08/16/2006

An Englishman's home is his castle.

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35 minutes ago (at 2am) someone rang the doorbell of my house. When I opened the door there was a guy in his late 20s to early 30s swaying on his feet. He asked me if I'd found his mobile phone!!!!

Despite my repeated suggestions that he come back and find it in the morning and that he make his way home, for almost 15 minutes he staggered around in the middle of the road, backwards and forwards, stopping every now and then to look at the front gardens of my neighbours and my house. More often mine than theirs - I guess because the front of our house has brighter lights than the others.

He refused to move on and kept muttering that he'd also lost his TAG Heuer watch.

I'm not particularly nervous but this guy for some reason really spooked me.

On a number of occasions over the 15 minutes, I threatened to call the Police. Eventually, I did.

When they arrived about 10 minutes later, he'd staggered off down the road. Even though I watched him for some time - his progress wasn't that quick - when the Police started searching for hi he was nowhere to be found! I was sure he'd gone into the back garden of the house 2 doors along.

The Police went into both of my neighbours back gardens - unfortunately, some lights came on in the house 2 doors down so they'll probably be making a 999 call for what they think is someone in their back garden - but the Police put a notice through their letter box to let them know it was them, not an intruder. I'll have to pop around tomorrow and let them know the full story.

My house is at least 5 miles from the nearest pub so drunks aren't usually an issue here. Ringing my doorbell at 2am was the only thing that even alerted me to his presence.

After the Police had been searching for him for 15 minutes there wasn't much else they could do other than to drive around the area to see if they could find him. Worst of all, I felt VERY embarrassed that it I'd made the emergency call and they'd not been able to find anyone!!!!!

Whilst I'm glad that guns don't proliferate in the UK as they do in the US, I'd have quite happily pointed a loaded gun up this guy's ar*e to get him away from the house - and the neighbours properties - bearing in mind that my wife and one of my kids were upstairs asleep!

If I see him around here again I think I'll just lay one on him, then call the Police to let them know that a drunk has fallen over in the front of my house and has banged his face up a bit.

Sleep tight!!!

07/13/2004

Is the tide turning?

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Something finally went right. I went to PC World at Farnborough to get a new PSU for the system that "blew up" last night. As I came out of the store a Tornado (the fighter plane type not the strong wind type) was just coming in to land after his aerobatic display test for the forthcoming Air Show. What a sight (and sound).

 

When I got back, I took the server out of my office, opened it up, hoovered it out, fitted the new power supply, switched it on and after a couple of re-boots whilst fiddling with the power and controller cables, the system started and all the drives powered up. Relief. If I'd plugged the mouse and keyboard cables back into the correct connectors it would probably have re-started second time (one of the SCSI drives is a bit old and takes a few seconds to power-up).

 

The insurance assessor is coming next Wednesday (not tomorrow, in 8 days time). He's probably going to get a bit of a shock (or perhaps not) when he finds out how much it's going to cost to put things right at Cassa Redloh! Still, that's what we pay insurance premiums for right?

07/12/2004

The continuing floor saga.

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Well the lounge is kinda back into something resembling normality. A good 3/4 of the parquet floor has now been removed (thanks to my son Tom and "She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed". The musky, damp smell is worse now of course but hopefully this will allow any remaining moisture to evaporate and the smell to subside

 

I've been musing over the possible routes forward to get this resolved now. The Gas Board are coming back on Friday to see if any water has gone from the header tank having tied up the valve so it won't re-fill automatically. I'll elaborate later (if it happens) as to what they suggested the resolution would be if this were the case i.e. the central heating system WAS leaking somewhere

 

I spoke to a good mate of mine who's a builder (he's actually part of the company that built the extensions on the house) about how to repair the floor now that it's had holes drilled into it (here's some pictures) and that the part where the parquet flooring was is not sone 10mm lower than the floor of the extension and what was the entrance to the kitchen. He says the only proper way to deal with it is to dig out the 5-6cm of the concrete and then re-lay the whole lot. That'll mean moving out of the house for a good couple of days whilst it's dug out and re-laid and we won't be able to put the wooden flooring back down for around a month afterwards to allow the concrete to fully dry.

 

Jeez, what a nightmare! (And we've only notified the insurance company that we'll be making a claim. They have no idea how much it's gonna be yet. They'll have kittens when hey find out)

07/12/2004

The house is like a building site

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I mentioned last week that the flooring in the lounge had to be taken up (partially) as the parquet flooring had "popped" up making a big bump in the floor. The Gas Board are here at the moment, digging holes in the concrete sub-floor to try and find where the moisture has come from. The more parquet flooring they take up, the worse the damp smell gets (and the more holes there are.

 

The missus is starting to get upset. There was major disruption in the house when the extensions were built on the front and back of the house 3 years ago.

 

It's taken ages to get the decoration and the flooring as we wanted it. Now that's all been ripped up to this moisture. There's dust everywhere, the furniture's piled up in the corner and the TV/video/DVD/surround sound system has all been disconnected so we could move. That'll take me a month of Sunday's to get all set up again