A Sustainable House in Kintyre
No, not another Heartbleed scare, since the last post, we’ve both had problems with low grade viruses that seem to specialise in producing sore throats and green lumps. Still as the better weather threatens to become more apparent things should improve. Fingers crossed! Continue reading “Virus Alert”
Well, Spring has finally made an appearance in Kintyre but despite a few sunny days without too much rain, everything in the garden is still sodden and will be for a while yet. It seems to have been a long winter with very little sunshine and far too much wind. We’ve hardly generated any electricity on the p.v. panels but otherwise things generally seem to have survived the deluges. More drainage work is needed especially in the “woodland”. At least, however, we seem to have avoided the 4 feet of snow that we had this time last year.
After a bit of head scratching, I decided to take a chance and buy a new mother board for Suse’s pc which had been knocked out by lightning last month and scarily, to fit it at home. Well, you can imagine our delight when when we switched things back on and everything worked. I should have bought a lottery ticket! So far the pc seems to be behaving itself but we still haven’t done anything about preventing similar problems in the future.
Yet again there were two huge flashes of lightning with matching crashes of thunder and our router and desktop pc were no more. Sound familiar? I checked back. We were last struck in Autumn 2012. Grr! BT told us that we couldn’t protect the phone line into the router but I now understand that you can get surge protectors that also take a phone line. Ours doesn’t and it has cost two routers and two pc’s. Anyway, enough of this. What else has been going on?
The title of this post probably needs a bit of explanation. When Suse decided to sell Lothian Life it was obvious that this web site needed a new home. At first I thought we would be able to find something free but eventually we decided that we didn’t want adverts so ended up with a firm called Ariotek who are based in Coatbridge and are very approachable as well as being half the price of Media Temple. The transfer was straightforward with some WordPress issues afterwards which Colin at Aritek solved for us. So if you need a domain name hosted give Ariotek a call. They seem fine to me.
As I suspected, the heating saga did indeed continue. We were disappointed when the venting continued but at least there was only one other valve that could be causing the problem. I failed to get a replacement locally but sourced one on the internet which arrived the day after it was ordered. Pretty impressive. It went in pretty straightforwardly and now things seem to be back to normal. Just in time for the temperatures to dip and for the fire to be needed in the evenings.
I listened to a Radio 4 programme the other day about serendipity or “happy accidents” and thought afterwards that it seemed to confirm my belief that “what goes around, comes around”. So, I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised when Ted and Val Finch offered the tyres and suspension units from one of their trailers and a monster mower which they had retired and replaced with something more civilised. The small trailer now only needs a different tow hitch and we will be back on the road. The mower needed a good “fettling”(Thanks Andy) and has already seen action in the back garden and at the front of the house. It will definitely speed things up but I’ll have to do some levelling and it may be just too big for some parts of the garden, so I won’t be putting the strimmer away just yet.
The saga of the trailer tyres continued. Various “scrappies” in Glasgow were visited without success until one of them put me onto a place in Shettleston (near where we bought the slates for the house) where an old tyre was unearthed and fitted for nothing. Another phone call got us a new tube and an interesting chat with a local in his local and a generally good feeling about ordinary people in Glasgow. It took half a day but the trailer is just about functional but I’ll probably end up replacing the suspension units just to be able to fit better tyres. Continue reading “Summer Time contd”
Emily and Caitlin spent a few days with us and we had a delightful time. Emily had suggested that she could travel at a time that would allow me to catch the 926 to Inverary and then travel back to Whitehouse with them. Things worked out beautifully especially when Caitlin decided to give her lungs a rest! For the rest of the visit we were is serious tourist mode and for once the weather co-operated. Continue reading “Summer Time”
Just before Ton and Tineke left, Ton did the first leg of the Kintyre Way Relay which we were marshalling. Needless to say, it poured down and Claonaig was as wet and miserable as I’ve ever seen it. Three runners decided to call it a day there and ended up back at Larick House to warm up. Two of them had locked themselves out of their car in Tarbert and this was preying on their minds as they ran. I decided that some grand theft auto might just be possible and went equipped for a spot of breaking and entering.