Achievement Unlocked: We now own a shed

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Actually we don’t own a shed as such just yet. Rather, we’ve got a collection of pieces of wood which one day (hopefully sooner rather than later) will be fixed together to form a shed-type building. The pieces arrived this morning at 6:45 am. At 6:55 it started to rain for the first time in a while. So I was out in the wet before breakfast trying to cover over the really big bits of wood so that they would remain dry enough for painting.

Fortunately I seemed to manage it and later on in the day when the rain had stopped and the sun came out I was able to give all the woodwork two coats of hopefully waterproof paint.

VOIP phone

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The chap from Kingston Communications came along today to fix our broken phone. Except that he didn’t fix it, he changed us over to “voice over internet”. This was actually a very sensible move. There’s not a lot of point spending time and effort mending a connection to something that will be torn down in a few years anyway.

Now our fibre optic connection is also our phone connection. The dial tone is the same and everything works as before. This means we can continue to receive the spam calls that make up most of our landline use.

The only snag that I can see is that if the mains power goes off our phone connection goes too. However, we all have mobile phones, so in that situation we can use those instead to ring someone and ask “Our power’s gone off, has yours too?”.

Broken phone

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We hardly ever use our land-line telephone. Most of the calls that we get are of robotic voices telling us that our Amazon account is about to explode or we owe a bunch of income tax. However, we’ve stopped getting even those calls now, as the wire to the phone seems to have snapped somewhere. The good news is that the Kingston Communications folks are great to deal with and someone will be coming out later this week to take a look.

Piano playing vs typing

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As I was doing my piano practice today (yes - it’s a thing) I was wishing that I could play the piano as well as I can type. Then it occurred to me that actually my typing, although fairly fast, is actually a bit rubbish. I frequently hit the wrong keys and the must used key on my keyboard is probably delete. With a document you can’t tell how many times the words have been retyped, whereas with a piece of music it is immediately obvious when you’ve played the wrong note (or no note). Piano players have to be right first time every time, which has raised them to a new level of respect in my book. And made me decide to perhaps type a bit more slowly and focus on getting all the letters right….

The return of Piano Practice

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Music lessons were one of the less fun parts of growing up for me. For a while I was learning the violin (mainly so that when I took the violin case into school I could pretend to be a Chicago gangster). But then I got bored with that. And, once that my friends discovered that all I had in the case was a violin, and not a sub-machine gun, they got bored with it too. I got out of that practice regime by the neat trick of being really bad at it. Truly, I put the vile into violin. After complaints from the neighbours in the next town I gave that up and returned to what was supposed to be my first love, the piano. A substantial part of my childhood was spent hoping that mum and dad wouldn’t remember that I hadn’t done my practice that day.

Anyhoo, as things do, piano practice has now returned to my life. This time I’m using the Simply Piano app to keep track of my efforts and I must admit that I’m rather enjoying it. I’ve connected the iPad to my new piano and so it can tell what keys I’ve pressed and track my progress. The app has lots of content, including versions of tunes I quite like. It runs on subscription, but it is much cheaper than proper lessons.

The nice thing about learning an instrument (which of course completely passed me by when I was younger) is that when you are practicing you really can’t think of anything else. You are too busy focusing on why your hands won’t do what you want them to. So if you want to escape from the worries of the world for a while you can just go in there and do battle with something that you can’t play yet but would like to. Today I had a go at playing Beethoven. Beethoven won, but I’ll be back for another go tomorrow.

Making Hauga

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We are in the final phase of our domestic renovations; assembling new furniture. We’ve gone for some Hagua units from Ikea. I quite like assembling Ikea furniture. I’ve not done it for a while and they’ve found a way to make it even simpler and quicker now. Panels just slot together and the huge number of little nails that you used to have to use to put the back on have been replaced with a few push-fit plastic things.

Ikea seem to have minimised furniture to make it cheaper in the same way that aircraft designers minimise planes to reduce weigh. There was nothing in the kit that didn’t absolutely need to be there.

Birthday carpet and piano

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As they used to say in the A-Team, I love it when a plan comes together. Today a whole sequence of DIY, decorating and carpetry (if that is a word) comes to a head. The carpet fitters are due in the morning and the piano arrives in the afternoon. And it’s my birthday.

It all worked carpets duly in place we headed out for lunch at the wonderful Bluebell Pub and then staggered home to wait for the piano to arrive. Which it duly did, right on time. Happy birthday me.

More woodwork

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Shelf slicing today. Made some shelves into slightly narrower shelves so that they fit in the newly modified unit. Quietly impressed by the way that I managed to find nearly all the tools that I needed. Pro-tip for the day: If you want a nice edge to cuts in laminated or veneered materials put some sticky tape along the line you are cutting and then cut through that. It protects the edge and reduces the damage to the surface.