Yes, this year is a leap-year and the 29th of February was yesterday. According to Blog365 rules, yesterday was a non-posting day… so I didn’t. Yesterday also didn’t exist according to my watch, which happily informed me it was the 1st of March instead.

Today I went to collect a Mac Classic from a friend. It’s now sat in my house waiting for me to play with it. There must be a cheap or easy way to connect it to my network. Right now I’m sat on the toilet at Amy’s while she cooks some food downstairs. She’s moving house tomorrow and we’re madly trying to put things in boxes.

Got to go, my legs are going numb. I hope the toilet in her new place has a better seat.

Damn, my VMWare Fusion demo expires in three days. Looks like I’ll be without Windows on my Mac until I can afford to buy the full version. Despite being the shortest month of the year, this one has proven to be quite expensive for reasons I can’t quite work out. I think hiring the van and moving the sofa did it, I made use of the van to buy lots of large things that I’d have no other chance to move.

Looks like I’m living on beans for March

After running my heating at a higher temperature, and pointing a small fan heater at the mould patches, my house is probably drier. I made up a solution of bleach and water and wiped the walls with it. This seemed to take the mould off leaving no visible staining. Hopefully the bleach will also prevent the mould from coming back.

My house is so cold! It’s one of those red-brick victorian terraced houses that had no insulation because it wasn’t invented back then. Also, with a fire place in each room who needs insulation? Just chuck another log on.

Only this is 2008 and all the fireplaces have been bricked up, which is a shame. There is central heating and it does work, in every room except the front room, the kitchen and my bedroom - conveniently the three largest rooms in the house. Well I lie, the heating works fine, it’s just not enough to heat the rooms effectively and I think it’s down to the crap insulation.

I have a thermometer in my bedroom, the highest it gets up to is 16c and that’s during the day when the heating isn’t on! At night it drops to about 10c, with 6c being the lowest recorded (ever slept in your fridge?).

After coming home today I found a letter from the landlord saying they want to arrange a house inspection at some point. In anticipation of this I have done some tidying up. While picking up some random stuff from my bedroom floor I noticed this behind my chest of drawers…

Isn’t that nice! For the curious, here’s a closeup…

Needless to say the heating has been cranked up some more and the timer altered to run for longer. There’s also a fan heater whirring away up there now in an attempt to dry the room out. I think I’m on a losing battle though, what with the space under the house containing a large pool of water…

Spent most of today helping Amy tidy her new bedroom that her old housemate used to inhabit. Since her previous housemate was a dirty person with no concept of hygiene we decided to remove the carpet and put a new piece down. We also started stripping wall paper and disposing of quite a large stash of naked-lady magazines that he had been hoarding.

We have no idea what he used to do on his carpet, and really don’t want to think too hard either, but there were quite a lot of stains that had gone through to the underlay.

Once the carpet was down I set up a small fish tank that I’d bought. It’s now whirring away and has to be left alone for a week to make the water fit for fish.

To finish off we had a barbequeue in the dark and cold. It being so cold things were beginning to freeze by the time it’d got to the marshmallow course. Barbequeues always have several courses - the raw sausage starters, cremated burger appetiser, char…everthinged chicken main with extra soot and ash, followed by volcanic marshmallows.

From Random

Today I spent a fair amount of time driving around in a hired van. Yes, finally after about six months I’ve managed to hire a van and retrieve a sofa from Amy’s. I also called upon the assistance of a fellow YakYakker to help move it. Thanks Andy.

On the way home we detoured past Ikea where I bought some Ivar shelf pieces for in my kitchen, and a Detlof display cabinet which, as you can see above, has been put to good use. It sits neatly in an unused corner upstairs showing off my random collection of retro computing stuff.

My washing machine has just finished washing the covers for the settee cushions. They were rather dirty, turning the water a manky brown colour. Now they’re all clean and probably safe to touch again. I’ve cleaned the settee itself best I can and it’s now drying out. I think I’ll need to hire a carpet cleaner at some point and give all my upholstery a good clean.

It’s great, I have a settee and a chair so visitors don’t have to sit on the floor any more

Here is Todd. Todd is a dog. See Todd run, run Todd, run!

From Random

Except earlier on today Todd couldn’t run in the sun, he had to wait, which was no fun. No fun at all. He was stuck in the kitchen with nothing to do.

OK, enough of that before it turns into a warped version of The Cat in the Hat

I’d been asked by my parents, who are off in Spain at the moment being rained on (the rain in Spain falls mainly on the tourists), to look after the dog for two days while my sister was at work doing long shifts. They’d agreed to leave me a key so I could get in. This suited me, I needed to visit Steve, who I used to work with and he lives down the road from my parents. So off I set.

I arrived at my parents and obtained the key. Then things went a bit pear-shaped as I discovered the back door was bolted from the inside, and I only had a back door key. Oh dear. The irony of this situation was not lost on me - here I was on the wrong side of a locked back door contemplating whether I could break in - not to steal laptops and Xbox 360s but to let out a by now rather wound up dog.

I texted my parents to let them know I was at home, but locked out. I also texted my sister asking where she worked so I could call her a moron in person, and maybe get the front door key. Making it fully clear that any dog mess found in the house was her problem to deal with.

She rang me back and gave me directions. We’ll skip the driving to her work and collecting the key, it was as boring as it sounds and contained no interesting drama. I came home and let myself in.

Wanting to get off to Steve’s to do some important stuff I let the dog out so it could have a crap. Only it wasn’t interested, and after five minutes of being prompted to go and pee, I put it back in the kitchen and said I’d be back later.

Off I went to Steve’s, I showed off my Macbook and we did some work. It got dark and I came home about six pm. It’s quite fun walking a black dog in the dark, it wanders off and waits for you to catch up. If you’re not paying attention it’ll remind you by nipping at your kneecaps.

I will take it out for a proper walk tomorrow to make up for being stuffed in the kitchen all day.

I’m at Amy’s in wonderful Scunthorpe. We’ve been cleaning her house now that her grotty housemate has gone. His room contained stuff that makes those “how clean is your house” programmes look tame. It’s now safe to enter and no longer smells funny. I’d have some pictures but was too busy trying to suck everything up the hoover.

While doing this we were treated to front-row seats at a small fight outside the pub across the road. There was a lot of shouting, shoving and swearing going on so we phoned the coppers. By the time a police car had screamed past (not bothering to stop) they’d got bored and dispersed.

The insurance man (or “Loss adjuster”) came around to do some paperwork. He just managed to take down all my details before his laptop battery died; he’d been processing lots of claims for the recent floods and insane rain. A simple burglary must have made a nice variation for his day.

He saw my retro console collection and remarked that at least the good stuff had been left behind He needs to go away and check some of the fine print on my policy and will let me know by Friday.

Voice slightly better, the green lumpy goo continues to come forth. Plus I’m developing a really irritating cough.

I’ve an old Kenwood amplifier that used to be in my front room, doing sound for my (now missing) Xbox 360 and other consoles, etc. After coming home from a trip out over New Year I discovered the amp wasn’t working.

I proceeded to take out the relays that isolate the speakers and dismantle them to see if anything was burnt out or corroded. They worked fine so I abandoned the project out of boredom.

Tonight I put the whole lot back together, soldering in the relays and… it all works! I have no idea what I’ve done, but it seems taking everything apart and resoldering the relays has repaired the fault. This is good, I can now play music with decent speakers in my office

Oh yeah, and if you’re now the proud owner of a stolen Packard Bell laptop, I hope you enjoy it. It overheats, is slow as crap and contains no battery. As to the work laptop it’s totally unsellable due to being security marked, and you won’t be able to use it without re-installing something. And you left my car despite obviously seeing my car keys, you dozy bastards.