A Sober Moment

Today has been interesting. I spent an hour or so helping electricians pull cable to feed one of our buildings at work. See it gets it's power off one of the buildings that is going to be moved so they need to run a new power feed for it (see what happens when you take shortcuts). They (electricians) spent much time (and much noise) drilling holes through concrete walls so they can run the cable.

About 4 I got a text message from Ariskah to say that she was just about to hand in her design project and did I want to go get ice cream. I agreed and (after checking with Major Feltch Monkey, he is in charge of this ship after all) went to find her. By the time she handed it in and we tidied up and went outside, the weather had turned sour and so we decided that we'd be better off trying for coffee instead. We ended up at Tull and had yummy desert and Hot Chocolate (at least I had Hot Chocolate, Ariskah had something similar but with "extra" stuff)


This evening I have been at church for what was a rather sobering evening. They were holding a special service for a guy who used to be one of my Youth Group leaders and is very sick with cancer. It was a great time of reflection and recounting of stories, but also a kind of reality check as well. I suppose the best way to describe it was it was kind of like a funeral but the guy was sitting in the front row. People took turns telling him (and everyone else of course) what special memories they had and how much they had appreciated his input.


And now I'm off to bed, my touch typing isn't as good as I thought it was and so I'm having to retype things because I keep making mistakes. I could turn the light on but that would take effort. I'm obviously not good enough for the black keyboard yet.

& Then there was a river....

Just to make things really interesting for a Tuesday afternoon, the road that's not a road (see the aptly named "& Then there was a road...." post) is now a river, to keep you all on your toes. Somebody with a rather large digging instrument (probably the guilty looking digger still at the scene, trying to stem the flow) made a rather large hole in a water main. So now as well as a brand new shiny road, we now have a brand new river, flowing parallel to the old one (leith stream).

That should make things interesting for the guys working on the construction site, now that everything is all wet, and someone's got to fix the pipe. Bags not...

We have ignition

After spending all day at the Railway Engineer's place we managed to get quite a bit done on the car. At first it looked like we were going around and around in circles. We turned the key and nothing happened, not surprising really. After several hours work, on about the hundredth turn of the key the car turned over, Yay!!, but that was all it did. Crank, crank, crank, nothing else. :( After a bit longer and much comparing to the other car (not quite the same, but similar) we managed to get it to turn over and start (that answers the question as to weather or not there's any petrol in it) and stall. So it still needs a little work but at least it's running(?) now, which is a big improvement on where it was.

Play that funky music

I managed to install an Alpine stereo that Road Runner had given me in the car yesterday, it has several advantages over the Aiwa one that was in there already. First major advantage is that the alpine one actually works, as opposed to the Aiwa one that kept turning off every few minutes which was really annoying!! Another big advantage is that the sound quality of the Alpine, with full bass and rich treble that isn't over-powering, is far superior to that of the Aiwa. I was beginning to think that I'd wasted my time installing a nice pair of Bosh tweeters at roof level in the front of the car because with the Aiwa stereo the treble was over-powering and if you turned it down so a "comfortable" level you couldn't hear the bass. With the same speaker set up and the Alpine headunit the sound is much more even.

& Then there was a road....

.... where there wasn't a road before.

The digger that I talked about in the house movers post, sat for about a week and did nothing, then slowly each night (well after I left to go home anyway) it started to peal back the grass and top soil. On about Wednesday it was joined by a smaller digger and several trucks. They finished digging up the grass and topsoil and then spread lots of gravel around and a road straightener (I mean steam-roller, have no idea how I came up with that) spent 2 days trying to shake all the nearby buildings down while compacting the gravel. There was a grader working with it as well as a water spraying truck (to keep the dust down we assume). On Friday there was a smaller road straightener working, which didn't seam to shake the buildings as much. Tell you what, if the big steam-roller had keep working for another week or so they wouldn't have had to shift any buildings, they would've all fallen down.
Anyway, now there's a road there, and a car park. Just in time too cos they blocked the old car park and access off so you can't use it.

I know it's been over 10 days since I last wrote anything but nothing much has happened. We've been very busy at work shifting furniture and various related things. I set out on Saturday to go and do some work at work, since it was raining, but I never got there. I went via the Railway engineers place to drop something off and we ended up working on the car until his wife came out and "reminded" him that they had to be somewhere in half an hour. So did I, so we packed up and I left. Hopefully with any sort of luck we should have the wagon running by next weekend. Can't wait!! And then all it needs is a visit from the Friendly Panelbeater, a trip to Mr Magoo, a trip to the certifiers and it'll be ready to roll.

Watched "Son of the Mask" with Delta yesterday afternoon. It was the worst movie that either of us have ever seen. It's supposed to be a comedy but you spend most of the time going "what??" It takes forever to get going and it could easily have been half an hour shorter. There's a point where the family are happily back together and Loki has been defeated, but no they had to go and add an extra 30minutes of nonsense. I can see why they say you should never watch sequels.

The House Movers

I always wanted to be a removal man, but after the past 2 days I don't think so. Time is your enemy and the weather is not your friend, but when you have guys waiting with diggers and trucks and "implements of destruction" then you have to keep on keeping on. In the last 2 days we've managed to fill 3 skips, twice. And over a couple of weeks before that we managed to fill 2 skips twice, that's 10 skip-loads of junk!!

On top of all the junk we've had to haul out, we've also had to move a fair amount of stuff into storage. But at least we got fed today, so that's all cool. I also managed to pick up a few freebies so I'm happy, but I'm also exhausted.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about click here. (hopefully you won't have to sign up to read it) The two wooden buildings referred to in the article belong to us at work. So we've spent the last 2 days sorting stuff stored in the basement of each building, finding other places to store stuff we want to keep and filling skips with the rest.

A great big truck and tractor thing arrived last night. The truck was full of all the sleepers they are going to use to put under the houses (stay tuned for more information as it becomes available) and the tractor thing was unloading them. The truck (not including the trailer) was the biggest one that I have ever seen (well that I ever remember seeing) and the tractor thing looked like a cross between a tractor and a fork-lift.

This morning when I arrived at work there were no parking signs on the street and a big digger parked up on the grass. It sat there all day and didn't do anything but it will. I also saw a truck load of gravel at some stage, but it disappeared so I don't know if it was for us or the construction site up the road. (Lots of building going on at the moment while the students are away)