Full Metal Wheelbarrow

New business bank account now up and running, funds transferred thereunto from the old account and letter despatched to the smegheads in charge of said old account asking them to please close it. I didn’t bother telling them why as I don’t imagine they care - we’ve heard from at least one other person who’s had similar issues, so we wonder if they’re deliberately weeding out unwanted customers.

The new Oki printer is having a major sulkfest and insisting that two of the cartridges aren’t inserted properly. I contacted support, who kindly sent two replacement cartridges, but despite taking great care in inserting them, still getting the same error messages as before.

Next step to talk to the warranty people on Monday.

Meanwhile I have bought an Emergency Holographic Cheapo Printer. It’s not the best print quality but most important thing - it does actually work. I was astonished to find it, as it’s a printer/scanner, made by HP and cost me £30 including shipping.

And when I plugged it into my iMac, the pooter said “You’ll be wanting some software for that then. Shall I nip off and download it?”. So I said “Yes, please do.” and it did. And it Just Bloody Worked. Result.

New oven arrived on Friday, after the old one decided to stop working the previous Saturday.



Note the eminently sensible door which slides underneath out of the way so that I can get near the oven to clean it or to get things out without it swinging shut on me or getting in the way.



Also, Rob has now fitted the controls of the extractor fan on the front of the unit, instead of on top of it. I’m not sure what deranged person though that was a sensible place to put them….

Yes, half the heated windscreen seems to have failed after less than a year. Bah.

The photo is because Ford demand a picture of the fault before they'll authorise a new windscreen, according to the nice and apologetic man at the garage we bought it from. I'm appalled that it requires a new windscreen just to fix this. What a dreadful waste :(

Picture was forwarded to the garage a couple of days ago and we're now waiting to see if they can fix it before we toddle of to Scotland for our holibobs. Assuming they'll let us in after the referendum of course....

 New printer now arrived and running. Seems perfectly cromulent so far and it was simple enough that I was able to set it up myself, which is good. It's an Oki 321 if that means owt to anybody. I think I shall have to name it Coki on general principles....[g]

Ink from old printer sold on ebay and posted out this morning.

Now I just need to to contact the recycling people to se if they'll come and take the dead printer away and buy some spare ink for the new one as I don'r know how long the current lot will last - sometimes they put teeny ones in new printers for amusement and jollifications.

 Which were very nice, but would have been nicer if my camera hadn't died on the first full day....

I shall steal some of Rob's pictures to show you later, when I've got organised, or something vaguely resembling same.

 Gloria is off to the menders again on Tuesday. 

Rob set off to visit his parents this morning and I settled in to poddle about a bit while he was gone.

About eleven a.m. the phone rings - it’s Rob, who’s arrived at his cafe stop en route and as he pulled in his rear derailleur’s failed. Brilliant.

Ordinarily, I’d have just found out where he was, programmed the satnav and set off to fetch him. But this week, the van was, for reasons that don’t need exploring at this juncture, full of furniture we’re selling on Ebay. So Rob says, not to worry, he’ll call the people at ETA with whom we have a vehicle recovery policy. They’ve fetched him home before,, so it shouldn’t be a problem.

Except now, apparently, without bothering to tell us about it, they’ve altered the terms of the cycle recovery policy so that they’ll only transport him 25 miles. Since he’s currently 37 miles from his parents’ house and 50 miles from home, this is about as much use as a chocolate teapot.

So I had to unload the van, included single-handedly moving a sodding three-seater sofa into the garage and go and fetch him myself. Thanks a bloody bundle ETA.

Not, I hasten to add, that I mind fetching him, but why keep a dog and bark yourself?

I think we’ll be looking for a new recovery provider PDQ…..

Today I has mostly been Moving Stuff.

We are expecting a treadmill tomorrow, so today we were moving the sofa out to the van (it's currently for sale on ebay along with the matching arcmchair and pouffe) to make room for it.

Also we removed the fire surround (the gas fire has been safely capped off and removed a few months back). All of which makes the room seem much larger.

Parents-in-law successfully visited hand clinic at hospital and toddled off back home yesterday.

The docs apparently took a piece of nerve from pa-in-law's arm and put it in his poorly finger, which sounds jolly clever, especially as they did it without a general anaesthetic.

He has to go back there on Friday, apparently to have the stitches out, although that sounds very quick for doing that!

Just for extra fun and games, we slept in the lounge on Monday night, having given Rob's dad our bedroom, and so Rob turned off his computer to stop it keeping us awake. As it turned out, it would have been more use if he could have turned off the cat, who made a huge nuisance of himself miaowing and trying to get into the room.

Then, when he restarted the computer in the morning it kept behaving as if it was trying to download a BIOS update and then restarting itself.

So I spent half an hour or so on Tuesday morning talking to nice man called Jose at Applecare, who talked me through several different attempts at starting up with limited success, until we were left with the option of erasing the hard drive and starting over. Not too bad, I thought, since Rob makes regular backups to an external hard drive array called a Drobo.

Unfortunately, when we'd done what was needed and I came to restore from the backup disc, the most recent backup was from January 9th. Bah.

So I bethought me that it would be a good idea to check that my own backups (to a similar but separate device) were up to date. Nope. Last on on Jan 9th. Bugger.

And my computer couldn't see the Drobo. So I restarted the computer, which usually fixes that. No dice.

Shut computer down, restarted Drobo, restarted computer.

Computer can now see Drobo, but one of the four drives has a red light next to it. Removed and reinserted the drive in that bay... and now the Drobo is busy redistributing data between the four drives in it. Only 14 hours to go.....

And somewhere in there, the computer decided (again!) that my nice shiny Apple keyboard doesn't exist and will only talk to the big clunky blue Macally one, that's older than our house....

I am Not Amused.

The washing machine appears to have gone kaput - on Sunday evening it was making very worrying noises and refusing to spin properly.

Given that it's lasted for about a decade and this is the first time it's misbehaved, we feel it doesn't owe us anything really.

I went into the village today and ordered a new one from the local electrical shop. It's a Samsung Ecobubble and should be here sometime in the next week.