Saturday 28 May 2011

Friday 27th May 11

Up quite early as Gill went to school to do her stint in the shop, and I got up as I didn't want to go back to sleep and miss my 10am appointment in town.  I made up my muesli and got myself awake... rang the Council bod at 9.30 and then cycled down to town.

I tried putting my little camera in a different place... clipped onto the brake cables on my handlebars.  I was glad to have the camera this time as a car driver pulled out on me, forcing me to stop.  I told her she was being recorded and I got her registration.  To her credit, she realised she had pulled out too far and stopped, so that I could have swerved out into the road to get past her... but that would have been dangerous if another road user had been following me.

I got to David's with no further problems and went to see if the gate to the yard with the full inspection chamber was open... it had been bolted last night and it still was.  The Council chaps arrived and saw that they needed their van to be in Stonegate not Grape Lane, so I waited there until the van appeared.... I spotted a friend from Heslington and I asked if she knew about Barley Hall.  She didn't so I showed her and she was delighted.

The sewer van came and the shop still wasn't open so the Council chap got a step ladder and hoisted himself over the wall and unlocked the gate which was just bolted.  The inspection chamber was full, and the crust on top indicated it had been like that for months.  This was therefore the cause of the pool of water in the cellar, as water can soak through ordinary bricks.  The chaps used a couple of plungers to unblock the drain and within seconds it all disappeared.  Job done, or indeed, jobbies gone!

I signed a sheet of paper which means the Council will demand £96, but the chaps told me to claim it back from the shop owner as the drain was on his property.

I went to tell David the good news about the unblocked drain, and then went to see the shop owner (the owner will be there tomorrow) and the Theatre Royal, about access for wheelchairs tomorrow, and the Council to ask about a structural engineer to inspect the steel joist which is corroded at the wet end, and might, or might not, need shoring up.  I was given a phone number to try later, as the person wasn't in.

Eventually I came home, via Country Fresh and a nice big trailer full of compost materials.

During the afternoon I tried to work out how to solve the router problem.  The job wasn't made any easier by the paid-for 24 hours of BT Fon repeatedly going off, and the signal disappearing.  Very frustrating.

Neither our son, responsible for the router difficulty, or I could work out what to do.  But Gill, whilst down at the Steiner School, chatted about it to Jim Semlyen, who said either find a male to male connector to link the router to the computer, or take it to the computer shop over the road.  So I started to get the router untangled to take it over the road... and found a male to male lead dangling from the back of it, not attached to anything on the free end.  My son immediately knew what to do and plugged it into the laptop he uses and within a couple of minutes had switched it back to WPA from WEP which he'd switched it to yesterday, wirelessly, so causing the wireless connection between the router and laptops to fail.

So, success.... well, some success, as my email wouldn't work, initially, but when Simon came and sat next to me, it started to work again... his 'computer-literate aura', perhaps.  Gill was very pleased with how we'd both dealt with this, in a calm and practical manner.

I phoned one of the engineers that had worked on some Council projects and he agreed to come and look at the cellar next week.

I dealt with a small backlog of emails and then went outside to put a pile of stuff on the heaps.  Tea was noodles.... very tasty.... and then I went back out to do more work in the garden, ended up doing some weeding, pulling docks out and more ground elder.

A good day, constructive and seemed to get quite a bit done.

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