AndrewC

Time to get your Clark W Griswold on. 25,000 imported Italian twinkle lights, full Santa & sleigh & reindeer. Don't forget the oversized tree complete with squirrel in your living room. Good moaning from the boring borough. Nothing of note happening so I'll just say cheery bye then. Cheery bye then.

I'd be more than happy to look after your excess cash for a nominal fee.

Greetings from the boring borough. A good weekend with elder brother and SiL was had. We'll meet up again later in their travels. No movement on the legal action against the builder. I'm still compiling the paperwork and all the emails, texts, etc. I'm taking a few days off the building works but will start on doing some of the stair treads later in the week. Really suffering from modelling withdrawal. This gets worse every time I have to go to the shed for something and see the layout half dismantled and the Millarville modules still in the packing frames. The bloody builder again.... managed to damage the staging sidings by loading a bunch of crap on top of them and leaning heavy stuff against the sides. The sides of course have the jumper cables between boards. Several of these will now have to be replaced. He was supposed to use some floor space for his tools and materials but extended that by putting things like my shop vac on top of the baseboards. Asshat! Work is work. Still nothing out there to tempt me away, but that temptation threshold is lowering by the week. Good to see and update from the first lady of the awl. That's about it. Enjoy the day.

The downside of a virtual clubhouse is you never see people wandering out the door, so no chance to say goodbye, ask what's wrong, or to ask when they are popping back in for a muggasilliness. Greetings all from the boring borough. Action stations this week and weekend. First we had to finish emptying our storage lockup and get everything back into the shed temporarily. This is to save another month rental which has gone up by £9/week. That meant taking the back seats out of the Land Rover. (they don't come out naturally, but there is a way to do it thanks to a downloaded shop manual) Older brother & SiL are just about to board a plane from Reykjavik to Heathrow. I'll be "enjoying" 108km each way of the M25 this morning. That means the seats have to go back in. We'd planned on doing that last night but SWMBO had to work late. Guests for the weekend and the offspring with his squeeze will be popping by later for a big BBQ. The house is still a shambles in parts but at least the bedrooms are habitable. Speaking of the offspring, I've received several begging texts from him needing a ride to Gatwick on Friday. Sure I said, what time I asked. Be there for 4am he said. WTF I replied. Sleep is overrated I keep saying to myself. Time to get my poop in a group. Latte, bacon & egg bagel, car seats, butcher, pick up propane (Note, propane is only for the secondary bbq used like an oven. The main one is wood fired), airport, large drink. Enjoy the day.

I really don't think he is that clever. Can't see his kids being the registered owners of much as they appear to all be under 15 by the look of his FB page. He took over his dad's company last year and is a decent builder but seems hopeless at the business side of things. Considering the amount of work he did complete vs the 6 or 7 days of finishing off that he hasn't done it makes me wonder if he just didn't over extend himself elsewhere and can't cope with juggling so has screwed up royally. For me the biggest loss was we paid him for the materials in advance. That is the majority of what we want to recover. For future reference: trading standards will just direct you to Citizen's Advice now. Just went down that road and hit the speed bump. A thanks to all for the support and suggestions. It is much appreciated.

That is my worry as well. However, there are a couple of things in our favour. He has money and property. We aren't claiming from his company so he can't just dissolve it and hide. We are going against him directly as the money was paid straight to him. Even if he declines to pay up after the court action there are sufficient assets at his home for the bailiff to seize and sell. (at least £30k worth of vehicles on his driveway according to Google Earth) If we want the long wait solution we can also look at putting a lien on his home. There is also the nice people at HMRC that will be taking an interest in how his companies house filing for last year showed only £3k worth of business when his Facebook shows a hell of a lot of work in the last 6 months of that financial year, plus the first £7k we paid him. Stewart, we are expecting him to ignore the claim and fail to defend. He seems to have a real problem communicating or responding to anything in a reasonable time these days. If we get a default judgement the plan is to apply for enforcement asap. By the time he figures out that he has been sued the bailiffs will be carting off one of his cars.

Greetings all. Back from our 5 day sojourn to the low lands. A good time was had by all, with maybe the exception of my liver. Many new and unique beers were enjoyed. Sadly the trip home wasn't what it should have been. For the third time in a row our Eurostar was delayed. At least this time it was only 40 minutes. Shortage of EU border control staff was the excuse given. There were 2 when we were there but from what I heard that went down to one shortly after we got through check-in. Perhaps the EU's way of saying, "this is what you can expect after March 2019, get used to it". On the upside construction of the Eurostar facilities and passport control in Rotterdam Centraal is well advanced. Maybe having clearance there and in Amsterdam will take some of the strain off Brussels. I still don't know why they have to do an exit check that takes longer than the UK immigration process. With the automated passport gates the 3 UK border force officers were sitting at their desks doing burger all. In our time in the queue I didn't see one non-EU passenger have to use the manual immigration booths. Top tip for travel. They don't advertise it but if you need to travel from Amsterdam or Rotterdam to Brussels you can get a last minute ticket for 35€ on the returning Eurostar from the NS ticket office. First come first server, no seat reservation but cheaper than the Thalys or Hi-Speed service. Good to see Debs posting again. Hopefully Rick will soon follow with his tales from the hill of strawberries. Some of the relatives that are gathering for my brother's re-wedding thingy in Italy next month have started arriving. Tonight we'll be getting together with a nephew and his wife. Saturday my older brother arrives from the US. Back to work, blech. My builder's 2 week notice has expired, so time to start filing the small claims suit. We've decided to get quotes for fixing all the snag list as well to include in the claim. I believe the phrase is "take the b*****d to the f*****g cleaners". Enjoy the day. Coffee with a bacon & egg bagel is calling.

A happy Birthday to Roundhouse. Now sitting on a 20 min delayed Eurostar.

Child stowage?

Could have been Pete & RePete, or Kate & DupliKate.

Greetings from the boring borough. Colour me exhausted. The weekend was spent moving crap loved family treasures and furniture back from storage. Another 5 trips and that will another box tick. Yesterday we also managed to finish the undercoat in the kitchen and lower hallway. Today I shall be painting the topcoat. Joy unbound. Commiserations and congrats as appropriate. Good to see John is recovering. After a load of wrangling I managed to extend the time off I had already booked, so that gives me 3 days to try and get as much done around the house as possible before we head to Brussels & the Netherlands on Thursday for 5 days of beer fests and brouwerij touring. We'll be meeting up with Roundhouse and his lady, likely Friday evening in Rotterdam. Treated ourselves to the final piece of the puzzle with regards to music through out the house. The Sonos Connect now bridges the hifi with the 4 wifi speakers. That gives us music in every room in the house. (yes even that room, great for long baths) Who ever designed the software and firmware for those things did a fantastic job. Each speaker is perfectly phased with each other. Not a hint of timing delay or echo. Far better than the bluetooth ones we saw demonstrated a while back. Which leads me to a strange rebirth of retro chic. Cassette tapes are now making a comeback. The Jean Michel Jarre 50th anniversary set we bought contains CD, digital download code, and 2 cassette tapes. Time to give the old twin deck a good head cleaning. I've also seen others like Ulrich Schnauss releasing on Vinyl and cassette. Not likely to make an appearance again until after the beery extra long weekend. (stop cheering) So I'll just say, enjoy the week.

Greetings from the boring borough. Another sunny day in paradise. Up and out early to Screwfix for some more gripfill adhesive, plaster filler, and treat myself to a nice DeWalt mitre saw. The parts for the stair railing and bits arrived yesterday. I worked out that I'd have to make well over 100 cuts, many of them at a precise angle. I have a feeling the saw will pay for itself very quickly. It will also make building Freemo modules a lot easier. The broadband routers supplied with most packages are total merde. Even the super dooper pooper thing that comes from the Beardy tw@'s company is crap. The so called Virgin superhub (2 or 3) has a well known issue with its DHCP. This means most corporate VPNs won't work with them. This includes my employer and all of their government clients. I've just set the thing to modem mode and use it as a pass through to an ASUS RT-AC68U gigabit router. That means I get really good internal wifi speeds between machines, Sonos speakers, and the music library drives. Externally I'm getting a lot better performance than with the old SuperHub. (220mbit v 140 on the hub) The ASUS is also AI mesh enabled so along with the second matching unit, I'm getting 200mbit all the way to the alley and across the street to the chippy. If your signal is dropping out, increasing the speed of the broadband package ain't gonna help one little bit. You need better placement of the router and more likely a more powerful router. If it has adjustable antennas, make sure they are vertical and not at funny angles. Another cause of poor connection and drop outs can be your neighbours and channel contention. There is a free download called inSSider that can be used to see all the wifi signals in range and their channels, signal strength and whether or not you are channel overlapping. Thus endeth the geek lesson for the day. Coffee calls. Enjoy the day.

Greetings from a dull and damp boring borough. Little to report. Nothing happening around here. Suffering a bout of modelling withdrawl. I doubt I'll get the shed back to a state where I can set up the layout and/or modules before the end of the year. Chris, I generally keep a container of baking soda on my workbench for neutralising flux and other nasty spills. When mixed with lemon juice also makes a great and non-toxic cleaner for brass and other metals. < oops, now awaiting the awl of rebuke from the Mighty Deb. SWMBO buys the non-food grade in bulk along with white vinegar instead of harsh cleaners. A 5kb bag of sodium bicarbonate works out cheaper than 2 100g packets from the supermarket. That's about it from me. Coffee awaits. Enjoy the day.

Greetings from the boring borough. Chilly but sunny. Latte consumed and time to get to work. Not a lot happening apart from trying to get the house into some sort of order. All the railings, newel posts, spindles, etc for the stairs are due to arrive tomorrow. I've managed to get power restored to the shed on a temporary basis. Another couple of weeks months and things should be semi-normal again. Last night we started the process of retrieving all our crap from the storage lockup. Rather than waste money anymore we've now got enough space in the dining room to store what is currently costing us £71/week. Builder has received his formal letter of his sacking and our intent to recover costs if he doesn't refund the money he was paid in advance for materials and some of the work. T - 13 days. I really don't expect him to respond. That will just make the small claims process a bit easier as he is then less likely to file a defence. The locksmith should be around later this week to replace the locks. That's another £180 to add to the builder's bill. At least the front and back will be keyed the same so one less thing on the keychain to faff about with. Time to run. Early meeting today. <joy unbound> Enjoy the day.

TFIF!!!!!! Greetings from that borough of boring we all know so well. local news: The cafe across the street died a deserving death a couple of months ago. Nobody noticed. Now there is a gentrified eatery going in. If their website is to be believed they will be pushing for a Michelin star in no time. Obviously the website was designed by some millennial media studies grad. I wish them luck. If nothing else for the plain signage that is illuminated by 3 retro swan neck lights. Looks too nice compared to the rest of the small parade of businesses. They appear to have spent a shed load of cash so far. Should be interesting as 90% of the old cafe's business came from the various car dealerships, motorspares, servicing, and other businesses in the small industrial estate behind the cafe. Well, that was the customer base until the old cafe owner pissed them all off. The council finally replaced the missing wiped out street light a few doors down. It had been a metal stump with barricades around it for about 4 years. Bloody bright out there now. See, I told you the area was boring if these are the highlights of the year. i know what you mean. We've stayed at the same hotel in Rotterdam every September for the Borefts beer fest since 2013. This year it coincides with some conference and the rates were more than double what we paid last year. B*stards. Loyalty card my a$$. The diy continues. After work today I shall attempt to complete the flooring on the upstairs landing. New railings, base, newel posts, and spindles ordered. That will be next week's steep learning curve. Enjoy the day. T-7:38:00 until Beer o Clock.

Afternoon all from the boring borough. Just reporting in to say that after 43 nights we've got a functioning bedroom again and a real bed. Good news for us, not so good for our chiropractor who has been coining it in over the past 6 weeks. And now a small rant. Has anyone else noticed that we now have to pre-plan our lives further and further in advance? Last week we had to book our Christmas dinner on the Bluebell as there were few seats left. August ffs!. SWMBO had to book and pay for her opening day Chelsea Flower show tickets already. That's for the end of May 2019. Every year they open the sale a bit earlier. About 5 years ago tickets didn't go on sale to RHS members until December, and the general riff raff in January. Concert tickets are the same. Last spring we almost missed Jethro Tull because we'd bought the tickets a year in advance and had almost forgotten about it. Travel is not much better. Want to pop to Brussels or Rotterdam for a weekend at the last minute? Forget it unless you have deep pockets. Eurostar tix now go on sale 100 days in advance. Thalys is 90 so you have to book them separately. If you don't book in the first week you are looking at paying a lot more as there fewer and fewer cheap seats. For example £70 return is what we paid back in May for later this month to Brussels and €65 to and back to Rotterdam. If we wanted to go this weekend at the last minute the cheapest is £109 out and £79 back to Brussels and €142 for the Rotterdam leg on Thalys. Even things like beer fests are pushing early bird ticket purchases. I've already had emails telling me to book now for next April. AARRGGHH.

Ahh UK radio. Utter crap. Now I'm not saying the noisy asshats on Canadian and US radio are any better but they actually play a lot more music per hour than here and manage to actually talk about the music not their own lives. If I'm out and about driving I want music, traffic, news, and little else. I really don't give a flying phuque what the ginger tw@ (many other annoying "personalities" available) had for dinner last night, or have them laughing at each other's inside "jokes". Yawn. We rarely listen to radio anymore with the exception of Radionomy streams.

Greetings from the borough most boring. Grey miserable cold. The weather is pretty much the same. Work is being a pain in the nether regions again. 2 more people have said "take this job and shove it" in the past couple of weeks. That means I'm having to do my own work and cover for the now happily departed junior developers that managed to escape. The powers that be have decreed that our practice needs to double in size by the end of the financial year. To date we have lost about 10% of our people. I think the only reason I haven't made a dash for the exist is that I'm a lazy sod and the perk of working from home has up to now outweighed the fustercluckery of the practice. I wish I was about 15 years younger and I'd take up some of the silly offers being waved in my direction for doing contract work. Just tried Gavin's page 45 love life thingy: Navigate to the security incident catalog and remove each unneeded item in the list. Nope, doesn't work with Security operations training manuals. That's about it from here. Enjoy the day. Now if I could only work out a pump system to get the coffee from the kitchen directly into my office..........

Be prepared for some sticker shock. Some places are selling at par. Lucky for us we bought all the tickets and tokens months ago when the £ was still at 1.15€. We've also got a few tokens (yes real tokens for buying real beer at the fest and not a euphemism for cash) left over from previous years. Can't remember if you are there both days or just the Saturday @ Borefts.

Greetings from the boring boring borough. A belated (on here) Happy Birthday to Tony. Saw the picture of his cake. Looked more like the guys on Mythbusters playing with thermite than the usual candles. Construction DIY continues. My shoulder and knee have slowed things down quite a bit but we'll have a usable bedroom by this evening. (about 5 days later than planned but still faster than waiting for the sh*tweasel of a builder) Speaking of which, nothing but tumbleweeds from the ****. He has 7 days until I cry havoc and let slip the solicitors of war. At some point today I need to escape to the nearest diy shed and pick up some caulking and beading to create a trim around the fireplace hearth. One thing discovered when putting down the flooring and skirting. No 2 walls in this house are straight and no corner is exactly 90 degrees. It's September already. Where the bleeping bleep has this year gone? Time to pretend to work. Coffee awaits. Enjoy the day.

Its TFIF day in the boring borough. While the rest of our practice is in Madrid, I'm soaking up the culture in the cosmopolitan wonder that is DA16. If it stays as quiet as yesterday I may get some more flooring down in the bedroom. No I'm not skiving but I am technically on standby, so I only have to remain in earshot of the laptop in case there is an issue. Chris, if you have Twitter hunt down one or more of the lone traveller twits or do a bit of googling. There is all sorts of info and good ideas for people that prefer seeing the world on their own. If they are to be believed, its the next big thing in tourism. The Landy passed the MoT and had her annual service yesterday. 16 years on the road and still going. Went to pay for the service and discovered the chip in my bank card had fallen out. Bizarre. 30 seconds with the bank app on my phone and a replacement ordered. Later in the evening I received an email from the bank asking 'which card'. Called them up to discover there are 2 debit cards active on my account. Turns out when they sent me a contactless replacement a few years ago they never deactivated the old card. No risk as the old one had been shredded. This weekend we'll be finishing off the bedroom and making a start on flooring on the upper landing and replacing the stair treads. That's all for now. Have a great weekend everyone.

Happy Birthday Mal.

Bloody French. Always on strike. Now its the flippin' lightning.

Greetings from the very soggy boring borough. Quiet evening catching up on some recorded tellystuff and a few beers. This morning so far I've been into the city for my spinal origami session and back. Starbucks have already brought out their pumpkin spiced lattes. Yum but sooooo early. Although with this weather I could be convinced that it is October already. Andyram. I hope you didn't let those little furry b*stards in the pic try to sell you insurance. You'll never get rid of them. Burger all else to say really so I shall bid you all a good day.

Greetings from the boring borough. Good to see you back John. Sorry for the loss of your dog/companion/friend. It's never easy to lose a loved animal. Thanks for the debdate, err update. I think we need to petition the OED to just put a pic of Debs next to the entry for stubborn. Plan C with the building work is underway. We spent the weekend doing the bedroom work the builder should have. Another couple of evenings and we'll have a habitable bedroom once again. Those I know on Farcebook may have seen the pics. Painting completed, floorboards up, plumbing for the radiator done, radiator mounted and plumbed in, central heating pressurised, floorboards down, sockets installed, about 1/3 of the flooring laid, and the wardrobes put back in place. Today I'm dealing with complaints from muscles that I'd forgotten about. I finally heard from the builder by way of text. He claims that he'll be back within the next 2 weeks. Like Alice I try to believe 6 impossible things before breakfast. If he does show up I'm not sure how to handle it. Do I let him finish the work with a large risk of him b*ggering off again part way through, or do I tell him to sling his hook and pay back the £ he received in advance for materials? Q good luck with the boat building. Once upon a time an old family friend and scoutmaster was building his retirement boat. (1000km from the sea as you do) He was very meticulous and precise about everything. He spent nearly 20 years working on it. He'd driven the route the boat needed to take to the coast several times and recorded every possible problem enroute. This included every bridge height, every powerline, etc. No problems. 3 months before the big move, the BC government installed a new bridge across the TransCanada highway that turned out to be 400mm too low. (well the temporary supporting structure was too low.) Eventually the boat made it but not before a major detour via the USA and I90. Another day of work. The siren's call of the coffee maker is luring me to the kitchen. Enjoy the day everyone.