Aquarionics

Medium Distance Relationships

Woot, Yay, and expressions of excessive joy.

I’m back to a medium distance relationship despite living with my girlfriend. Woot. yay. Great.

The thing I was going to rant about, yet wasn’t allowed to, was this: LoneCat, my girlfriend, has been attempting to find a job ever since she completed her masters degree just over a year ago. The very fact it’s taken her this long to find one is a damning statement about the economy and everything, but this is something else. For the rest of this article I’m going to assume that her parents are never going to read it, which may be stupid, but I’m going to do it anyway. Her parents don’t really like the fact that she moved out. Can’t deal with it. Their reaction to this is not to do as my parents did and deal with it, but to rearrange things so she moves back. This rearrangement takes the form of applying her for jobs around Bedford (where they are, which is about an hour north of London. We live about half an hour west of London. For comparison, it takes about 45 minutes to get from the station we come into to the station to get to Bedford).

This has now worked. LoneCat starts work, as of tomorrow morning, in Letchworth, which is just south of Bedford, for a week. If this works out, she will be there full time. During this, she will stay at her grandparent’s house. If it works out, she’ll move back in with her parents until we can both move somewhere new, like Stevenage, which is between where she works in Letchworth and where I work in Kings Cross, London. The notice on this place is two months, which means that if she gets the job – and I’m fairly sure she will – we will be in a Medium Distance Relationship where we only see each other at weekends. In other words, back to how we were last year.

It looks like I’m moving house again, then. Considering we moved into this place in Mid-May (after moving out of Cambridge on April 1^st) I can’t help but feel this is a little soon. Not that I particually like this flat, or anything. It’s just…

I’ve really got nothing to complain about. It sucks more for her than for me, esspecially since she’s playing half-rent on a place she’ll only see two days a week, but I thought when we finally moved in together that would be the end of the whole ‘Weekends Only’ thing.

So, anyone know anything useful about Stevenage?

So

It’s been an Interesting Week on Planet Aquarion. The big news is that my SO is – finally – in permenant work after over a year of searching. The bad news – from my point of view – is that it’s in Letchworth, about half an hour north of London. We are in Reading, about a half an hour west of London. Going across London is about a half hour, and, generally, it’s too far to commute. So LoneCat is living with her Grandparents near Letchworth, and we are planning to move again.

We’ve only lived here six months, and we’re now moving back to almost where we moved from. Great.

My current plans involve a certian paranoia in not, under any circumstances, allowing what happened last time to happen this time too. Last time we moved out of Cambridge on 1^st April. We finally moved into Reading in mid-May. A month and a half sleeping on sofas with 90% of my belongings in storage was unpleasant, and I have no intention of doing it again. The other down side is that this house requires 60 days notice on moving out, as opposed to the 30 days the previous house required, which means even if we move out tomorrow (unlikely) we will still be paying rent until the end of January. (Probably. I may have a way around this).

On top of all this, our Letting Agents decided not to honour LC’s letter of intent from Reading Council to pay her housing benefit (It was delayed by 12 weeks by the time it was delivered last week) by sending us a letter stating this fact, and then a week later with an eviction notice. This was also sorted.

Last friday was the final deadline for the first version of my project at work. I dislike 12 hour days, but when I was unable to go into work on the Thursday because I was too ill, I didn’t get much choice.

Oh, and apparently it’s nearly christmas. Yay.

But yesterday I went to Cambridge and met people, and played fun games, and saw LoneCat, and this was Good.

Now, everyone should watch University Challange tonight (BBC2, 8.30) because my friend is on it (Warner, Caius).

And Ccooke and Ruthi are engaged. Congratulations :-)

Content soonish. Promise.

Pause

I’m writing again. All else is suspended until further notice.

In case I forget to mention it, or haven’t bounced at you yet, or anything:

We have a house. We are moving. We sign the contracts on the weekend of the 24^th, and move soon after. Yay.

Housing

The house.

That we.

Were due.

To move into.

This Saturday.

Has just.

Gone off.

The market.

I am less than happy right now.

Blogies and Pie

Ah well, another year goes past and I’m not nominated for a Bloggie or anything. I shall withhold my disappointment and carry on with a tear in my eye…

The amount of ways I’m screwed has decreased by three since my paycheque cleared today, which lead to me being able to get to work this morning, always a bonus.

On the minus side, we have a governmental inspection tomorrow to prove we actually exist and haven’t been Dot-Coming the money for the last six months.

...and winamp starts playing ‘Our House’ ...

House has gone away. No more empty houses in Letchworth, back to flats. I want a house, damnit. Three weeks and counting until we become homeless. For the second time – for me – in twelve months.

I’d love to be able to regale you with new content, but the most amusing thing that happened to me recently was losing my glasses.

I wear glasses all the time, because I’m obviously defective and lazy, and have done since I was about 10. My first pair of glasses I left on the roof of our car when we were on holiday in France, and left them there. Forward, reverse, crunch. Since replacing that pair I’ve worn glasses almost constantly, and until a couple of years ago, this was partly because not wearing my glasses gave me acute agoraphobia, which led to a general reluctance to take them off when outside. My method of countering this is to walk home from work despectacled once in a while, which meant that not having my glasses annoyed me, instead of sending me into a panic.

I found them. Eventually. Apparently at 2am I’d put them on the windowsill to my bed’s left, instead of the usual place on the right, and they’d fallen off and slid under the bed. It took me about 4 hours to find them – on and off – while my 21” monitor sat at 640×480, I tried to stop being taken to court, and I got the message as posted yesterday that I was no longer moving house.

Yesterday, in a very real way, sucked.

Fortunatly this is a fairytale that ended happily, since not only did I find my glasses and my watch (Which has been missing so long it was still on Daylight Savings) Pol & Supermouse decided they needed Emergency Pie, and since the best pie shop in the world is in Reading (It’s called “Sweeney Todd’s”, it’s next to a barber shop, and it serves Good Pie.

After this there was Tea, conversation and pimping of good books, and they went home and I went to bed.

And now I’m going home.

Trading up is hard to do

Okay, I’m now six weeks ahead on Header graphics changes, which may be a little far. OTOH, the last two have been pushed back so I could get the next few in, some of which are obscure to the point that I’m going to need to write at least three paragraphs to explain them, others are just one-off jokes.

Still others don’t have a semi-amusing tagline. Shock, horror.

Headers are now, as I mentioned, sticky, so the header that was displaying at the time that the top article you can see was active will be the one in the heading. For permalinked items, this will always be the directly related articles, for archives it will be the one for that month – or the first week of that month – etc etc.

This header was due to run over the week that I took off work to move house and get everything in the new place sorted. Unlike Jeremy, however, our moving-house exercise has been thwarted.

The monday before we were due to move in, the house we were about to move into vanished off the market due to ‘personal matters’. You could take that as a sign that should we have got it, we wouldn’t want a landlady quite that uncooperative. Personally, I take it as a personal insult, but nevermind.

The flat we agreed – last weekend – would do for now until we got a better place (Reluctantly. I’m fed up with planning on moving less than a year after I move somewhere) was gone by the time we placed an offer.

There are no more.

So, it looks like the Move To Letchworth may become a Move To Hitchin, or Bullcock Baldock, or somewhere, but has no chance of resolving before the 9^th, which is when the notice on this place runs out.

So I’m going to be living with my parents again, Yay Kipper-ness

Anyway, the header. The tagline came as an idea while we were going though the whole moving thing, and the original picture (which is attached to this post) was taken on a whim in Reading when I was wandering to work one morning and saw this huge row of For Sale signs.

In case anyone doubts Vanderpump & Wellbelove’s existance (Our infamous letting agent) the sign on the right is proof.

Attachments

• The original image for this week's header

Moving

Can’t blog, floor will eat me.

Outcome

To: The world in general

So, Lonecat has now moved out of the flat.

There is an empty room where her stuff once was.

I would like, if this would be possible, to have a house at some point soon.

I would also like not to move next year. That would be nice. An entire 12 month period where I’m living in the same house and have a job would be a novelty. In fact, just the house would be good.

I would also – and this is a concentrated attempt to limit the amount of pathetic whinging that characterised the first year or so of the diary to a single sentance – would like things to stop getting worse, just for a little while, so I can shovel this particular mountain of shit before the next one arrives.

That’d be great. KThxBye

Faithfully yours,

Nicholas Avenell.

Seven days remaining

• Anti-valentines
• Alternate & Anti-Valentines

On a less Valentiney note:

• New house

Gone

That’s it, I’ve left Reading.

Ah well, another house bites the dust…

Me upon my pony on my boat

The idea was that headers should go with weeks.

You may have noticed (Those in RSS readers may have not) that the header graphic for Aquarionics changes weekly. I spend a fair amount of time designing these things, and a major reason why I don’t like full-text feeds is because every page ends up looking the same.

But anyway.

The picture is a good example of why I’m a designer and not an artist. There was, at one stage of the design, a small child upon a pony on the boat, but since my ability to draw boats is a couple of thousand times better than my ability to draw ponies, which in itself is far above my ability to draw people, you get the boat.

It’s blue. You’d need somewhere else for other coloured ones.

The origin is a little obscure (Although it’s obscurity pales in comparison to some of those in the next few weeks), as it comes from a song I’ve never heard, which was covered by a band who’s music I like a lot, Eddie From Ohio. The original song is by Lyle Lovett. You can listen to the EFO version here

So why now?

Because I plan ahead. And, in this case, I was three weeks ahead when I queued this. Last week I was supposed to have a major work deadline (Which happened, but not in the way it was going to) and also have just moved house (Which didn’t) (Grr), both of which were going to cause Aquarionics to retreat into more of a personal journal for a while as I was probably going to be on holiday from work and dealing with house-issues while that happened. It was going to become more about me, thus a self-centred tagline. See? I do calculate these things.

Sadly the housing thing didn’t work out (Status on that is that we’re still filling in forms and waiting for references). I didn’t plan to wander off for four days without posting, either, that sort of just happened. Most of the stuff that’s making my life interesting right now is unbloggable, partly because it’s deathly dull, but mostly because it’s either work ($foo came onto the market a couple of days ago, it’s pretty close to what we’re doing) or something I don’t want online (under this category would fall ‘breaking the law’, for example) (No, I haven’t broken the law) (Probably) (Actually, I’ve forgotten the password to a shell account, so I could be arrested for that)

So, I’m living with my parents and brothers again. Yay Life.

The Great Move

Okay, so we move into the new house on Saturday morning. The last six months of only seeing my SO at weekends (And hardly at all since christmas), two months of dealing with all the hassles of getting a new house, and one month of living out of a box with my parents and brothers will soon be over. I will have a room again, a house again, a girlfriend again.

Then things will be better.

Sortly after that is the crunch period at work, which may or may not leave me still employed. Either way would be better than now, when I’m not actually making a profit on having a job.

So then things will be better.

Right now, though, the final screw is being twisted by my old Landlord, who took our old house off the market just after we moved out. Our letting agency failed to take either a gas or electricity meter reading. Since they no longer have the keys, they can’t do this now.

This means that the final bill from our gas and electricty is an estimated bill, and is on the high side of astronomical, and I can’t get it to a real number because I can’t get a meter reading.

Love moving house. Do it every year. Stress free.

Free as in beer.

Unwashed cleaned up

Since I apparently wasn’t clear in the previous post on the subject:

1. I stop being paid on the 17^th
2. A number of groups have expressed the intention of hiring me
3. Neither are able to do so right now
4. Therefore, as of the 17^th I’m unemployed until one of the groups gets the ability to employ me.

This could take anything from three weeks to – as has previously happened – nine months.

So, just in case anyone remains confused by the above set of statements, the below expression of paranoia, and the general level of luck I have finding employment, this comes under the heading of being “A Bad Thing” but not as bad as last time.

I’ve spent large parts of today outside lifting things. First, we had a rockary delivered and me and Brother Two helped unload it. (During this, I mentioned that I’d specifically gone into a career of indoor work with no heavy lifting. He noted that in return for a lack of heavy lifting, I get extra doses of stress while he – who shifts stuff around warehouses – gets the heavy lifting but no stress at all. He does have a point). Later we fetched a van to load my life’s posessions in ready for the moving in bit tomorrow morning, loading it from the piles of boxes that have been sitting in my grandparents’ garage for a month.

The whole ‘months gap between moving’ thing isn’t going to happen again.

Admittedly, I said that last time.

Anyway, so at 9am tomorrow morning we will be signing contracts for the new house. Yay. A week after that my paycheque stops, Non-yay.

On the other hand, Shaun of the dead opens next month.

Early bird catches the worm

There is a special hell reserved for South East Trains who have chosen tomorrow as the ideal weekend to stop all trains between TFT of Paddock Wood and London. In fact, I will have to catch a bus.

I hate buses.

And, because buses take longer than trains, in order to get to Letchworth by 09:00 to sign the contracts, I’m going to have to catch the bus that allegedally leaves TFTPW Station at 05:20

That’s twenty past five in the morning.

On a saturday.

Meh.

Oh well, at least I’ll have a house.

(This, By the way, Is Journal Entry 1337. Phear me, for I am L33t!)

Moved

So, we’ve moved then.

A 4am start on Saturday got us into our new house at about 10:30am, two transits full of stuff arrived, and we still have boxes everywhere.

The new house doesn’t get ADSL, but does get NTL cable, which may be a problem (Running mail servers from cable modems is not fun) but will be an Education.

The new house is glorious. It looks like this:

Attachments

• The new house, Thumbnail
• The new house, Medium

Yay lack of dialup

Typical. The day NTL are due to install the Whizzy Cool broadband connection, I manage to connect to the wireless network of some random person who lives nearby and who, apparently, can get ADSL.

Yay onlineness.

Twoo

So, I’m reinstalling Gentoo on my desktop in the hope that this time I’ll stick with it. I’m getting quite good at going though the install sequence, although since they did major revisions in January and my boot disc was from 2002 I’ve spent some time translating stuff for the new world.

Oh, and Java failed to compile last night, but it was fixed this morning, so that’s all right then.

This has given me a unique oppertunity to discover what the web looks like from lynx, since it’s the only browser I can use whilst the compile is happening. Somewhat to my suprise, Aquarionics works quite well (As do most – but not all – CSS based designs), though ATI lose points for making their “Which driver” dialog javascript dependant, so I’ll have to do that from X. Grr.

Today, whilst Gentoo was compiling, I went shopping. This was primarily to buy things, but also to explore Letchworth. I’ve lived here for three weeks now, and this is really the first time I’ve actually explored the place. It’s nice. It has a great mix of generic branded shops (Dixons etc.) along with the little single shops that I prefer. This means that I’ve acutally mangaged to conform with my oft-intended “Support your local trader” ethos, and get stuff from butchers etc. rather than picking it all up at Sainsbury’s. The primary benefit of a supermarket is that it’s all in one place and you can get everything at once, but since both me and LC are constrained by what we can carry on our bicycles anyway bulk isn’t a useful attribute, so getting stuff in individual shops is actually easier.

Letchworth also has a shop which I fear will be my undoing. It’s called “David’s Bookshop”. It sells both first and second hand books, is next to “David’s Music” which does the same for other media, and contains an Aladdin’s cave of stuff that made me glad I didn’t have much cash on me. As it is, I escaped with merely an old copy of the Good Housekeeping Cookbook (A Real Cookbook. One that tells you how to roast a shoulder of lamb, make dumplings and cook bread rather than a thousand and one uses for olive oil) and an Oscar Wilde complete plays volume. This, I feel, is me getting off lightly since last time LoneCat went in there she came out with a complete set of Agatha Christie books in hard-back.

Oh, and I found some gloves. They’re slightly too small, have embroidered snowflakes on them, and look slightly silly. They do, however, enable me to retain the ability to bend my fingers after cycling to town and back. This is meant to be spring, damnit. It shouldn’t hail on me while I’m cycling…

Casarufus as The Sims

Following the grand tradition I’ve rendered our new house in The Sims again. Took a while, mostly because I can’t do it in game, as none of my Sims could afford to live in a house with so much stuff…

Lines of Communication

Our garage door is broken, one of the wires that allow us to open it has snapped, leaving it jammed open.

So I phone our letting agents, who phone our landlord, who says she’ll get the builders to phone me.

Nothing happens.

So I phone our letting agents, who phone our landlord, who says she’ll phone the letting agents, who phone me.

Nothing continues to happen.

So I phone our letting agents (imagine about a days gap between every paragraph break here. The door has been broken a week now) who phone the landlord, who phones the builders, who subcontract out the door repair to “Acorn doors”, who tell the builders to tell the landlord to tell the letting agents to tell me that they’ll phone me on tuesday to arrange a time to fix the door.

If that doesn’t happen, I’m to phone the letting agents.