Tag: domestic

kettle woes

Dear Russell Hobbs Service Department

We purchased a kettle model 14439 in November 2008, from Currys on Winterstoke Road, Bristol.

The first hinge snapped in the early part of this year, and we soldiered on – it was useable, if awkward to raise the lid.

Now the second hinge has also snapped, and we have to remove and replace the lid by hand.

This kettle was not a cheap one, and I feel that a useful life of less than 17 months is hardly optimal. We have since moved away from Bristol, and I cannot locate the receipt, but I do have a note on my personal blog of when it was purchased, at http://www.kestrel.org/?p=14253.

I think we’re due a replacement – what do you say?  I look forward to hearing from you.

No love
Me

gardnering

in the past 24 hours, I have planted:

rosemary, tarragon, kitchen bay, two types of mint, coriander, flat leaf parsley, sage, thyme, basil, lemon grass and oregano.

and six alpines, an anemone, a potful of begonia tubers, a white decentra, two ornamental grasses, a couple of nasturtiums, and lord knows what else.

perlmonger has potted up the caster oil plant, two acers, a very tired bronze cordyline, which is looking better already, and the the olive tree.

now I’m about to go and collect two dozen bottles of wine from the local off licence, make a cake, get the laundry in, put the towels in the tumble dryer, cook chicken in red pepper sauce for supper.

then I might do a bit more in the garden, before collapsing in front of the Doctor.

“Spinaraound” |Shapes and Lines | Blue2Noise

brick

perlmonger is in charge of the bread machine – I am just a gurly, and cannot be expected to understand technology.

we don’t use it all that often – once or twice a week – but we have had it for years, and it rarely produces a bad loaf.

however, take it from me that you really, really do need to put the bloody *paddle* in the pan if you want a decent loaf … I shall be sending him to the bakery shortly.

life laundering

a bag came through the door – from the British Heart Foundation, I think – asking us to fill it with “clothes and bric a brac” for their charity shop.

given that I had been cruelly encouraged by kalunina to buy a load of new clothes at the weekend, I decided to have a sort out.

four bags of clothes, and a box of shoes (yes! throwing away shoes!) for BHF, and a bag of stuff that really couldn’t be given to anyone. Even Pete shed some of his beloved, but ancient and worn out, shirts, and a couple of suits.

now there’s loads of room on the clothes racks, so I can go and shop some more!

this weekend …

I have been mostly writing code. Not for clients, but for myself.

for a long time, I’ve wanted a way to track the recipes I use – I have a lot of cookbooks, loads of URLs file away, and can never find what I want. I also wanted a way to look through my recipe resources for given ingredients.

I know there are software products about that do this, but none of them did what I want, so I’ve been meaning to write one for *ages*.

and yesterday I made a start on it – I have ColdFusion talking to Amazon’s web services, and pulling data straight onto web pages, I’ve adapted some code we had to do the tagging thing, and I’m extremely pleased with myself (preens).

it’ll be a long time before it sees the light of day – there’s a lot more to do, lots of data to enter, and £920* odd to find to upgrade our ColdFusion to the latest version . But it must be done, and so I’m writing this stuff as a sort of test case; parsing the Amazon API stuff would be a hideous nightmare in our version of CF.

* or about £740 if you bought it direct from Macromedia US. But they won’t allow you to if you’re in the UK. Bastards.

what I haven’t done this weekend is what I should have been doing, i.e. doing some Extreme Housework before kalunina comes to stay – briefly – on Thursday, before we all trundle up to geoffcampbell‘s for the bank holiday weekend. And I have a load of stuff to do work-wise this week.

it’s probably extremely sad that I’d rather code than go out and enjoy the sunshine …