2007 — 8 October: rather dull-looking Monday

Time now (08:08) and the milkman's overnight delivery of pink grapefruit juice is on its way down. Time to study the clues we failed to get right on Saturday's crossword. "Bitumen", heh? Not "asphalt" — bah, humbug!

Today's first adventure

Struggle up into the loft with three more PO boxes of re-ripped CDs (from back in June) to declutter Junior's room by approximately the same volume as the two PC boxes now living there rather than in the less friendly climate of the garage. Replace the bulb up there by a Lidl low-energy special (for the next 5,000 hours or so) and make vague plans to wire in several more bulbs to make the whole enterprise slightly less of a hazard. Consider nailing down some of the floorboards that have gradually accumulated up there to make the whole enterprise slightly less of a hazard, too.

To describe our loft as "full" is a bit of an understatement. We still have a couple of boxes up there that were moved, without critical examination of their contents, from the loft of our previous house¹ in Old Windsor in 1981.

We have a non-paying guest

I mentioned recently that we have two sheds (for those of you who remember your Monty Python). Look closely at the middle window of Shed #2 here... then give up, and click the pic.

Footnotes

¹  Isn't it amazing how big a new house seems when you first move into it, poor as a churchmouse (29 years old, and on a supposedly high IBM² salary, yet!) with a baby and a non-earning wife? Mind you, we were able to trade up from a then 25-year-old three bedroom semi (under Heathrow's flight-path — Concorde used to go over so low we almost felt we could look down at the pilot, as well as feel the Olympus engines) that cost us £14,650 in April³ 1976 to our present (then new) four bedroom detached house that cost us nearly three times as much in July 1981.
²  Well, it was 13% higher than my ICL salary at the time, but I was (literally) busy supplementing that salary to make ends meet by freelance programming and writing to bring in another 50% or so. IBM took a dim view of this, insisting at one point on seeing my Income Tax declaration to make sure I'd stopped. I took a pretty dim view of that I don't mind telling you!
³  That was an horrendous month — I had my tonsils out and picked up a doozy of a post-operative infection.