Boilerdash

The saga continues of the new boiler. We're on day two of the installation.
Been lots of befuzzled amusement at the state of the existing boiler, random pipes and odd wiring.

I've also been doing my bit to amuse the engineer with my general ineptitude, lack of knowledge over anything to do with the heating system, or pipes. or water. or indeed pretty much anything.

The new boiler is here but doesn't fit the space of the old one. So i'm having foot-square hole in the wall bricked up, and a new hole for the flue drilled as we speak. In an 18-inch think wall, consisting of concrete on the inside. And granite on the outside. Fun.

The first engineer has now run away and a colleague has taken over - I asked him if he'd lost the game of cards, but he reckoned they did it all with straws.

Oh tits.

As a nearly final part of getting my house sorted out, I had the gas engineer round today to service the boiler and the gas hob.
Gas hob now sorted, and the wok burner is back to full smelting power.

Not so great with the boiler. After a few "would you look at that" style chuckles, and the odd quizzical humph, the engineer has now deemed the boiler "immediately dangerous" and has disconnected it. He seemed genuinely amazed that the boiler hasn't already killed me at some point during the last five years of living here. So that's good.

He said that he would advise me to disconnect the boiler, then added that if I refused, he'd call the gas board to come and rip my gas out. So I thought about it and said yes.

As this has brilliantly occurred on a Friday, looks like Monday or Tuesday before they can get here with a new one.


To add to annoyances for today, my next door neighbour's smoke alarm has been sounding its "no battery" alarm with a continual high-pitched beeping since 2am.


Most of this weekend will be spent, I forsee, huddled around the wok burner.

Palin Biden her time

That wasn't the awful pun I was intending when I started this. And it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense but still, both American VP candidates.

The papers today are making much of the fact that Sarah Palin could be up for running for the Senate seat in Alaska so I keep seeing headlines of "Senator Palin".

I can't help thinking that really she's aiming to be Senator Palpatine - it's only a few letters out for heaven's sake - classic evil-doer behaviour that, hide behind a poor pun.

Unfortunate wording

I finally got round to buying a poppy this year. By this point I've normally lost ten of the blighters.

When I went up to the seller, I realised that I only had tiny bits of change, mainly 2s and 5s and so apologised by saying "Sorry, I've only really got shrapnel at the moment." Only realising a bit too late that this is probably a deeply inappropriate phrase to use really.