If you don’t feed your blog, it will waste away and die Obligatory renovation report: The wreckage Obligatory work report: The centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed, yadda yadda yadda The Return of the Simonster Return of the obligatory cricket report
In my experience, finding a hole in the roof involves climbing up into the cavity on a very sunny day, lying down in the pitch black under roughly the area you think the hole is and meditating on how hot it is while staring at the ceiling until such time as the faint glimmer of sunlight through the roof catches your attention...Oh, did I mention you should have some sort of marker or you'll never find it again too?
An alternative to Jenny's suggestion might be to climb onto the roof on a very dark night while lighting up the interior of the roof cavity. this would definitely be cooler though the added risk may not be to your liking.
By Anonymous, at
9:26 PM
Tried the "looking for spots of light" trick, but it was surprisingly ineffective.
I just thought of another one...seal up your ceiling cavity and just prior to sealing the manhole, add a chemical mix which will produce thick, visible clouds of non-noxious gas (I'm sure there'd be recipes on the web - someone used to come check the airflow in our fume cupboards this way). Then get on the roof and look for smoke.....Qualifier - this probably won't work, may be illegal, will find lots of cracks from ceiling cavity INTO the house and is probably very dangerous...I didn't suggest it to you. But if you do decide to do it - get someone to take photos, it'd be very entertaining
My deepest, most groveling and unconditional apologies for that thouthtless act of stupidity. For any authorities who might be monitoring this site: I am a harmless idiot with a warped sense of humour who wouldn't be able to recognise a castor oil bush to save his life.
By Anonymous, at
8:22 AM
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
That’s a very important lesson, and of late I have been guilty of gross neglect. Note to self:Lexifab needs lots of attention, because it’s your most regular avenue of communication with your parents and friends. Don’t be slack, or they may think you are dead. This actually happens: I keep checking ted’s magicdog blog to see what’s he’s up to in Tokyo, and every day he doesn’t post up a blurry cityscape photo or point out how cool the building in which he works looks, I get worried that he might have fallen prey to one of the string of inclement natural conditions hammering that part of the world lately. (Hey, Toad! You okay mistah?)
Of course, he could just be very busy or travelling the world or not have electricity, so shut up, me!
It was quite a painful weekend, in a satisfying we’re-not-there-yet-but-you-can-see-the-end-from-here kind of way. On Saturday, we recruited Team Gyprock (Gaz, Al, Jimbo, ChrisT and Lindor) to help up attach the ceiling panels. It needed the full crew – each of the sheets was over four metres in length, and highly flexible (well, flexible right up to the point where the plaster just crumbles and breaks, leaving an ugly and permanent seam).
The attachment process involved carefully gluing the back of each sheet, after which it was carefully manhandled up overhead and held in place against the existing sheeting for ten or fifteen minutes at a time while Fiona scrambled about with the cordless drill, screwing the sheets to the beam. This was, needless to say, incredibly painful for the sheet-holders in question. Efficiencies were quickly devised, and we got much better at it during the afternoon. Just as well, too, because sooner or later we need to repeat the process with the lounge, and it has a much bigger surface area to cover (that can wait until after the chaos of Christmas, however).
On Sunday, Fiona and I followed up with our first attempt at plastering, about which I can report that it’s very easy to do an extremely amateur-looking job. It’s only the first layer of about three or four, though, so at this stage it’s not too important that our initial stab looks like pants. We were both obviously improving by the end of the process, so I doubt there’s anything really to worry about there.
We also attempted to fix a leak in the ceiling, which Sunday’s torrential downpours were good enough to reveal. I spent about half an hour lying full-length on three beams in the rafters, craning my neck and poking about with a torch to spot some sign of a drip, but wherever the hole was, it was small. In the end I gave up and set up a fibreboard sheet under where I thought the leak must be, hoping for some telltale spotting. That didn’t work after about an hour’s steady rain, so instead I just plonked a salad bowl up there to catch the drips. It gets so hot up there that I figure the miniscule amount of water captured will evaporate off before it makes the bowl too heavy. If there’s a horrible, roof-rotting flaw in my reasoning, please let me know, but I do plan to confirm my theory the next time it rains.
This weekend, the kitchen is getting demolished, top to bottom. A few days after that, the new kitchen will start to be installed. Oboy!
So the political turmoil and chaos continues largely unabated at work. In an interesting development, the Prince of Darkness (which is to say, the self-styled Chief Information Officer) has surprised exactly nobody at all by announcing his resignation to take up a no-doubt-more-lucrative position in another government agency. Actually, no, I tell a lie: the popular money had him squatting here scoring cheap points until he could con an executive appointment elsewhere for 12 to 18 months, whereas in fact he has managed it in less than 9. Well, I for one won’t miss the sour, intimidating bastard, but his sudden and graceless exit does present more problems than it solves.
For one, he has an elite team of super-geniuses with zero human interaction skills in charge of the Agency’s primary business application, who will now be completely unsupervised and probably unscrutinised as well. For another, going on his previous form, it’s reasonable to expect that before he goes he will attempt to ram through a whole raft of critical infrastructure changes, which will stretch the already-overworked IT group (and in the process probably squeeze out other priorities, such as the stuff I’m working on) and cram an assortment of ill-fitting, unpalatable technology solutions down the Agency’s throat.
In the meantime, the Branch Head who oversees our area is also moving on, and we found out yesterday that the Director of the section to whom we have direct responsibility has also had enough and is leaving in a fortnight. In other words, all the managers with responsibilities for oversight and decision-making are vanishing in the space of six weeks. sigh
On the plus side, I’m feeling oddly positive about the whole thing, probably because I have a week off at the end of November to look forward to.
Si’s plane gets in tonight, thus ending his six-month sojourn to the wilds of Europe. I want to feel jealous of him, but since he’s coming back to a small room in a half-renovated house with (soon) no kitchen, a strange housemate and nowhere to put any of his stuff, I am forced to feel sympathy instead. Especially when we move in a few weeks from now and Fiona makes him keep the place clean…
Summer’s back, and like the migration of the bogong moths, that means the seasonal return of my traumatic relationship with the green and pleasant passtime For those who can’t stand to hear a grown man moan about his aching shoulders, grass-stained knee scabs and dodgy ankles, let alone endless commiserating about inconsistent line and length and idiotic stroke selection, it’s time to delete your browser’s link to Lexifab until next March. The first match is on Sunday after next, so you have until then.
For the rest of you (hi Mum!), I have been placed in the unlikely position of having to be forced to accept the team captaincy, despite the wealth of evidence to support the contention that I am unqualified at best for such a role and, at worst, a grotesque joke. Still, since the autocratic appointment by my predecessor Gus has not been opposed by the rest of the regulars - who should by now know better than to entrust me with any more responsibility than keeping the scorebook – I have no choice but to accept gracefully and exploit my position for personal glorification. At least this means I’ll get to bowl a least a couple of overs every game, fulfilling a lifelong dream that was ruthlessly crushed in under-12’s cricket all those years ago. But I want you all to know that I’m not going to let the power drive me mad and do anything rash like move myself up the batting order. That would be both blatant and irresponsible!
Someone else can set the field, though. I don’t know squat about that shit.
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5 Comments:
I'm also hoping to be down that way towards the end of the year and would be quite willing to lend my (admittedly limited) expertise to the building project in return for shelter. I did do a few months work back in the early 90's as a builders labourer(although this did mainly involve smashing walls and concrete slabs with a sledgehammer).
Chris the Irresponsible
Oh, and if you are really worried about what that guy does before he leaves I could send you a recipe for risin
Chris, I'm pretty sure my internet use is now being monitored by ASIO because of your comment... When are you going to be here? We will have an appallingly full house in the weeks leading up to Christmas, but if you don't mind your conditions primitive and overcrowded I'm sure we can come to some arrangement...
Chris the Remorseful
