Wednesday 11 October 2023
Today and yesterday, we have had an Openreach engineer getting us ready for fibre broadband. As with seemingly everything about living out here, there have been issues, including that the cable will need to be laid underground rather than above ground due to some height issues (even that’s not straightforward, one issue being that the neighbour’s digger is too high). Underground is fine by us but it means we were unable to connect today and digging date is unknown, though it’s pretty much definitely not before 1 November. That’s all fine as we still have our outdoor router and SIM set-up. It was tense for a while though due to our current set-up and length of cable (so I was told). The Openreach engineer is not allowed to do anything unrelated to the specifics of his job, so I did a few things, which included pulling a cable through the wall. With probably 2mm to spare, the fitting we really needed to work did in fact work. But it was close and not without issues.
As I am largely incapable of concentrating on much of significance when someone is working at the house, I decided to do the second coat of dark blue paint in our stairwell while the engineer was working. I am wildly hopeful that two coats will be fine but as it’s a dark blue, I’ll decide tomorrow when it’s fully dry. It looks good, though I can now see that it should work well with the yellow edges along the skirting board, which will brighten up the stairs and their biscuity-brown carpet. I have so far only managed to deposit one blue splodge on the carpet, which I might have managed to remove. It either came off my foot or from a splodge on the cover sheet that I accidentally turned over.
My cunning plan to not keep bringing the washing in when it rained yesterday didn’t work out at all well. It did rain quite a lot and I think that most of the washing did end up wetter than it went out. It’s out again today. Today it has not rained (yet) but it is four or five degrees cooler and not so much wind. Drying clothes indoors is a huge issue here. We have thought about a heated drying rack but for storage reasons and a few minor practical issues, we’re unlikely to get one. None of this is an issue we’ve ever faced in London. We’ve even been able to have washing out on the balcony when it rains as we have a balcony above ours that provides some shelter. Indoors at the flat, it’s so warm that things always dry, even in winter.
Chris has been out in Hawick all morning waiting for his car to be dealt with at the garage. If all goes to plan, I’ll walk out when he’s almost ready to set off and get a lift back with him. In the meantime, painting is done for the day and I now need to get on with more work.