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Week 173: Floored
You wouldn’t believe how much of a palaver it is to buy flooring. After several cycles of order samples – choose one we liked – find it’s been discontinued – repeat, I was finally able to order something. That flooring had also been discontinued, but there was just enough remaining in stock.
It’s just oak-topped engineered wood. Nothing particularly unusual. Are our requirements too niche? Our tastes too passé?
Our house has walls again and new floors that don’t squeak. It didn’t take them long at all, and they’re not even charging much for it. Rebuilding all the internal walls was one of the cheaper jobs, in fact.
We also have a new loft hatch that opens along the landing, a much more sensible arrangement. The ladder folds up into the envelope of the door, the aperture is larger, and we no longer have the dangerous sliding metal ladder that nearly took my fingers off. Good riddance.
We took a train to Abergavenny for the weekend and hiked up Pen-y-Fâl (also called the Sugar Loaf, along with dozens of other mountains including at least one more in Wales) in increasingly miserable weather. As we reached the summit, the clouds rolled in until nothing was visible beyond the peak. Despite the cold and wet, I still enjoyed it, as I did a pint of beer and a vegetable chilli in a warm pub afterwards.
The view, such as it was, from the peak
We passed horses and their foals on the way up
The trip there was subject to the usual delays of British railways, so we missed our intended connection and had to wait about 40 minutes for the next train from Newport to Abergavenny, a tiny single-carriage diesel unit plodding its way through the Marches to Crewe. That’s another Delay Repay claim, already submitted and accepted, and due to repay us 25% of the fare.
After the miserable Saturday weather, Sunday was clear with blue skies.
The Blorenge seen from the castle
Abergavenny itself is quite a fancy town, with galleries and craft shops and a zero waste store, plenty of cafés and restaurants, and relatively few vape shops and bookmakers.
I didn’t hear any Welsh spoken except in railway announcements.
What do Chester (in England) and Luxor (in Egypt) have in common? I read a passing comment that they shared an etymon, so I looked it up. Latin castrum “fortress” → Old English ċeaster → Chester (plus a whole lot of other place names ending in —chester or —caster). Meanwhile, Latin castrum → Arabic قَصْر (qaṣr) “castle” or “palace” → الأقصر (al-ʾuqṣur) “the palaces” → Luxor (in English). As for the word “castle”, it’s from castellum, the diminutive form of castrum
Links I’ve found:
- Crunching worms, squeaking voles, drumming ants: how scientists are learning to eavesdrop on the sounds of soil. Includes audio samples!
- Passkeys: A Shattered Dream.
- Manual Supports For 3D Printing. Supporting PLA 3D prints with PETG forms, to which they won’t adhere.
- Relatively Universal ROM Programmer Hardware to program a W27C512 EEPROM or any 24/28/32 pin ROM requiring a 5 V to 27 V programming voltage. Buy or build your own.
- Bill Gates, Man United and 20 other sites that ban linking to them. Strange to see this unenforceable tosh still out there, decades on.
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Week 172: Tear down this wall
My train back from Weymouth was also delayed but as I was already entitled to a complete refund of my return journey, I couldn’t get refunded any more. They won’t pay you to take the train. However, my Delay Repay refund, applied for on Friday, is already in my account. That was surprisingly efficient.
Week 171: Intense burst of activity
The builders turned up on Monday, and told us that, contrary to previous plans, we really needed to have everything out of the house for them to be able to work effectively.
Week 170: Serving the song
Very late, very minimal weeknotes this week, for reasons that will become apparent in next week’s edition.
Using the brown M&M’s trick on Freecycle
As we’re having a new kitchen installed shortly, the old freestanding dishwasher that came with the house is surplus to requirements, and its most likely fate would be a skip and thence landfill. I don’t like that, and I’d rather see it live out the rest of its life in a loving home.
Older entries can be found in the archive.