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All ok in the end
02 July 2017 20:13


I was on fire Friday morning! Tided the flat (putting all loose paperwork and books away), hoovered throughout, emptied the bins, put a second coat of paint in the bathroom walls … all before 0930!

After I finished the bathroom I put a dab of paint on the tops of the kitchen cupboard doors, as they were looking a bit faded. Job finished, cleared up and changed into clean clothes, I made a cup of coffee to reflect on a good morning’s work. Guess what I forgot? Yeah, you guessed it. I turned around from filling the kettle to noticed a streak of paint across my trousers – I’d got too close the wet paint. And it was oil-based paint too, so wouldn’t wash out – I tried with a bit of white spirit, then washed the trousers but somehow that just managed to spread the paint over the rest of the trousers.

My windscreen has a crack in it, so I had that repaired as well on Friday morning – the guy arrived about 0845 and took about an hour. “you can’t wash the car for 48 hours” he said. I looked over towards the dirty car: “does it look like I wash it every 48 hours?”

I also had an estate agent appointment re marketing the flat. He estimated quite a good price, but we shall see. My experience of estate agents is that they say what the seller wants to hear when they are touting for business, but their evaluations and expectations tend to be a tad optimistic. I was speaking to a neighbour who’s flat is also up for sale, and she said that it’s all gone very quiet lately.

You know how much I like coincidences. The estate agent noticed I was working on some SJA stuff. “oh, my ex-wife is in SJA”. She’s someone I know reasonably well – she was my oppo at a Southampton unit when I was at Eastleigh.

At work this week we were “forced” to run some demonstrations of our work at the departmental meeting. We were slightly hampered by the fact that the Wi-Fi in the room had been turned off, so we were relying on the faint signal coming from the other end of the building, but we managed somehow and seem to have received good feedback.

I was demonstrating a reporting tool, but some people didn’t seem to twig that it was just a demo.
“where did the data come from?”
“well, I just downloaded a sample set from tinternet”
“but who looks after it?”
“it doesn’t matter – it’s sample data”
“but who’s responsible for making sure it’s correct”
I then twigged that the questioner had not grasped the concept t of the demo … “we’re just showing you the art of the possible, obviously any “in anger” use of this tool will need to go through appropriate governance and privacy assessments”.

One of the ‘visuals’ from the tool is a fish tank – the bigger the fish, the higher the value. It was reported back to me the following day that “Ruby made a good joke – he said that when the numbers are negative, the fish die”. It wasn’t meant as a joke – I said this in good faith, as I understand that this is what happens.

Last Saturday we took a trip to west London (Metroland) to see the latest addition to The Future Mrs Barefoot’s family – her first great-niece (two weeks old). OK, technically it’s the granddaughter of her ex-husband’s brother, but that’s too complicated – especially when it was his brother’s ex-wife that invited us. Let’s just stick with great-niece.

Anyway, there was a good few of us there: the five of us; aforementioned ex-husband’s brother’s ex-wife; her brother and his wife (though none of us were entirely sure who they were until we asked the Future Mrs Barefoot on the way home – we’d worked out that they fitted into the family somehow, but weren’t sure how); baby; baby’s parents; and baby’s mother’s younger sister. Wow, that sound s like one of those riddles that gives umpteen different relationships only to find out that they are all covered by just three people.

Baby was … well, baby-like I suppose. It slept for pretty much all the time we were there, but seemed to be quite pretty, as frog-shaped small humanoids go.

You know how much I like coincidences. So much that sometimes I will give two in the same post. Baby and parents are moving to the next town from where I went to school. But that’s not the coincidence. Baby’s mother’s sister’s boyfriend went to the same school – though about 30 years later. I expect that the teachers he knew as approaching retirement I would have known as just starting out!

I replaced another light switch at The Future Mrs Barefoot’s. You know this is going to end badly. Learning from my previous mistakes, this time I tagged the wires before I took them out of the terminals. Ok, so maybe using ties with metal inserts wasn’t the wisest move – it took me a couple of attempts to work out why I got a shock when I tightened them! Anyway, even with that aide-memoire it took me about 45 mins and several attempts to get the wires in the correct terminals on the new switch.

Later I was cooking and decided to sharpen the knife. Yeah, this is going to end badly too. Forgetting how sharp the blade was I put my finger between blade and chopping board. An elegant slice of top of nail and finger. I called for assistance from the medical student in the house but was told “you’re a first aider; treat yourself”, which was probably a reasonable reaction.

I was in the bank and another customer was obviously there in his lunch hour. He must have had some type of customer-facing role, as he was wearing a name badge (all those hours watching Sherlock have not gone to waste). His name was Ryan. Anyway, he was talking very loudly to the cashier about how he intended to invest a windfall he had received. “Keep your saving private, Ryan” I wanted to say.

Translations for North American readers:
Flat = condo
Hoover = vacuum
Trousers = pants
Windscreen = windshield
Estate agent = realtor
Metroland = the towns that were built around the Metropolitan Railway, heading north-east out of London

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