Pepper sitting, again. I might hide myself in Nikki / Kate’s office and write like a demon tomorrow. I’ll be spared many of my traditional escape routes, being as it’s the weekend I shall have less on Twitter, and my RSS reader is likely to be less full of ‘stuff’ than it is on a weekday.

So today, at work, I discovered that I was, in fact, right. I do earn my annual leave up on a day by day basis, not on a monthly basis (apparently). I wasn’t that angsty about it, just asked because I’ve got two random days to do on a weekend after I’ve notionally finished, so it would be handy. I just got a message back saying I need to ensure I take my annual leave that I’ve accrued. So it seems that for, essentially, my first 2 weeks of work at the new hospital I’ll still officially be employed by my old trust, and just be on days off and annual leave. Which is a bit weird. Unfortunately, there are insufficient staff for me to take the annual leave at the weekend, which means (I think) that I’ll work a week of nights, have one day off, do induction week in my new place, work two days in my old job, then start at my new place properly… I may have trouble remembering where I’m going on any particular day!

I’m now into the day-counting phase, with 13 shifts (including the 2 random ones) left to go, and people at work asking me every few minutes when I’m leaving, which is odd. I’m looking forward to long days though, and working only 3 (long) days a week, as opposed to at least 5 days every week.

Hopefully this means that progress will start to happen on the house again, which is something I’ve been missing – and finding very frustrating. Because while I’ve been sick there were so many things I was meant to be achieving. Also, I really, really want to finish my desk. Really, really, really. I’ve made the top – it just needs trimming to the right width, sanding and oiling / varnishing. I think I’ve abandoned my beautiful height adjustable, counterbalanced, standing / sitting desk. Why? Because I want a desk. Now please. I find working on my paper much easier at a desk, and since my dissertation is going to be starting shortly, I’ll be wanting to have it to dissertate at, or whatever the correct term for writing a dissertation is.

Still. In two weeks time, things should start to happen.

In the mean time, I need to fix my bike*, and I need to fix the garden gate so that I can actually get the bike out of the garage and go to work in the mornings without carrying the bike up the entire length of the garden, through the house, and out onto the street. I was going to fix the garage door…then I realised that because of the two chunky padlocks on the outer door, that won’t help, necessarily.

On the plus side, since getting home I’ve sat down and listened to Gladsome, Humour and Blue (If you’ve not encountered them…), and Amy Winehouse. I’ve drunk some delicious and refreshing black tea with lychee, and sat in our knock-off ikea bendy chair, and now feel a lot more human.

I am still not ‘entirely’ well, and this is reflected in the feeling of my peripheral vision closing in and generally feeling floaty as I did all day today; which made looking after the really, really sick person with the fairly uncommon and totally unexpected diagnosis a bit more of a challenge than normal. Quite honestly, I can say I’m awfully glad that I updated his obs chart when I did, because while his observations had only deteriorated a little since I’d taken over his care, the trend that became apparent when I sat and charted them shortly after his consultant review made me sit up and take notice. And monitor him more closely. And then ring the medical team 15 minutes later with a phrase that you don’t really want to come out of my mouth.

“Did you see Mr X?”
“Yep…”
“Err, he’s become quite poorly….”

When I start a request for a review with the comment that I think they’re poorly, that means they probably are really quite unwell. Understatement tends to be my mark**, so ‘quite poorly’ is never a good sign.

And so it was.

And so he was transferred to a hospital at which I’ll shortly be working. Where they have posher surgeons who can fix what ails him. We hope. He apparently has a 3/4 chance of survival, which isn’t so…bad.

* I now have instructions. A handy PDF of the original BSA service sheets. But no time. Argh. I also have brake blocks, which I may go and treat myself by fitting now.
** Although I have resorted to blunt truth on occasionally, the one that springs to mind is dealing with a particularly obstructive obs & gynae registrar (not in this trust) who didn’t seem to grasp that someone exsanguinating from a vaginal bleed would be their speciality whether or not she was pregnant, and that right at that moment, as we had the consultant and two ED registrars, and another nurse desperately trying to keep her alive long enough that he might get to see her, no, they would not be coming to chat with him, he needed to get his lazy arse into the ED now, please, and maybe, if he was lucky, we might have sorted out a pregnancy test by the time he arrived, but only if she was still alive and we’d sprouted more limbs.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So, as with most things at the moment, last year’s review is a bit behind schedule. I had a bit of a stressful morning for reasons which I expect I’ll go into at some point, but not right now, and am endeavouring to unwind by looking at last year – which given the insane stressyness I recall from last year is, perhaps, unlikely to be the most positive thing! However, after this I’m going to put what is, I hope, the final coat of paint on the ceiling upstairs – which should mean that I can start painting the corridor downstairs. That will bring the finishing of the house closer…

…all of which tells you how long it is since I started this. It’s been in draft for a while, and I quickly finished off the year to get it up online. I actually had a lovely morning with this little fellow,

who I’m looking after for my friends.

Anyhow, so 2011.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So, I have lacked in productiveness, at least at home in the last few weeks. This is not (broadly) my fault. I had work (uni work) to do (and still do). But mainly work has been incredibly hectic. As in, I come home and sit on the sofa and do nothing because my feet, calfs and knees hurt. Actually hurt.

And so the list of things that need doing remains unchanged, indeed it’s slightly longer, because I should look at the brakes on Chester, as they’re sticking a bit…

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

Okay, so let me preface this by saying, sometimes I’m a dumbass.

So, when we were doing the house, I think we considered insulating under the floor. I certainly vaguely thought about it, but with the exception of the last house, haven’t really thought of the floor as a place of great cold. Which is dumb, because when I think about it, the floor has always been a cold place. It’s just, when I was a kid, I’d sit on the floor with my back against the radiators (for USian readers, remember, most houses in the UK are heated by hot-water radiators, not by forced air). I didn’t really think about the floor, anyhow.

Our last house was on the chilly side in the lounge because, I assumed, I’d put the radiator on the wall away from the window. This is because it was a hideous, hideous experience to grovel around under the floor. And also, because it saved me a chunk of money not to do that. And also, it saved me taking up another floor.

Anyway, for many reasons I decided not to bother. ISTR that I didn’t bother in the bedroom either, for the same reasons, but the bedroom was never quite so cold. Clueful readers will realise that since I overspec’d the radiators for the rooms, the rooms should have been warm anyway, unless, perhaps (dumbass) there was cold air pouring in from somewhere. Doh. Anyhow, in this house, the radiators were spec’d by the plumbers (with the exception of the bathroom one, where they told us the minimum and we picked one that would do, and the kitchen where we’re a little underspec, but it’s the kitchen, and I tend to think of kitchens being somewhere that you cook, and so it warms up while you cook, and lo, it does’t matter if there is marginally less heating in there than you might ordinarily want).

And yet, it’s been cold here. Cool, anyway. Not freezing, but never terribly warm, and the heating’s been working it’s ass off – running much of the day – trying to keep up with the warming the house.

And every so often, I’ve looked at the gaps under the skirting (baseboards) and thought I should seal them. Then yesterday I got around to submitting the meter readings for our gas and electricity bill.

We use 100% clean electricity. Gas – not so much. It’s gas. It comes mostly from the North Sea. So, I still have guilt about gas. I have guilt about clean electric, too, because of things like wind turbines near wibble’s house, but our electricity usage isn’t too much of a problem. However, the gas bill came as a teeensy bit of a shock. Not an unpayable, dear god what have we done size shock. No. But a ‘oh arse, I really should have fixed that’ type shock.

So, in the last day, the inch wide gap betwixt floor and wall in the hall, where the was no skirting board – fixed. Taped over and then new skirting cut, fitted, and sealed against the floor and the wall. The lounge? Today I cleared each wall (‘cept the piano wall), taped it, sealed it, and put stuff back. And whilst I was doing it I was horrified – because I don’t spend that much time grovelling in the corners of the room – and it was like lying in a gentle cold breeze of fresh, cool, air. All that energy we were pumping in to the room was being gently wafted back out of the room. Arse.

There’s still one wall to do, which is sitting there mocking me. I’ve done the corridor – at least, the bits of the corridor outside the hall cupboard, and that too was a chill refreshment. I need to run the network cable up and then I can seal behind the skirting too (because where the ring main runs down the wall, there’s no plaster at the moment). And while I’ve been grovelling I’ve been thinking about insulating under the floorboards. I had not seen how cheap the (60% recycled glass) rockwool is. I hate rockwool, incidentally. I think it’s awful, awful stuff. But 12 quid would essentially insulate the underside of the house.

The problem is, I can insulate the main body of the kitchen (but not either side of the fireplace, I think); and the hall, that I can do, but I can’t insulate under the lounge without taking out some bricks to make a passageway into the lounge. And I imagine that they’d have done that rather than cut holes in the floor before now, but they cut holes in the floor rather than do that… so I assume there’s a reason for not doing so. I’m still pondering it, it’s not likely to happen for a few weeks anyway, but now as I hear the drone of the fan-assisted kitchen heating I think ‘should we not be doing that’. Of course, doing it before we had the all the floors down, say, whilst they were reflooring the kitchen? That would have been a clever plan. At least dropping the stuff down there so I don’t have to drop down under the stairs, drag it to the front of the house, then drag it back down the length of the corridor to get to the point where it splits off to the kitchen, dining area, and back room. Feh.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So, today I forked out for a 1945 copy of (the) Cycling (magazine) Book of Maintenance. I was going to get a 1938 reprint, but it was cheaper, even with extortionate postage to get the 1945 original edition. I’m led to believe this includes details of how to service a BSA three speed hub. Look forward to excitement on that front.

I’m wondering if it also has details of how to change the hub on a Westwood rim, because the bearing in the front hub is a bit iffy. Ideally I’d just change the bearing, but I’ve no idea if you can do that on a cycle hub. I’d assume so, but again, no idea what I’m doing here. It’s an interesting experience.

I’ve also ordered a new set of brake shoes, which will hopefully be arriving in a few days time. Impressively, it was cheaper for me to buy the book second hand and pay £5.00 for shipping from Abe Books and to pay £2.00 shipping to get the brake blocks from another online retailer than it was to buy the reprint and the blocks and pay the shipping just the once from the other retailer. Can’t say as I’m overly impressed with their pricing.

Also, whilst at the M-Shed yesterday (we went with my Sister, her Husband and their kids) I saw this:

Now, looking at the back of my bike there are a large number of small holes in the mudguard:

Which, I suspect, once held a similar wire thing, presumably either to stop panniers or skirts from landing up in the spokes. My question to the assembled masses is how in hell to I recreate it? I’ve still got the little metal dobble on the back at the axle to which they would attach, but the wires, where to get them from?

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

So, today I rode a bicycle in the UKs best bicycling city – alledgedly.

I collected Molly from the Bristol Bikeworkshop, who’d been terribly positive about the chance of fixing her gears…

She had been rather lackadaisical about gear selection, leaping randomly around and making riding somewhat entertaining. I was also wanting some new brake shoes, the original 40′s ones seeming to me to be… lacking in braking facility.

Anyhow, they rang yesterday and said that Molly was ready for collection. They were pretty keen for me to collect, on the basis that they were lacking in storage space, so I turned up after walking* there and hopped onto my trusty steed. Well, not quite.

See, I’ve not ridden a pushbike for…years. I mean, the last time I rode any proper distance was riding Kate’s pushbike when she moved to Bristol…which is probably 8 years ago? And the discussion at the shop I discovered that they (a) had no new brake blocks (and thus I’d be using the ones that came with the bike to get home), and they (b) had only managed to get two of the three gears working. Still, the general once over and service cost a tenner, so I was happy enough to pootle off.

I pulled out onto the road, and a quick test revealed that my brakes weren’t really going to stop me in a hurry. Or indeed, necessarily at all, if the road were steep enough. However, on the slope I was on, both brakes together would bring me to some kind of halt, albeit one which needed to be booked well in advance. I pootled off down the hill again, some trepidation filling my bones, and attempting to see as far ahead as humanly possible, so as to ensure that there were no surprise stops required.

At the bottom of the hill I looked, hopefully, for some kind of direction as to what they’d like cyclists to do. Having looked and considered the matter, I feel that what the city planners would like cyclists to do is die. Horribly. I have decided that in future I’ll skip quietly up onto the pavement and skidaddle across the huge paved section because having made it part way round cabot circus on the bike I decided that enough death was enough, and that I’d rather hop up on the pavement where I might not be crushed by some distracted driver. Again I mention, Bristol is apparently the UK’s best city for cycling. The best. This is the veritable Peak of British Accomplishment in the arena of cycling. I only mention that as an aside. Something one might wish to consider as we continue our journey.

So I waited for an appropriate gap, slipped back out onto the road and (stopping at red lights as they occurred trundled down the road. As I crossed one of the bridges a bus (from the company abus, I think) pulled infront of me, and then promptly stopped at the bus stop causing me to quickly write in triplicate the stopping request, send it urgent same day delivery to my bike’s brake levers who replied with only a few bureaucratic and procedural concerns which I was able to address promptly, and forthwith some marked degree of retardation was applied, allowing me not to trundle straight into the back of the bus. Whilst I wasn’t exactly whipping along at speed, I suspect such an experience would not have endeared me to cycling, the bus, or the bike.

Having slipped around the bus I headed for what is probably the only decentish bit of the ride. Around Temple Meads station there’s some fairly modern / decent road planning and cycles are granted a route around the massive roundabout which, should they decide to take it, takes them well away from the traffic. I liked that bit. I wasn’t quite sure where I was meant to rejoin the road, but scootled along for a while and dropped back onto the road where there was a dip. Then I head over the bridge and to a set of traffic lights that have traffic sensors. That resolutely refused to change. Now, my bike has more steel in it than most modern bikes, so if it were going to change for someone, I’d be a good bet.

But no.

Fortunately, it wasn’t busy, and I headed through the tunnel in a gap and headed onward to the bit I was least happy about. There is a road near us which has a ‘cycle lane’ in the least accurate sense of the phrase. A cycle lane in paint only. They slapped some paint down and went “there y’go”. It’s not the worst, no, not by a long way. My favourite is this (I’m sure this isn’t the worst cycle lane)

View Larger Map

Which involves the cyclist dodging lamp posts and trees. Lots of them. And is horribly uneven. And next to a busy, narrow road.

Anyhow, this is not a patch on that. It’s just a busy road, on which people tend to drive faster than the limit, and which has cars parked all the way down one side. This means the cars coming the opposite direction to the cycle lane are slightly on the wrong side of the road, which means that cars going the same direction as the cycle lane tend to occupy the cycle lane. It’s not their fault, it’s simply poor design.

And then there’s the more fun bits, like the lane starts of nice and wide… and then sloooowly gets narrower, before finally (and cyclists will already be expecting this) stopping. No warning or signage. One minute you’re on a bit of road officially marked as a cycle lane, the next you’re fending for yourself on a busy main road. So that’s nice.

Despite all that, I actually rather enjoyed the experience, the bike was fun to ride, and didn’t hurt my body in any more than a kind of ‘You are seriously not used to this activity’ way, which is good, because it’s been really painful before. Now I just need to find a 1930′s book on hub gear maintenance, and see if anyone’ll sell me spares for a BSA shifter, otherwise I fear I might have to get a new wheel / hub. She could also do with new front bearings, at some pont.

* Yes, I walked the 3 miles to the bike shop. Go me.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.