Had a bit of a lazy day today due to the rain. After waking up at the more civil time of 9am we caught the bus into Chamonix, and then another bus to a village up the valley. The idea was to then walk back, but after watching the rain start beating down we gave up on that plan and instead entered tourist mode and began wandering the streets, before catching a bus back.

This evening we went back into town, making good use of our free bus passes, and did some continental sitting-in-coffee-shops-watching-people, it’s quite amusing. Before coming back to the hostel we went for a curry, which was nice but supposedly expensive; I don’t know what the exchange rate is, so it’s all just numbers with no real meaning

It’s Amy’s birthday on Monday, so this weekend was her party. After the usual panic and flapping things settled down into a very nice evening. Beerman and Lager Lass attended, as did two of Amy’s friends from Swindon, and some of her local friends.

We had a giant pile of MEAT, three bbqs and the weather was being sensible by not raining. Oh, and a large amount of drink. The barbeques did their best to smoke out the street, being surprisingly effective and Amy was very excited over her presents.

Here’s a video I made of the evening, created in iMovie and uploaded to YouTube. Enjoy, and don’t have nightmares!

Of course, once we were happily munching away the heavens opened and the hail came down. A two minute deluge managed to put out the bbqs and send us all scurrying inside to hide and continue the party and drinking indoors. Can’t stop the party

In contrast to yesterday’s warmth, the weather has been ‘traditional’ and quite quite damp, windy and generally a bit nasty. This is more like the Wales I know Me and Amy braved the murk and went into Carmarthen for some greasy takeaway goodness earlier, and are now off down to the pub with Jeff & Giles.

Playing GTA4 on Jeff’s giant telly was an amusing and eye-bleeding experience. All those photons.

I phoned my current insurers to find out how much it would cost to transfer my current car’s insurance onto the car I am getting on Saturday. The helpful man on the phone informed me it would be £76 extra and that I have three months of insurance left. After that I will have acquired 3 years no-claims and that’ll make my next renewal cheaper.

So instead of my insurance being a whole £300 a year, it’ll be the not too bad £375. That’s for fully comprehensive with the usual stuff and the ability to drive other people’s cars - a feature that is useful at times.

It’s still not stopped raining yet so I can’t T-Cut the scratches out of the paintwork.

The roads around here are awful. On my way home tonight there was a lot of water on the road, and somehow a large amount of oil or diesel had spread itself across the surface too. Every time I set off my wheels span, and stopping was a bit like driving on ice. When I got home I ran my fingers over the tyres and they smelled of diesel. Hopefully it’ll get washed away in the rain overnight.

Clocks go forwards tonight so we all lose an hour. Whee, I now get to resync back to School Wakeup Time and BST at the same time. There’s going to be lots of groggy zombieness on Monday morning.

Went into Scunthorpe to do some shopping, and it pissed it down all over us. I bought an umbrella and it went inside-out within half an hour of using it.

I like Thursdays, they’re easy. To begin with I have a small group of year 9 students who are quite low ability. We spend most of the lesson doing easy work that keeps them occupied. Then I have a period where I assist in a maths lesson, followed by year 12 groups for three lessons. Year 12s mostly shut up and cause no hassle. After that it’s a free period. The only ballache is an NQT meeting that I have to go to at 3pm for an hour.

Today I had a maths cover lesson last period, rather than a free lesson. Not to worry, these things end up being somewhat amusing. This one was in the grotty little maths computer room. So the kids played educational games on the Internet and I planned some work. We all got along and everything was great.

Oh, except it was raining all day. A great storm blew over us during the morning somehow causing lots of kids to become soaked to the skin. They don’t have to stay outside when it rains, so we have no idea how they get so wet.

Well, we do… they do it on purpose so they can go home. Our kids are sneaky like that. So we tell them they can’t go home if they get wet. So they get their phones out at break and to their parents, with quite a good bit of acting, make it sound like the world’s ending and that the school is under six foot of water. Last year there was a pretty bad flood around here, so the parents ring the school and demand their kids come home immediately. Oh yeah, and for a while it sleeted enough to cover the ground sending the kids into orbit.

And you know what? In my day it was exactly the same, although the snow really was knee deep. Since I used to live within walking distance of my house I was always allowed to go home; this being back before the concept of child safety existed, way back in the dim days of 1991. “What? it’s snowing and you live up the road? OK, bye then keep safe”. Strangely enough that was also the time when I suddenly had loads of friends who were also staying at my house

Oh dear me, I think I should have come in my amphibious car, it looks a bit wet outside…

closed
A628 West Yorkshire - Closed both ways between the B6273 Southmoor Road junction and the Barnsley Road junction in Hemsworth, because of flooding.

That’s the road home…

I got sidetracked by being overcome by boxes and having no phoneline for a few weeks, so here’s what’s been happening…

I hired a van from the 25th to the 27th of June which was, coincidentally, the same time that the weather thought it’d be really fun to rain constantly. The 25th was spent mostly sat in the van on either the M62 or in a mega giant queue leading down to my house. Only I wasn’t allowed to drive to my house as the road was shut. The slightly irritated policeman told me to turn around and find some other way to my house. I had to make a five mile detour just to get around a roadblock 50 metres from my house. There was another block the other end of the road too, but I ignored that one.

Thankyou people who helped me move house, I think I’d still be doing it now otherwise

The rest of that week was spent using the van to take my old house and move it into my new house. It took forever as I’d not packed everything into boxes, mistakenly believing that it would be quick to move things. Ha! no, it’s not… I did two van trips and four car journeys before the house was empty. I left behind a washing machine and a wardrobe.

On the 29th I went to a conference set up by the school I’ll be working at. They gave me a laptop They gave me a laptop that was severely locked down to the point where I had to become quite creative at connecting to my local network.

The following week was spent unpacking boxes. So many boxes… if it takes two weeks to pack, it takes three to unpack - especially when you have a large kitchen, but no storage in it. I do have a mysterious dungeonlike place under the stairs though. Most of my stuff is now neatly packed away or piled in corners. I went to the recycling centre (tip) yesterday to get rid of a ton of shit left from when this house was done up before I moved in - the builders had filled the bins with wire and pipes and then left two bags of rotting rubbish outside too. That smelled great when I tried to move it and ants came out the bag.

BT turned up a week later to install my phoneline, which was nice. My laptop denied having a modem in it though, and wanted to connect to the Internet to find drivers. I resorted to visiting my cousin and letting my laptop talk to the Internet there. Once back at home it was all happy again and I could use awful dialup to go on the Internet… only I couldn’t as I didn’t have a new ISP yet!

Using the phone and my dad I signed up to Be Internet, plugged their dialup details into my laptop and reconnected with the world. Be made my Internet work on Monday, I’ll write about that separately.

So yeah, in the past three weeks I’ve managed to move house and it’s great. I do not have people living above me, the ones at the sides are normal, nice people who talk to me. I have a garden, somewhere to put my car and windows in every room. Of course there is random damp patches on some of the walls and under the kitchen floor there is a small lake, but I’ve taken that to be normal now. I like the view out my windows at the back, it’s a field, some trees and a little hill. The hill is really a rubbish dump, but they seem to be covering it over with soil gradually. I looked on Google Maps and it stretches quite far. The local council should really get more intune with recycling, I have a green bin for normal rubbish (err what?) and a brown bin for cardboard and paper only. I can take tins, glass and plastic bottles to Sainsbury’s but nobody seems that interested in plastic meat trays or sodding plastic bags.

I took millions of photos while moving, but since I’ve stolen the RAM out of my server I have nowhere to put them. Some have been uploaded to my Flickr account though and they’re what you’re currently looking at.

When I finally get the RAM I ordered off eBay I’m going to set up Apache on my server, allow incoming connections and turn it into a webserver. Once that has been done I can use it to store all my photos and selectively put some of the nicer ones on my piku.co.uk gallery. It’s quite a bit of hassle getting photos online, I want a nice and simple method that doesn’t require farting around with lo

ng and error-prone HTTP uploads.

My house came without a fridge or washing machine so I’ve had to buy both of those. The fridge came three days after moving in, and my washer is due to arrive tomorrow. This is good since I’m running out of clothing and my bedding could do with a wash. The best part is the house has a normal electricity meter - no more walking to the local shop to buy tokens - good job since the local shop is a Post Office five minutes down the road, or the middle of town.

Click on any of the images to view my Flickr photostream.

My house is full of boxes. I’m slowly packing everything up in readyness for hopefully moving on Saturday (if for some reason my application doesn’t go through I have no idea what to do). It’s quite hard boxing your life away, while also still retaining something that lets you have clothes, technology and something to do in the evenings. Also shows how little I actually use my CDs.

Went into the estate agents in Wakefield on Friday to hand in bits of paper and the £194 fee. Well, I tried to get into Wakefield. The first hint that something was Wrong was when I got stuck in a traffic jam outside Horbury. A traffic jam that continued all the way to Wakey town centre. I slowly shuffled down the road, wishing I’d had a pee at the last petrol station I passed, watching my GPS tell me there was absolutely no way to escape the traffic, and that I had to just sit it out. Time passed, my bladder became fuller, the cars shuffled down the road.

Eventually I came to the cause of the jam, a mere hour later and really really needing to pee. The drains had burst and the centre of Wakefield was now in the domain of ducks, large lorries and idiots who think their cars are aquatic - and of course then breakdown recovery trucks and the police. Sorry people, your car doesn’t work under water so don’t even try.

Joyfully the nice policeman (wonder if he needed a piss as badly as I did?) directed me back up the road I had just come down all the way back to bloody Horbury almost. My GPS then told me to randomly turn left and go down another (equally jammed) road. Fortunately this one went past a supermarket and I had the most satisfying and wonderful emptying of my bladder ever (well, possibly since the time I spent three hours sat on a boat with a bunch of kids and a broken engine waiting for a lift… that one might have been more satisfying).

To continue the theme of being stuck in traffic I was off to meet Amy in Scunthorpe later that evening. After seeing the traffic on the motorway I thought “sod that, I’ll go along the back roads”. Hahaha Bad Move! Barnsley was a total carpark, and even the random detours I invented (my GPS is the best thing ever!) didn’t help. Took me three hours to do a one hour journey Again I needed to pee quite badly, think I’ll get my seat converted into a toilet!

The M18 was fun, lots and lots of rain to the point of me wondering how soon it’d be before my car went skidding sideways off the motorway. The giant ruts in the road made by the lorries don’t help much. The thunder and lightning was fun to watch, but the sheet rain that chopped my visibility to nothing wasn’t.

OK estate agents, ring me now! I need to phone about 20 different companies and tell them I’m moving house and sort out a van. The new place is nice, I’ll put up pictures when I get it.

I don’t know what happened last night, but this morning there was a puddle of water in my car…

It was bizarre, just a puddle in the footwell at the passenger side. No wet drip marks or dampness on the seats, roof or doors. Windows shut, door shut, sunroof shut.

Very baffling, and of course I discover it when leaving this morning which makes me almost late :-/