14°C, rain. CR:?
It would be dry if I'd left it in the house
Sunday is cyclingday, so I wake to rain and a washingline full of wet clothes. I face a grim choice: finish the last bit of painting in the attic, or attack the pile of marking while I wait for the clouds to lift. It’s a tough life.
10°C, and rising
That cold never did materialise, I felt fine the next day. I’m off soon to switch mortgage, my fixed term runs out next month and it reverts to a tracker, but interest rates are so low I should get a new fixed rate term to hold it low for years.
It’s a strange thing to shop for- nothing like choosing a TV or Hifi. There is none of the materialistic glee from a new feature in your home. A re-mortgage will give you a huge saving in about 18 years. Nothing you can reach out and touch then. It’s even worse than paying out for a big repair. The car is the worst for this, you have your card swiped for £300 and drive the car home, feeling the same as before. It’s no wonder that few shoppers jump ship to another energy provider/mortgage/phone company. The root of the problem is that it’s all so boring.
Anyway, no decisions yet, but the main contenders are fixed rate for 5 years, tracker for 2 then onto fixed, or variations on those (18 or 15 years). I’m playing with a spreadsheet to find the one. Open Office Calc works well.
It’s warm enough for shorts now.
16°C, Dry. CA:20 miles
The fault lies here. Posted for your peace of mind and a sense of completeness.
17°C, Dry, light cloud
The innocent fan. Blame the circuit board!
He’s done it, the water boiler works now. The fan was not guilty all along, it was the circuit board causing trouble. By the look of it, the board is just a set of relays & an IC chip to control the front LEDs. Perhaps a relay failed, it does tend to be a mechanical failure more often, relays physically throw a switch rather than some transistor method. You can hear them click inside.
16C, light clouds, but…
It’s coming: a new cold, it’s now cold outside, but I’m not warm inside.
And it’s got nothing to do with my home heating not working. The boiler won’t light, but the repair man is dealing with that one. The timing couldn’t be better, it’s normally another month before I put the heating on in this house.
16°C, towering cumulonimbus- they missed me, just. CR:48 miles
Late ride today, with only limited time before sunset at 19.15, so you want to freesteady miles, unimpeded by traffic, then this happens- it’s milking time. Those ladies weren’t in a hurry, many stopped at that big puddle on the right to drink, others just toddled off on their daily routine.
Blimey, those ladies looked full.
Surveys and data analysis can sometimes be sullied by dirty data.
“It’s not what you think girls”, but actually- what do they think it is? Why do they snigger, these 13 year olds? It’s not as if they expect to open a spreadsheet and find the number 69!
17C, lighter WSW wind, CA:45 miles
Extended my ride home tonight. Up the High Street of desolation that is Brownhills, straight on, along a canal tow-path and then onto Cannock Chase. Eventually clocked up 45 miles arriving home in fading light. I shalln’t do this for much longer, though it’s done the job of making up for tomorrow’s drive. Not looking forward to open evening- it makes for such a long day.
18C,
The media haas been full of 9/11 ten years on stories this week. I expected to really hate all of this, but as it happens, there have been some moving personal accounts. Opinions varied hugely on questions like “is the world safer after the War on Terror?”. Even high ranking US govt. men had seemingly balanced views on this, Bush had been advised to drop the term but decided to stick to it because American’s aren’t bright enough to adjust (how ironic). It was reassuring to remember how we felt threatened by that war on terror- it did indeed create a huge recruitment drive for the anti-American groups as we warned at the time. The reassurance lies in being right ten years ago. With hindsight- GW Bush was every bit as bad as we thought at the time, he did make the world a worse place, a less safe one. Many more US soldiers died in the various campaigns than civilians had in the World Trade Centre. The USA can’t begin to imagine how much the world hates them, and why.
I have to take this opportunity to answer the challenge that we don’t feel any diminution of our civil liberties. We do: detention without trial, tourists who are arrested for taking pictures of ‘sensitive’ buildings in London, and for most people- the conduct of security checks at airports.
Light cloud in complex layers. 19°C & less wind. CR:35 miles after school.
The brightest Type-A supernova is at it’s peak tonight. It’s hidden under some thin high stratus cloud right now, which is a bit of a problem. The object is faint anyway, you’d need binoculars at least, so the slightest cloud renders it invisible. I’d really like to see a supernova sometime in my life, even if it’s faint & non-descript; it’s the thought, that’s all.
Rode after school tonight. The shower is still out of action so I left promptly and hit the road on two wheels at 5pm. I got two hours in and still arrived home ½hr. before sunset. Feel-good.
Micycle 