Management strikes again - a leap into auction.....

Management is of course extremely managerial and this week has been a busy one.

Wednesday was not a good day - out of bed bright and early and drop off the the plugeot at greasy garage.

One car meant taking me to work in her trusty xantia, laden with religious artifacts, I got into the passenger seat and prayed my way to the destination.

On we went and, it would really have been better had I got the right day.

Thursday of course was the day to take things to the auction except it wasn't, should have taken it on Wednesday.

Still at least we had the plugeot back.

This meant that on Friday I could really go to work, then rush the meeting through so I could race back, finish tidying the house, collect various children and meet a social worker whilst she of course went to the auction.

Bargains she got too a veritable 806 load, paid three pounds for some very nice egg cups. Trouble was they came with 5 huge boxes of tat. Still at least she got the tools, some very high quality old gardening tools, gardening tools? Oh dear, I think there might be work ahead.....

Today our normal relaxed saturday, Tallie to work at 7 am as Branwen slumbered having been collected from work last night at 11......


R

The benefits of stress....

This morning started bright and uuuurrrggghly.

One car two near simultaneous drop offs of young people for busses several miles apart.

Throw one lot out of a still moving car screach back up the road to collect the second lot tasked to start grumpily walking in the crisp bright early morning.

The result? Back from the school run early and the washing up already done.

Should do this every day then!!!

Well maybe not.

Still it could be worse, at least Taliesin is not working and needing to be dropped off at 7 AM - no that's tomorrow, and Saturday.

He is going to owe us one - big style....

R

It would have been better to stay in bed....

There are days where you think it might have been better not to bother.....

Bright and early lovely day and children to school.

Not Gwion, he was unwell.

So anyway to garden we will go.

No, maybe not; the strimmer brought back from France had a shattered cutting head as I remembered when I got it from the trailer.

Over to the garage and the head resolutely refused to budge. Big spaners, the vice profanity, no nothing shifted it.

Leave it, so they could deploy brute force and ignorance after I left, home and get the mower out.

A bit of a struggle then noticed the man hole cover, hmmmm the drains were blocked, again.

80 foot of old fire engine hose stuffed down there, all of it, eventually 3 wonderful aromatic hours later it was clear.

Cursing myself roundly for not filling one of the fire engines with water, this would have been a "whoosh and clear" moment for a green goddess.

The smell though, mysteriously, had now backed up right into the house, the place was full of methane and the subtle perfume of weeks old cachi.

Open all the windows and let the air right through the house.

My this was going well. Management who missed all the "Fun" yesterday was really wishing she had missed this fun, all of it....

So back to the mower and the case in hand.

Finishing the mowing meant moving the caravan, a job that has needed doing for a week or two.

Time for the suspension trick on the xantia then.

Lower the suspension, to reverse in under the caravan and connect it painlessly, having first moved the clutchless 806, xantia over a bump and a curious grating noise, then diesel started running out from underneath the car ......

Oh yes this day was developing and some.

Drag it over to the hard standing and crawl underneath, something had ripped off what looked like a cooler panel underneath and pulled a pipe apart.

So underneath I went and took it all apart, patching in a bit of fuel line would repair the damage but first the old connector had to come off the pipe.

Easy to write and slightly harder to do. A whole hour harder in fact.

Done just in time to fetch the kids from school.

There was good news though, the open windows had cleared the shit smell but made the aga run backwards and the back draught filled the house with burnt kerosene smells.

So anyway on to move the caravan at last.....

This was really getting to be fun, especially when the hitch on the caravan jammed and needed furious beating with the hammer to free it, that was another 40 minutes done.

This freed the car up just in time for management to go shopping.

But of course the car had been up and down a few times on the suspension and the fuel lines were now pulled down and dangling off the bottom - again.

Back came the management and under the car I went yet again. This was starting to get boring, very boring...

She has gone now, on Tesco bent.

I have switched off my mobile and ripped the phone wires out of the wall.

If the car breaks, thats her adventure.......

Not mine.

R

being wise around water......

Now there are times when a bit of thinking can save a deal of swearing and sometimes a short cut can turn into a longer route, a lot longer.

The New water pipe I put in before we sallied off to France is one of the many half completed jobs that are lurking at the moment.

Water is lots better than is has been for a very long time but in order for it to continue that way into the brrrr months of the year the pipe itself needs to be about a foot underground.

Now of course today's original plan involved collecting rather a lot of firewood, a trip to the wood yard in the Bedford showed a missing wood man and gave the delightful prospect of a non power assisted three point turn in his yard.

Back home then and thumbs were twiddled.

Trip back to the wood yard - no one there home for further thumb twiddling.

In a flash of inspiration I went outside and decided to bury the water pipes close to the house. The pipe burying job had been started by a Taliesin in a fit of helpfulness. Said fit though started and finished at the exact points the pipe lying on the floor meant he was banned from driving round the field. Once his driving area was restored he promptly went off and did something entirely different.

Now, the original route for the pipes was a bit sub optimal so, in a flash of inspiration I worked out that I could dig one trench, put both the pipes from the reservoir and the pipe from the pump in it and everyone would be a winner.

Of course this just meant moving the pipe which required either dragging it over the top of a tree or disconnecting it re running it and connecting it again. So far so good.

The water was in that condition that experts call "on", I could of course have walked half a mile up the mountain and turned it "off" but no, I thought, it would be simpler just to quickly break the joint, move the pipe then remake the connection the pressure here is after all never that high.

Taking full advantage of hindsight, I think a trek up the mountain might have been more sensible. The pipe came apart quite easily and the re routing was quite simple, joining two bits of pipe when one side of the joint has 5000 litres of water hell bent on escape proved just a little bit more "tricky", in a clouds of water and a pipe that was not about to go into the joint sort of way.

A few minutes spent noting that the water coming off the mountain is actually quite cold and I thought something a bit more scientific might be required.

Into the house I dripped and turned on all the taps so that instead of fighting the full pressure there was at least somewhere else for the water to go.

Back into the hole, that was now rapidly filling with water, noting that I really had intended to buy new wellingtons this year as the old ones......

Well anyway back in I went.

Generous amounts of wrestling, swearing enthusiastically in three languages, the joint was made, I went into the house in search of dry clothes and to switch off the taps.

All I had to do now was work out a route for the pipes to share a trench, dig the trench (using the digger whose battery Taliesin had cunningly hidden in his bedroom) and all would be well with the world.

I should have mentioned that prior to this a section of the water pipe ran over the surface, something we had dealt with by simply lagging the pipe with old army wool blankets.

The grass really likes the wool and had taken to itself to grow into the blankets which in turn required even more profanity in order to remove the pipe from the floor. In the end I resorted to fire engine tools but it was still not an easy task and handling the rotting wool blankets fell just a little teeny bit short of pleasant. At least I wasn't wet, no I was just coated in foul smelling mud.

This was the point at which I had the next sudden realization, the cable for the electric pump would not actually be long enough and therefore Plan A, one trench and two pipes was not going to work....

Dear me, I was pleased.

Of course in the normal run of things I would not have been doing this alone, management would have been there offering helpful advice, praise and encouragement.

She had of course chosen to absent herself, gone off in Xantia to the woodland where she spent the afternoon ripping trees apart and drinking tea whilst I had this enormously fun time.

When she got home she was a sea of sympathy, incredibly and genuinely sad she not been here, she was deeply sorry she missed it all, she could not decide if she would have wanted still cam or dvd recorder, Flickr or You tube, such a terrible big decision to make she said.....

Today though at least saw some forwards progress, it also saw something very rare.

Now, I am not picking on the foslings but it's a pretty rare day that we get one that is just us.

The management, me and our own children, the two D's had gone off with school to watch a football international and that left the 6 of us, nothing else to do then: off to the pub for tea. Taliesin though had other plans, he had an engine to put in his range rover.

This was a serious waste of time, food should be selected on the basis of what was quick to cook and quicker to eat.

In the pub and out immediately. Anything else was too slow....

The whole tea experience was a blur of exhortations to eat faster, talk less and could we leave now..

Back home and he's changing the clutch on the engine which "needs" to be in his range rover for the weekend, or so he says.

At least life holds some consolations, he has just found that the flywheel needs to be changed as well, I haven't the heart to tell him they usually only come off with explosives, some things he can find for himself....

R

#sustainable living and respect....

I think I might have mentioned sometime that management's driving is a subtle blend of brisk and assertive.

So each journey is an adventure of things flashing close by gaps gone for and now we throw in random stops.


For management has been infected by a serious outbreak of sustainable living so every so often the car will screech to a halt as she goes to investigate something she caught a glimpse of in some hedgerow. Now, for the vegetablists out there this is not collection of road kill but elderflower and rose hips and other berries I know not the name of. All this has served to additionally brighten up my life.

As if it needed brightening, as if fed up with the strains of towing the samba van; the clutch on the 806 has decided to come out on strike.

Free the drive it simply won't, a bit of a chore but not impossible, well, except maybe for the 1 in 5 hill up the side of the valley where you really have to master the clutchless change and rely on prayer not to meet a tractor coming the other way....

Worrying is the lack of a part number in the GSF catalogue, GSF being the best place to get bits for French cars in the UK.

This all promised to make tomorrow on the interesting side, tomorrow I am off to university meaning a drive up the motorway and a drive across a city, something a lot easier to do if the car has a clutch!

Fortunately, I have been able to beg a lift; from a director of social services no less.

Here we have another new strand to my life, working for an university as a social work tutor.

A concept so physically distressing to the social workers who came to do our annual review that they could not include it on their form. They recoded instead that I sell parts for fire engines...

the start of winter

Today We lit the fire, about 20 minutes ago in fact, Winter is coming, could use some fire wood, could manage without rain for a bit....

This looks good....

Thursday, 3 September 2009

chchchanges

The house has gone into change mode.

For a while now it has been coming that young P was going home.

The district were fantastic and understood how having a child in your family for 5 years means they form attachments, they also understood that we and our kids have attachments too.

Fostering meanwhile have checked everyone of their boxes is ticked though they could not tick the ones about turning up for meetings as they had not attended one about this young man in over a year.

Still he has gone now, of course MSN is buzzing, the last thing we did was buy him a laptop so he can stay in touch.

The end is in sight for us as foster carers.

We get on well with the districts, the CAMHS team and us have built up a good working relationship, the nurse has walked the second mile to make sure young P is being looked out for. Education in this area, we work very closely with them.

The single thing that stands out for me is the letter we got off P's mum, talking about what it all meant to her. That's a proper reference, written by someone to whom you made a difference. Sort of makes all the other nonsense worth putting up with.

No the fostering team percieve us as a problem.

Their campaign of low key harrasment rather blew up in their faces, but they are planning to block any further use of us.

So it's find a new career time I think.

Time to reinvent ourselves.

R