It’s F-Day plus 35, and I’m spending a few hours working in the habitable part of our flood-damaged house while I’m “between” two AirBnBs.
The dog, who doesn’t normally get to come upstairs, is sitting with me on the landing. Except she also wants to keep an eye on what’s happening downstairs.
The result? Her back legs are sitting and her front legs are standing as she peers blepfully down the stairs.
One last outing for the dog and I along the Cotswold lane we’ve been living on, before we move to different temporary accommodation tomorrow.
We’re hoping soon to no-longer have to move every week or two, but we’re not at that point yet.
It’s now twelve days since a flood struck my house, causing the ground floor to be submerged under a couple of feet of water and ultimately leading us to kick off an insurance claim process.
And man, a home insurance claim seems to be… slow. For instance, we originally couldn’t even get anybody out to visit us until F-day plus 10 (later improved to F-day plus 7). The insurance company can’t promise that they’ll confirm that they’ll “accept liability” (agree to start paying for anything) until possibly as late as F-day plus 17. Nobody will check for structural damage until F-day plus 191.
Oh, and the insurance company have advised us to look for something like a “12 month let with a 6 month break clause”, which is horrifying. We could be out of our home for up to a year.
Some days it feels like being stuck in a nowhere-place… but simultaneously still having to make the regular everyday stuff keep ticking over. Visiting the house- currently stripped of anything damp and full of drying equipment – feels like stepping onto another planet… or like one of those dreams where you’re somewhere familiar except it’s wrong somehow.
But spending time away from it, “as if” on holiday except-not, is weird too: like we’re accepting the ambiguity; leaning-in to limbo. Especially while we’re waiting for the insurance company to do their initial things, it feels like life is both on hold, and not-allowed to be on hold.
And I worry that by the time they’re committed to paying for us to stay somewhere else for at least half a year, they lose any incentive they might have to contract for speed. There’s no hurry any more. We’re expected to just press pause on our home, but carry on with our lives regardless, pretending that everything’s normal.
So yeah, it’s a weird time.
1 I’m totally committed to this way of counting the progress, which I started on F-day plus 3. I get the feeling like it might be a worthwhile way of keeping track of how long all of this takes.
2 Normally, the younger and older child are able to get to school on foot or via a bus that stops virtually outside our house, each day, so an hour-plus round-trip to their schools and back up to twice a day is a bit of a drag! We’re managing to make it work with a little creativity, but I wouldn’t want to make it a long-term plan!
3 And do some work from there, amidst the jet engine-like noise of the dehumidifiers!
Today was a long day. Between commuting (the kids to school from our distant flood-evacuation accommodation), work, childcare, insurance wrangling etc., I was pretty tired when I got back “home”. So I came in and lay on the floor.
At which point the dog decided I was a pillow.
This checkin to GC8X888 Crawley to Minster Loop - #11 Wasat reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.
The dog’s walk needed extending to make sure she’s well worn-out and not too-excited for some guests we’re having over this evening, so she and I came and parked on Dry Lane (ironically-named, it seems, as the road was flooded) and walked down to try to find this cache. Unfortunately we weren’t able to find it, this time, but we’ll try again next time we’re in the vicinity.
Our dog has decided that the perfect place to lie down at our holiday accommodation is… on a staircase whose carpet is the same colour as her!
I’m grateful for her very-visible blep… or I’d have tripped over this camouflaged pupper several times already!
I think the dog’s back paws were cold this evening. The giveaway was when she tucked them into a convenient nearby trouser pocket.
Unusually, we had no guests this Christmas Day. This meant that my usual level of overcatering went even further than normal.
A side effect of this is that a certain little doggo was delighted and surprised by her Boxing Day breakfast of roast goose!
A few pockets of the morning’s freezing fog still cling to the hedgerows as the dog and I set out on a chilly West Oxfordshire morning walk.
We got our dog a Christmas jumper.
My favourite thing about it is that its coat hanger contains instructions for use:
“Please insert dog” 🤣
This has been doing the rounds; I last saw it on Kev’s blog. I like that the social blogosphere’s doing this kind of fun activity again, these days1.
Umm… sometimes? Not as often as I should. Don’t tell my dentist!
Usually at least once a month, never more than once a week. I really took to heart some advice that if you’re using a fluoridated mouthwash then you shouldn’t do it close to when you brush your teeth (or you counteract the benefits), so my routine is that… when I remember and can be bothered to floss… I’ll floss and mouthwash, but like in the middle of the day.
And since I moved my bedroom (and bathroom) one floor further up our house, it’s harder to find the motivation to do so! So I’m probably flossing less. The unanticipated knock-on effect of extending your house!
I love a coffee to start a workday, but I have to be careful how much I consume because caffeine hits me pretty hard, even after a concentrated effort over the last 10 years or so to gradually increase my tolerance. I can manage a couple of mugs in the morning and be fine, now, but three coffees… or any in the mid-afternoon onwards… and I’m at risk of throwing off my ability to sleep later2.
I keep a bottle of water wherever I work to try to encourage myself to hydrate, because I’ve got medical evidence to show that I don’t drink enough water! It sometimes works.
Basic trainers for everyday use; comfortable boots for hiking; slippers for when I’m working. Nothing special.
I wear holes in footwear (and everything else I wear) faster than anybody I know, so nowadays I go for good-value comfort over any other considerations when buying shoes.
Varies, but if we’re eating out, I’m probably going to be ordering the most-chocolatey dessert on the menu.
The very first thing I do when I wake up is check how long it is before I need to get up, and make a decision about when I’m going to do so. I almost never need my alarm to wake me: I routinely wake up half an hour or so before my alarm would go off, most mornings. But exactly how early I wake directly impacts what I do next. If I’m well-rested and it’s early enough, I’ll plan on getting up and doing something productive: an early start to work, or some voluntary work for Three Rings, or some correspondence. If it’s close to the time I need to get up I’ll more-often just stay in bed and spend longer doing the actual answer I should give…
…because the “real” answer is probably: pick up my phone, and open up FreshRSS – almost always the first and last thing I do online in a day! I’ll skim the news and blogosphere and “set aside” for later anything I’d like to re-read or look at later on.
Honestly, I’m good where I am, thanks.
Sure, I was fitter and healthier in my 20s, and I had more free time in my early 30s… and there are certainly things I miss and get nostalgic about in any era of my life. But conversely: it took me a long, long time to “get my shit together” to the level I have now, and I wouldn’t want to have to go through all of the various bits of self-growth, therapy, etc. all over again!
So… sure, I’d be happy to transplant my intellect into 20-year-old me and take advantage of my higher energy level of the time for an extra decade or so3. But I wouldn’t go back even a decade if it meant that I had to go relearn and go through everything from that decade another time, no thanks!
Four. Ish.
They are:
The last photo I took was of myself wearing a “geek” hat. You’ve seen it, it’s above!
But the one before that was this picture of an extremely large bottle of champagne, with a banana for scale, that was delivered to my house earlier today:
Ruth and JTA celebrate their anniversary every few years with the “next size up” of champagne bottle, and this is the one they’re up to. This year, merely asking me to help them drink it probably won’t be sufficient (that’d still be two litres each!) so we’re probably going to have to get some friends over.
I took the photo to send to Ruth to reassure her that the bottle had arrived safely, after the previous attempt went… less well. I added the banana “for scale” before sharing the photo with some other friends, too.
PAW Patrol. No doubt.
You know all those 1980s kids TV shows that basically existed for no other purpose than as a marketing vehicle for a range of toys? I’m talking He-Man (and She-Ra), Transformers, G.I. Joe, Care Bears, M.A.S.K., Rainbow Brite, and My Little Pony. Well, those shows look good compared to PAW Patrol.
I was delighted when our kids graduated from PAW Patrol to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic because it’s an enormously better show (the songs kick ass, too) and we could finally shake off the hollow, pointless, internally-inconsistent advertisement that is PAW Patrol.
This is the single most-boring thing about me, and I’ve doubtless talked about it before. At some point between the age of about six and eight years old, I decided that I wanted to grow up and become… a computer programmer.
And then I designed the entirety of the rest of my education around that goal. I learned a variety of languages and paradigms under my own steam while setting myself up for a GCSE in IT, and then A-Levels in Maths and Computing, and then a Degree in Computer Science, and by the time I’d done all of that I was already working in the industry: self-actualised by 21.
Like I said: boring!
You should give this pointless quiz a go too. Ping/Webmention me if you do (or comment below, I suppose); I’d love to read what you write.
1 They’re internet memes, in the traditional sense, but sadly people usually use “meme” nowadays exclusively to describe image memes, and not other kinds of memetic Internet content. Just another example of our changing Internet language, which I’ve written about before. Sometimes they were silly quizzes (wanna know what Meat Loaf song I am?); sometimes they were about you and your friends. But images, they weren’t: that came later.
2 Or else I’ll get a proper jittery heart-flutter going!
3 I wouldn’t necessarily even miss the always-on, in-your-pocket, high-speed Internet of today: the Internet was pretty great back then, too!
4 Obviously an intergalactic hitch-hiker should include a bandana, perhaps as well as an equally-versatile towel, in their toolkit.
5 It’s not about privacy, although that’s a fringe benefit I suppose: mostly it’s about getting my food quicker! If I walk into Dominos wearing a geek hat and they’ve got pizza on the counter with a label on it that says it’s for “geek hat”, they’ll just hand it over, no questions, and I’m in-and-out in seconds.
6 JTA observed that similar excuses were used by people who resisted the rollout of mandatory seatbelt usage in cars, so possibly I’m the “bad guy” here.
7 From left to right, the single personality traits for each of the pups are (a) doesn’t like water, (b) is female, (c) likes naps, (d) is allergic to cats, (e) is clumsy, and (f) is completely fucking pointless.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Dogspinner is the Monday morning distraction you didn’t know you needed. Get that dog up to full speed! (It’s worth it for the sound effects alone.)
I had some difficulty using it on desktop because I use the Forbidden Resolutions. But it probably works fine for most people and is probably especially great on mobile.
I’d love to write a longer review to praise the art style and the concept, but there’s not much to say. Just… go and give it a shot; it’ll improve your day, I’m sure.
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
We made it to the end of another Bleptember, with a photo every day of my especially-bleppy young doggo.
Thanks for coming along for the ride. See you next year!
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
Somehow, even when she’s alert and focussed, our dog’s bleppy tongue makes her look at least a little bit dopey.
It’s the Twenty-Ninth of Bleptember; we’re almost done for another year!
This post is part of 🐶 Bleptember, a month-long celebration of our dog's inability to keep her tongue inside her mouth.
It’s a little wet and miserable this Twenty-Eighth of Bleptember, but what really perturbed this bleppy doggo was somebody she didn’t recognise moving a wheelie-bin outside their house. What could they want? Can they be trusted? Might they have ham? 🐶
