Tag: houses
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Dog tired
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. -
6-12 Months
"How long should we plan on renting another house to live in?" I asked, warily.
"Six to twelve months?" guessed the loss adjusters. -
The calm after the storm
This morning, from my Premier Inn window, the skies are clear. I could almost forget that, just 4 miles away, my house is full of water.
Today may well be a day of waders and damage assessment, conversations with insurance companies and of working out where we'll be living for the near future.
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Today, I can overhear the two guys who are digging a trench through my garden.
Guy 1: Does this look like a gas pipe to you?
Guy 2: Dunno. But we can't dig round it soo...😬
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I decided to take my meeting with my coach today in our house's new library, which my metamour JTA has recently been working hard on decorating, constructing, and filling with books. The room's not quite finished, but it made for a brilliant space for a bit of quiet reflection and self-growth work.
Alt
Dan, a white man with a ponytail, wearing a black shirt and jeans, sits in a rocking chair in front of an open laptop at a long desk; he has a notebook in his hand and holds a pen near his lips. He's in a domestic library with deep red walls, balanced-arm lamps, a woven rug on a wooden floor, and the wall behind him entirely covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. A grassy lawn and sapling trees can be seen through a window, bordered by floral curtains and two clumsily-placed WiFi routers that sit on the window ledge. On the corner of the desk lie various hand tools, suggesting that light construction work has recently taken place.
(Incidentally: I might be treating "lives in a house with a library" as a measure of personal success. Like: this is what winning at life looks like, right? Because whatever else goes wrong, at least you can go hide in the library!)
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Shared Email Addresses
I've long mocked people who've opted to use email addresses that they share with their partner, or email addresses that are tied to their geographic location... but it turns out that I've been doing the same thing for years, albeit only with aliases.
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Framing Device
This weekend I repaired an ill-fitting door, which I learned to do by watching my grandfather, over thirty years ago.
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Zap
This week, a live-to-earth fault on the grid resulted in me getting zapped with mains electricity. Unfortunately, it didn't give me superpowers, just a mildly-interesting anecdote and a partially-shaved chest.
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If you enjoy a bit of "cable gore", let me introduce you to the fusebox cupboard at my house, with its plethora of junctions, fuses, breakers, switches, timers, and cabling everywhere! Banana for scale.
Alt
A cupboard the height of a fully-grown adult containing several fuseboxes (two large, one medium, and a handful of single-fuse ones, with a mixture of traditional fuses and RCD breakers), a large switch toggling between mains and a generator, a mains timer, and copious wiring. There's a banana in there too.
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Installation of Windows has Stalled
I was told Windows installation should take less than 20 minutes, but these ones have been sitting outside my house all day while the builders sit on the roof and listen to the radio. Do I need a faster processor?
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[Bloganuary] Toilet Paper
There is a correct orientation in which to hang a roll of toilet paper, and it's the one that leaves the loose end hanging away from the wall. Fight me.
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Household Finances Revisited
A year or two ago, my polyfamily and I switched from an "income-assessed" to a "same-residual" model for managing our household expenditures. If the former could be described as "socialism at home", the latter is more like "household Universal Basic Income".
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Milk and Mail Notifications with Flic 2 Buttons
Dan deploys Flic 2 "smart buttons" to remind him to read his post and bring the milk in.
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Heatmapping my Movements
Leveraging a decade of past GPS data, Dan draws heatmaps of his movements around Oxfordshire.
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Building a Playframe (Timelapse Video)
Dan builds play equipment for the kids and shares a timelapse video of the process.