Grit in the Gears

I am the grit in the gears, the missing bolt, I am the poker of sticks into spokes. I like to know how things work, but sometimes when I take them apart and rebuild them, I have a few pieces left over. I am a man, so I tend to leave reading the instructions until after it goes wrong. And like all men I have a comprehensive mental map of the world and never need to ask directions. I never get lost, only sometimes I'm late, or end up in the wrong place entirely. It's what we do.

Sunday, 12 December 2010

Record Breaking

How did that happen?
I was just idly thinking of tidying up the sidebar when I noticed that I'd posted 22o times this year.

7 posts in 2006, (but I only started on the 26th December),
218 in 2007
132 in 2008
177 in 2009
220 so far, in 2010

This is, for some undisciplined reason, the most blogposty year so far.
Yet when I looked, I thought I'd been neglecting the blog this year, came very close, a couple of times to ditching it.
And I still don't know what it's about, or how I'd describe it if I had to categorise.

'Blog', it is said, is a contraction of web-log. Maybe once upon a time there were navigators, navigatrices of the interweb, who kept a log "Captain's log, stardate:****. At three-bells in the forenoon watch there was a voltage spike that caused the screen to flicker.
Noonday sights threw up a '404 not found' error. Connectivity good, but graphics loading slowly. Have sent a party to resplice the optic cabling near the street nexus.
All well...........
Argh!!! crew has gone berserk and is hammering on my door..... I will defend myself with the fire-axe, as best I can... if I do not return, pray for me...."

Should I quit?

We Had a Break-In

Into an empty office, from adjoining premises. They cut a steel grille, smashed the double-glazed window. The windows are tinted obscured glass, you can't see in.
The office was unoccupied, and nothing was stolen.

What they missed was the carpet. It's value, according to auctioneers who sold some furniture from those offices, is over £1200. About $1900.

We've moved it out of there now.

2 Pee, Or Not 2 Pee.

That is the question.

One of friday's jobs involved a flooded shop due to a burst pipe. On further investigation, the toilet upstairs was seen to be frozen solid... Down to the very bottom. The water in the tank was also as liquid as a brick. Surprisingly, the ice had not split the porcelain.

There's a little wall mounted heater, low powered, about 100 watts, or less, in the room. But it was not turned on. The tenant was surprised that the pipes had frozen. They're on the uninsulated outside wall, and the night-time temperatures have been hitting -10C or thereabouts for the last couple of weeks, daytimes have rarely climbed above freezing.