Monday 2 October 2023
It’s 10:51 and we are awaiting the arrival of telecoms engineers to hopefully repair whatever is wrong with our WiFi and to get us ready for fibre broadband from 10 October. Fortunately, one of our three WiFi signals is working (the outdoor one) so we can do basic things online. It’s annoying. I’ve only experienced the absence of constant WiFi since Saturday; Chris has managed a week. Well, I say ‘managed’; he’s not been quiet about complaining.
On top of the WiFi issues, the house is now wintery cold even though outdoors is not particularly cold. According to the app on my PC, it’s currently 11°C outdoors. It feels colder indoors but my meat thermometer says it’s 14°C and I’m not wearing the coat I’d be wearing outdoors. We haven’t bothered to put the heating on yet as it’s not cold enough to justify the expense of powering up a very weedy heating system but I suspect the mini fan heaters will be making an appearance soon. I appear not to have acclimatised to autumn/Scotland yet, which is unusual for me. I will appreciate the autumn colours significantly more when I’m okay about the significant drop in temperature between London a few days ago and Scotland right now.
The extractor fan mouse is back. After Mitch cut away the part of the extractor outlet pipe that had been pretty much decimated by mice, it clearly got back in. He’s now put up a longer tube of copper mesh to hopefully stop the mice getting into the pipe. None of us are convinced it’ll stop them chewing through the pipe but it’s worth a try. Mitch and Chris keep mentioning we should get mouse traps. I’m still reluctant, though only for the reason I don’t want to have to deal with dead mice. I’m all for getting rid of them, not that I think even a load of traps will get rid of them.
I had finally relented and acknowledged that patches of the paint on the banister needed redoing. Mitch clearly thought the whole thing needed redoing (I know, that would make it a job done properly) and has scraped most of the paint off and will do an undercoat before trying again. He claims it looks shabby chic, which Chris seems to think looks ok. It doesn’t, it looks horrid. It took me ages painting that. Oh well, the rubbed-off areas also looked horrid and in theory it will now look better for longer. Annoyingly, I have run out of one of the colours, so another trip to B&Q and another pot of paint to add to our impressive paint pot shelves.
The telecoms engineer has arrived so I suppose I should finish this while we still have a semblance of WiFi and make a pot of tea.