Whale Wars - Update

Alright!

Captain Paul Watson has left Germany, not bound for Costa Rica either!  Apparently it is not illegal to leave Germany while under bail.  Apparently it isn't even an offence to break out of prison in Germany.  Maybe, for once, a country has learnt from it's history and has realised that sometimes people are put away for political reasons, i.e. they are innocent of any crime save disagreeing with their government and its mandates and they have every right to do their best to break out of jail.  I hope so any way.

Anyway he has left Germany and looks like he's going to be back with his crew for the winter season of hunting illegal whalers and others who rob our planet and therefore us, of it's bounty.  All this means that he is now on Interpol's 'Red List'.  Apparently, Interpol doesn't actually have any powers to arrest someone.  Apparently being red listed by Interpol means that the country you are in, if it is an Interpol Member, is lawfully bound to tell the other member countries that you are there.  It is up to the police and law courts of the country itself to arrest you.

So if the police and law courts of the country you are in takes a good look at your case and go 'the people that have charged you are involved with illegal activities themselves, therefore their case is a load of hot air and we are not going to act on it', the countries that are jumping up and down and screaming for your arrest may as well go and sit on the naughty step, nobody is taking them seriously until they stop having fingers in dealings they should not have.

I have to admit that the best part of this whole series of events has been Captain Paul Watson's response to the news that he is now on the red list and I quote:

"Put me on the blue list, the red list, the black list and even the death list - just never on the I-don't-give-a-crap list!"

Could not have said it better myself!

A Pain in The Butt

As some of you may know, my family doesn't have a big budget, so when the eight weeks of half price storage at Big Yellow in Norwich ran out we had to move everything out into the room that we have managed to half way do.  Que one long day.  However, for me it did not end there.

Saturday morning I woke up with really sore knees.  Nothing I had not expected.  They had been sore the evening before so I'd gone to bed with some heat pads strapped to them to help.  By the afternoon the knees had loosened up some I had a good visit with my friend who is in hospital and then had no trouble doing a BBQ for a couple of my friends who come over that evening for my birthday party.

What I wasn't expecting was, when I was waving my friends off, for a nerve in my back to be seriously trapped.  By the time I went to bed an hour later it felt as if someone had put the business end of  a rock pick into my spine.  The result of this was that every time I rolled over in the night and I am a fidgety sleeper, everything from the small of my back down went into spasm.  Not a very restful night and certainly not what I wanted for my birthday.

Managed to get out of bed the next day bent double.

After breakfast my mother, who is an ex-nurse (she was an army nurse and had to come out after she become pregnant with me) managed to get me laid down on my front so she could rub some arnica gel into my back and do some hot and cold treatment.  Hot and cold treatment is when you lay a bag of frozen peas over the effected area for three minutes followed by a hot water bottle for three minutes.  Repeat for half an hour, always ending with the bag of peas.

That loosen my up but it also revealed the cause of the trapped nerve.  I had ripped a muscle in my butt during the course of shifting all those boxes out of storage and then up the stairs when we arrived home.  It had swollen up during the course of the night and the day and then, when I turned to keep an eye on the dog while I was saying goodbye to my friends the swelling had nipped the nerve, which in its own turn had swollen up, becoming trapped.

I will admit that once I knew the cause it was a lot easier to bare but it still didn't make it any less disappointing when it flared up again this afternoon so I missed out on the opening evening of the Norwich Writers' Circle season.  I'll have to take the next two weeks easy so I can be there on the 2nd of October, for the talk by Amanda Addison.  It promises to be extremely interesting.  It is titled 'Writing the Visual' and sets our first competition of the year. here's hoping that I can repeat my winning streak of last year.  Every little helps on your CV.

Storage Quest

Some of you may know that before we moved house, we put a lot of our belongings into storage, including most of the furniture.  We didn't quite put the kitchen sink in there but it felt like we were close to doing so.

Due to the state that the house was and still is in, the two months of half price storage at Big Yellow Storage, Norwich (if you need something stored in the Norwich area check them out, they are well worth the price) ran out a month ago.  Therefore, the bill for storage was taking a bigger bite than we could afford out of the finances.  The only solution?  Empty the room at storage and close our account with them.

My room-to-be is the biggest of the bedrooms and the most complete.  By most complete I mean that the wall paper is off, the room has been washed down, the ceiling, walls and floor have been sealed and the plaster board put up.  It was therefore decided that work on that room would cease for the time being and it would become the new storage room.  Que a thirty miler of a day (by thirty miler I mean a day that feels like I triked thirty miles during its course).

We did a run on Saturday the eighth of September, removing two car loads of stuff from the room at Big Yellow and handing in our weeks notice of the account closure.  Yesterday, Friday the fourteenth of September, we came back for everything else.

I was up at six o'clock in the morning, where I'm used to getting up at eight.  You'll be amazed at what a difference those two hours make.  We were out the door to go and pick up the hired van at half seven and where at Big Yellow for nine o'clock.  Five hours later we finally finished loading all our stuff into the van and two cars.  Thank God for good friends otherwise we would never have done it all.

Then we had to come home and unload it all.  We actually managed to do that in four hours, probably because my room-to-be is a little larger than the one at Big Yellow so we didn't have to be quite so careful to 3D puzzle it to the very max.  That and my best buddy, Michael, was able to come over after work and help.  He's a boxer and those extra muscles come in useful.

What is more it wasn't done once we'd unloaded.  Oh no.  While Mother and Tay were taking the van back (I don't drive) Michael and I had to walk the dog because she'd been cooped up all day!

By the time I went to bed my knees were aching and this morning was not pretty.  Ow!

Dongle Adventures

O.K. first off, who thought up that name?  I'm sorry but 'dongle'?  Really?  It sounds like something from a Carry On movie - "It keeps my dongle warm."  You see what I mean?

Anyway on to the meat of this blog.

We moved on the fourth of August with no knowledge of when we were going to receive our new broadband line.  Two weeks later, in desperate need of some D.I.Y and cleaning supplies order on mass over the Internet, as well as a chance to view my e-mails I finally decided that I was going to have to bite the bullet and buy my next piece of high tech, ultra modern kit - a dongle.  The other thing that spurred this decision on was the sub-committee meeting I had with the other members of the Norwich Writers' Circle who were involved with the revamp of our website.  (For those of you who don't already know I'm the Publicity Officer.  A very fancy title for basically being the PR women.  Still it is normally fun so I don't complain that often.  I save that for when the deadlines are haring up my aft at a rate of knots.)  Anyway, during this committee meeting it was decided that the website, leaflets, posters and, when I finish them, the postcards, all needed to have common themes and graphics in their design.  Thankfully James, bless his heart, said that he would e-mail the necessaries over to me.  However, that depended on me being able to access the e-mails.  Que the decision to buy a dongle.

The committee meeting was on a Sunday so Monday morning a trip into Norwich and a visit to Maplin provided me with what I thought was a dongle.  Ha ha.  It was a wireless internet adaptor, near enough the same thing but with one very important difference - it needs a hardline connected router.  Doh!

Tuesday afternoon I take the wireless internet adaptor back to Maplin and then go down to the T-mobile shop to buy a dongle.  So far so good.  Wednesday I have the fun and games of setting the darn thing up.  A week later I finally discover that the only place in the house with a good signal is out in the garden.  Argh!

Thankfully I was just able to meet the deadline for the leaflets but it has been a month of very nearly throwing my computer across whatever room I happen to be in.  Not good for my stress levels no matter which way you look at it. If nothing else it means that if it decides to rain for a week without stopping I am sans Internet.

And we think computers make our lives easier...

Odysseus of Moving - Part 2

So the plaster board arrived and I had to start cleaning all the dust out of my room-to-be.  First hurdle with this - nearly killing the dyson.  Apparently it has no liking for sucking up large amounts of plaster dust.  I have found something that will make a dyson loose suction!  However, I think sucking plaster dust is categorised under 'industrail use' so I don't think I can complain.  Considering how much use and abuse that little machine has taken over the years its belonged to us...  I really can't complain.

Next step, wash down the room.  Well, I used the steamer in the effort to remove the nicotine from the ceiling.  A case of steam, wipe, move on, steam, wipe, squeeze cloth out into the bucket etc.  I called the resulting collection in the bucket 'my bucket of cancer'.  'The Cancer Cowboy Rides Out' (John Connolly) eat your heart out.  It put me off milky tea for quite a while.

After that I brought out the sugar soap.  After the scrub, the rinse and finally the room was ready for some sealant - watered down Eva-Bond PVA being my weapon of choice.  I put three layers of it on the ceiling and the nicotine was still trying to come through so a fourth had to go on. UGH!  I also put three layer on the walls and a less dilute solution on the floor boards before I finally killed the smell of old cigarettes.  Seriously, how can people live in this amount of dirty without becoming some horribly mutated monsters.  Or does ignorance come under that category?

We have finally started putting up the plaster board now but since that is a job that takes three of us, on the days when one of us is away, I have continued to steam the paint off the rest of the house.  I'll be the first to admit that I like coffee but not as a gloss paint up the stairway wall.  And that was what was underneath the snot green, rancid yellow and sea blue layers that had been painted over the top of it.  Either some people have very strange tastes or there's been a whole succession of people with strange tastes living in the house before us.

An up note - we should be regaining our internet access on the tenth of September.  Fun with the dongle coming up next.

Odysseus of Moving

O.K. I will try to update this page with some photographs sometime, the moment I have found the cable needed to attach my camera to the computer and have worked out how to do it but for now I'll have to rely on just description.  A challenge for my writing skills so here goes:

We moved to our new house on the fourth of August.  Four days later Mother had the kitchen clean enough to start unpacking the boxes marked 'Kitchen'.  That should give you an idea of just how disgustingly dirty this place is.  I know it is probably very unchristian but I am rather glad that we didn't have time at the old place to wash out the cupboards in the kitchen.  As I said unchristian but I don't think that it would have been appreciated any way.

What is more we can't really complain about it to the council because we had already signed the tenancy agreement which states 'taken as seen'.  However, that was signed before we saw it empty and I'm sorry but you can't see the maggots crawling in the back of the utility room when it's still full of their crap (if you'll pardon the language).

Once the kitchen was just about clean enough to use my first job was to chop down the hedge that ran along side the drive and dig out it's roots,  seeing that it was the cause of us having to call out the plumber at eight o'clock at night on the day we moved because it had blocked up the toilet drain.  Thankfully we have a terrific bunch of neighbours, the first one helping us to chop down the hedge and then dig it up.  His friend then helped us chop it all up and his other friend then donating his tractor and trailer to cart it all away.  That took us about two weeks.

The next job that I was assigned was the de-papering of my room.  You know that a very heavy smoker has been smoking in the house when you spray the wallpaper to soak it off and the water runs down the wall yellow.  And not a paint yellow either, unless you have some really, shall we say, unusual tastes.

The amount of nicotine on the walls may have had something to do with the struggle we had to remove the wall paper in the bedroom that is going to be mine.  In the end we resorted to the streamer and that finally managed to budge it.

I'm not entirely sure why, other than the fact that the plaster was falling off, the room had been papered because it was exactly the same purple under the paper as on top of it.  I was not keeping that colour, especially as it still stank of cigarette smoke so we took the plaster off the really badly cracked wall and then I tried to steam the paint off the others.  Not only was the paint horrible to look at but it had been put on only one layer thick so steaming it off was not possible, unless I fancied picking it off one square inch at a time, if I was lucky.  Out came the sander. Que lots of dust and noise.  However, it was coming off fairly quickly, until my sister came home yelling that she had found a cheap source of plaster board so we were going to do that instead.

Cheap source of plaster board?  If over a hundred and nine pounds is cheap, I'd hate to see expensive.  However, I will admit that it did mean that I could dyson up the dust a lot sooner, although the dyson objected to the treatment.

And all this only takes us up to August the twenty fourth.