Orange Mobile Phones Do Work

I can blog, albeit with limited decorations and sidebar adornments. I can google/research really well. I can internet-shop globally. I can use word, powerpoint and excel. I can teach classrooms full of kids on computers and monitor them and their computer use AND still have all the keys left on the keyboards when they leave the room.

Three days ago I tripped over the mobile phone charger-lead and the phone fell to the floor and spilled its guts. Very carefully, I picked up all the pieces and replaced them in the cavities that matched the dimensions of the fallen parts like completing a jigsaw. Optimistically, I opened up the phone but it was DEAD.

Today, I went to the ORANGE shop in Darlo and stood in line at the service desk for about 15-20 minutes. When it was my turn I handed over my Motorola and gave them the sad story. I said I hoped that, perhaps, I had returned the parts upside down or something like that. The woman (blonde, attractive, tanned and with long finger nails which were not her own) said "what happened when you tried to turn it on?"!!! She then pressed one, long, decorated thumbnail into a squishy button bit on the right-hand side.

What do you mean...turn it on! Hasn't it always been on? It beams a small screen at me every time I open it up. It does some very useful things like...1) send phone calls to people whose numbers I can remember off by heart or who were thoughtful enough to put their number in my phonebook. 2) send msg things to people who don't mind my sorry lack of punctuation and realise that a long space between words is as good as a full stop.
It doesn't take photos, play tinny music into my ears on the bus or alert me when something momentous is about to happen and last but not least IT DOESN'T ALARM ME WHILE I'M IN THE QUEUE IN ASDA. It is just a phone and I put about £20 in it every six months and use it mainly for calling tradesmen who don't know what a landline is.

Anyway the long thumbnail treatment worked a treat! The light came back on and it dinged a few times. She smiled at me as I would smile at a dear old lady. I celebrated by buying a wand attachment for the hose so that I can water the hanging baskets without climbing a ladder.

If I can remember how to use the new camera, I'll take a pic of those hanging baskets tomorrow or the next day. Tomorrow I'm off to an auction sniffing out some books and then off to Durham Hospital for my annual check-up.

The summer has disappeared. I hope it is short lived because I have some sun-burn that needs evening out.

Cheers Gillian

EXTREME GARDENING

Well this is the front of the house. As you can see, the central strand of clematis and yellow climbing rose has fallen from the tenuous grasp it had on the central guttering and is hanging by the phone wire above the central bathroom window. There are extensions of the growths of these plants, to each side. I realised that the whole lot needed to come down because it was taking the wiring down, invading the pebble-dashing, blocking the view and light from the windows etc.
The problem is that when the job has been done the house will have a very different facade.

The first cut of the gardener's secateurs went straight through the phone wire! The cost of a BT call out is £115+£99 per hour. The gardener did a repair job himself in the end rather than face that bill and it all seems to be working well again.



It does look a bit bare...in fact it looks a lot barer than I expected. Well not really. I knew it would be bare. I am having the window boxes on the first floor removed as well. They cannot be gardened from the windows which do not open on the lower level. The double glazing provides an immovable lower layer and an upper awning opening.
At the end of the day all the climbing stuff will be gone.

It was a very warm day and J the gardener also "pollarded" the old apple tree at the front which had grown up into the wires above.

D had already made the front hedge and gate much smarter last week and ...

the old pond and ungainly tree and

much more was was removed in and around the front door.

I have told the Phoenix Centre that I don't wish to be in their "bank" of supply staff any more. I feel a bit of a failure for not wanting to go there any more but each time they phoned I realised how glad I was to be too busy.

More to come on that later. This picture shows some of the damage done to the garden by local children when they thought the house was vacant. I can do without spending my days trying to cope with such behaviour.

Cheers Gillian

MORE PROGRESS AND MY FIRST VISITOR

At the start of June each year, Travellers gather with their families, traditional wagons and horses for the trek across the Pennines to the Appleby Horse Fair. This family are returning home and there are many groups still camped on local roadsides enjoying the get-togethers.

Their snug caravans have even less space than my "snug" next to the kitchen. In the winter there will be a log fire and all the books I want within arms reach are beside my sofa.






There is even the original toilet behind me! A bit too intimate at times but very handy. From here, french windows lead to the gravelled area and a cat-flap allows Tigger to come and go as she pleases. This means that she now has her litter tray in the small shed and has caught on to this arrangement very quickly.



I made some sails to cover the empty spaces below the sink and to hide the recycling basket and stuff like that, and...




















I cleaned up the old fireplace and bakers oven and hung some chicken pictures and...




















I spray painted some chicken wire and cut it to size and stapled it to the inside of the cupboard doors of the china cupboard. I saw it in a magazine and thought it looked good. I'm happy with the result but I dont know how long it will be before the wire gets out of shape and saggy.















I also did lots of rearranging of goods and chattels and took dozens of empty banana boxes to the skip so I'm ready to show the house to my sister who arrives from Dorset tonight. She will have started her journey at about 8am and I will collect her from the Megabus stop at Scotch Corner at 10.10pm tonight. We will be at my place about 15 hours after she left home and then we shall talk a bit or so and some more.

Cheers Gillian

BACK ON LINE and IN MY OWN HOME

I have just read what I have written and realised that I have "blog-mouth". That is what you get when you haven't been able to blog for ages because you have moved house and BT haven't been as well organised as you and you suffer from withdrawal symptoms without an internet fix each day.

This pic shows me cooking my first real meal in my new kitchen. It was
"Sung Choi Bao" from Kylie Kwong's lovely book of recipes and stories. She is, as her name suggests, a Chinese Australian. Many of the early Chinese settlers have kept their ethnicity even after quite a few generations as Australians and there is a rich tradition of Chinese (and other asian) cuisine in Oz. They were the first "take-aways" in Geelong, where I lived for a few years in the early 70s, and I remember lining up with saucepans to be filled and taken home to be swiftly reheated. This was in the days before plastic containers and plastic carrier bags.

I must say that there are less Chinese ingredients on the shelves here in the UK. I seek Sichuan pepper. Indian cuisine is catered for more than Chinese and Thai only seems to come in packets. I have noticed that Milton Keynes Fresh Food Market caters very well for a large variety of fresh fruit and veg and very good prices too. It serves its market. The market here, in Bishop Auckland, is for pastry and bread. Pies, baps and stotties abound. The favoured meat is pork and it is usually served as bacon or sausage. Apparently most coal miners kept a pig out the back and slaughtered it at the years end, so pork is still a favourite. I shop for meat at the local farm shop and have been thrilled with the quality and consistency AND PRICE.

As you can see, I have calmed down the colour scheme and added an extractor to keep the air cleaner and changed the lights...and as you cannot see, I have also stabilised the taps, cleaned the cupboards out and been down to the tip quite a few times. The woman at the tip looks forward to seeing me arrive and has taken the old light fitting away as if it was a great treasure. I'm so glad. I hated it. This light is not enough and another one will be added soon.


I went the whole hog and bought a TV for the kitchen!!! Well why not? I can keep an eye on things while I stir my pots. The armchair is Tigger's scratching post and hides her litter tray, although there are plans afoot to train her to use a litter tray in the small shed, now she has become an expert at using the newly installed cat-flap. She settled in remarkably quickly after having a sojourn at the local cattery while the move was on.

I had the chimneys swept before moving in and had a "living flame" gas fire put in the sitting room, then I had chimney cappings put on and then.... we had the "HAILSTORM OF THE CENTURY".
The hailstones weren't enormous but were rapid and fell straight down the chimneys. Quite a bit of soot was dislodged and the garden was inches thick in a few minutes.

D went to put some stuff away in the shed and forgot that there was a pond below the white stuff. He came in with a very,cold, wet right foot and as you can see by the out-lying stones, there wasn't much to indicate where the pond was until it all melted.

I spent a bit of money on a couple of blokes who scraped, sanded, filled and painted the stairwell. It is a three storeyed place and there are two flights of these convoluted stairs. They look so much better without the polystyrene ceiling tiles, thirty years of embossd wallpaper covered with regular doses of emulsion and frequently added nail holes and patch-ups. Oh I love the stairs and they will keep me fit. I had the stairwell painted in a Dulux paint that says it will reflect more light and I will eventually have the stairs carpeted. I looked into lovely stripey runners but they are very pricey and the stairs are not that well looked after at the edges. Top floor is next to be done.

Cheers to everyone,

I will catch up with my reading of blogs soon

Gillian

New House coming up

I shall be moving to a new house in a couple of weeks. I have got myself organised and it will be...pick up keys on day 1, day 2 will be get together with Ted/the/handyman to rip up the bits of left-over carpet and any more stuff we can do, the next day will be a total clean from top to bottom by Sue and Gillian and then after the weekend, Ted will return to start painting and decorating. The people putting in the new gas fire will also arrive during that week and the TV aerials will be installed. THEN I shall send you a better picture of it all and news of how it's going.

Cheers Gillian

THE PHOENIX CENTRE

It's a lovely name for an educational centre which aspires to create new students from the ashes of their pasts. These people are only in their teens and so often their pasts have been worthy of a good bonfire that they deserve a place, safe from further scorches.

Okay, that was probably an over the top slushy, intro....but I had had it up to my eyebrows by lunchtime today and did what most of them do if they don't like it and walked out. I was heartily sick and tired of being insulted, ignored, treated like a piece of sh-t. I was on my way to the Principal to inform her about the bad behaviour of a couple of girls and went past the front door. I thought to myself........I can go home through that door! So in the end I went to inform the Principal that I intended to do just that. We sat down and talked it through. Yes! I am appreciated. The abuse is in fact a form of communication and signifies that I am on their radar and not hated and loathed as they successfully attempt to make me feel.

I shall return for another dose tomorrow. I don't give up easily but I am wondering if this is the way for me.

There are no pics with this because I still have not had my replacement Hewlett Packard camera from the Camera Shop in Darlington. I am getting a bit narked by that!!!

Everything else is going really well and my dashingly dark eyelashes (dyed again this evening by darling Debbie) are fluttering, the house purchase is moving ahead, the job will be fine and I'm an expert at moving house by now. Tigger is a happy cat. Dave is working and happy about driving enormous articulated trucks about the place. We shall gather in France in August with Trish etc .....Good Stuff All Round

Cheers Gillian

BLACKHALL ROCKS

I got a "thingy" in my camera and every shot came out with a little knot of dust in the middle, so I took it back to the shop. They sent it to the suppliers who agreed that I should get a replacement. That was many weeks ago and I got sick of waiting politely. I also got sick after my last call-in to school and have spent a couple of weeks recovering from a chest infection.

Last time I would not leave the shop until they had phoned to find out what was going on. After half an hour it transpired that nothing was going on because they had sort of forgotten that they were meant to be doing anything and so they assured me that they would start again and I would get the replacement camera in a few days. It is now a few days but I have to work for the next three days so hope to get the new one at the weekend.

So I took my old 2 megapixel kodak on an outing to Blackhall Rocks to walk the beach and cliffs and view the Industrial Revolution archaeology in the remains littering the beach. The picture above shows the black scars of the eroding "slag heaps". These are the coal waste dumps left on the beach. The collieries were on the cliff tops and the coal mines were the ones that went out under the seabed of the North Sea for a mile or so. My uncles told me how water dripped from the roof of the workings and it was salty to the taste!

Mind you I don't want to waste the weekend at the camera shop; I want to go to the Garden Sale at Addisons Auctions at the weekend to get some stuff for the garden at the "new" house. Yes! I shall be on the move again in a few weeks but hopefully this is the last time because I have purchased instead of leasing. There is a lovely but small garden and it needs some care and attention.

The cliffs at Blackhall Rocks are a friable magnesian limestone, with remarkable caves. The limestone is topped with a thick layer of glacial boulder clay from the last Ice Age (now grass covered) and underlain by the much older carboniferous layers which contain the coal seams. On the beach is an amazingly disgusting and very thick layer of solid sludge. This is a couple of metres deep and is slowly being eroded away by wave action.

There are miles of this layer, which is the remains of centuries of dumping all the muck over the cliff onto the beach and hoping that the sea would act as a giant toilet and the tides would flush it all away. The boulders embedded in this thick, brown-grey fudge are not natural pebbles but rounded bricks, worn concrete conglomerates and vast lumps of klinker. The klinker is left from furnace bases. Industry ceased here a few decades ago. The mines closed and the works were demolished, the slag heaps re-vegetated and the area re-landscaped. The sea is still battling to remove the sludge layer and storms do great good here.




There was a movie starring Michael Caine (now Sir!) made "oop north" a few decades ago. The bad, baddie was disposed of by MC and loaded into a slag bucket and trundled on a sort of aerial cableway, off the nose of this cliff into the sea. I can't find an old pic to link to right now but there are plenty around.


We sat atop the cliffs in the sunshine to eat our picnic (I made some scotch eggs...simple but messy and much enjoyed). We could see to Sunderland and beyond to the north and Hartlepool and the billowing chimneys of Billingham to the south. We could see eight people!!!


More news soon about the house. I'm awaiting certainty before blogging with pics.

Cheers Gillian