Bill Bailey's Devil's Interval Doorbell

The other night, Steve and I were watching Bill Bailey's Tinselworm. It's entertaining in many ways - interesting as well as funny - and we've both watched it several times before.

For some reason, this time, we got to the section on doorbells...



... and looked at each other.

To the internet!

Step one: a doorbell which can be personalised. Soon Steve had found one that would play mp3s from an SD card.

Step two: creating an mp3 of the notes we wanted. The notes in question are at about 1:50 on that YouTube clip. But trying to get those few seconds from the DVD, without the crowd sounds, would have been tricky. Since we only needed three notes - and since Steve has enough of a musical ear to be able to identify what those notes are - the free trial version of Pianoteq was our friend here.

Step three was a poor design issue. The "button" part of the doorbell is white, and the bit you press, is also white. It needed to be more visible. Clearly a job for Sugru.



Twenty-four hours for the Sugru to set, and then who knows how long desperately waiting for somebody, anybody, to press the doorbell...

This is a technical document

Well, of course, it isn't, but I could put words like Cisco and network and voice over internet protocol all over it, and then it would look a bit like a technical document. It wouldn't make any sense, but I can't imagine who'd notice.

You see, ladies and gentlemen, there have been complaints. A particular reader is being a Bad Example To The Younger Generation by reading my blog at work, and apparently I must post more often. It's okay, English is unlikely to be the first language of anyone peeking over his shoulder. Yes, hello you. :)

There now follows a diagram. This proves the technical nature of this document which is entirely work related.



Look, I'm sorry. I mean to write more. I also mean to not just write about disability. I want to write more about my life and what I'm doing, but things divide into two groups:

• Things which are too boring and inconsequential to write about.
• Things which are quite interesting and I want to write about, but after doing the things, I'm too tired to write about the things until later.

Perhaps I should try doing shorter posts?

Today, I did some grocery shopping online. The best bit of doing online shopping when your brain doesn't work the way it's supposed to, is that when the shopping arrives, you've forgotten what you ordered. It's as if some kind of benevolent pixie sent you £70 of delicious food, and there isn't a single item you don't like!

I also had my laundry done. Yes, that's right - don't tell any of the women in my family, but I use a laundry service for my towels and bedlinen. I am a slattern who does not do her own housework. Or possibly a person who prefers not to injure herself wrestling large, wet, heavy pieces of cloth. Either way, in the morning the nice man picks up a sports bag of smelly linen from my house and in the evening he brings it back, fresh, clean, dry, and neatly folded.

I'm struggling with the paperwork for my assistants at the moment - making sure they get paid, and the monitoring that Social Services conduct to be sure I am using the money properly. I set up my systems really well, and my more lucid self has written out clear instructions for how to do each stage so that when I am not very well, I can still get things done. The problem at the moment is I quite literally don't know what day it is. I have "today" and "yesterday". All other days are confused together in a big tangle. So the timesheets and invoices got in a muddle and weren't submitted at the proper times... I think I've unpicked it, though.

Steve and I have been married for nearly a year and we are wondering what we should do for our anniversary. He's been able to book a little bit of time off work and we're looking at options. We have all these ideas - we'd love to go back to the Eden Project, or alternatively there are a few places in London we'd like to visit, for instance the Science Museum - but Steve is so tired out from work, I think he could sleep for a fortnight. We could just stay home and try to put together our wedding photo album. Right now we have thousands of photographs backed up to multiple storage devices, but unless you count shoving a USB stick into a digital photo frame, no album. There are also several guests who we have no pictures of, which is a bit sad.

The book I'm reading at the moment is Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. I have read it many times - I first picked it up in high school. It's a bit of escapism, I suppose. I have the DVD as well, but I think the DVD won't make much sense to people who haven't read the book because it misses out an awful lot of backstory and historical detail. Some of the "historical" detail is inaccurate but then it is a fiction novel.

I don't know. What else? What do you want to know?

Following technical complaint about the diagram above: (written by evilstevie)
This diagram clearly only holds true for a relatively small number of passwords - above a certain point you are either some kind of memory-whizz or use a password-manager program to ensure the right password goes in the right box. This has to be the case as most applications of passwords also have something in place to prevent brute-force guessing of passwords, either a counter or timer (or in some cool applications, both) to make it difficult or impossible for you to try more than a few passwords. At a certain point on the graph you simply get a flat-line as you can't enter any more wrong passwords and you stop making new ones or come up with a new way of dealing with passwords. Also, I'd like to add that Batsgirl's clearly been around me too much when she considers VOIP usable in everyday conversation or blogging...

Wedding Ceremony

Evilstevie and I were married at noon on Saturday, 21 May, 2011.

The day was everything we wanted it to be. Our friends and families all made a big effort to ensure that the day was as relaxed and happy as it could possibly be.

I don't have any pictures yet. There are about 700 pictures on Evilstevie's camera but we haven't had a chance to go through them! The lovely Carie has put up a few of her shots which can be seen on her blogpost here (I'm afraid I can't link them as images).

What we do have, though, is the text of our vows. Evilstevie had gone to a lot of trouble setting up our home server to tweet the vows at the appropriate time (much like he did for the engagement proposal). Unfortunately, this was thwarted by our plan of having our Wii set up at the reception - on the morning of the wedding, in the hurry of extracting the TV, Wii, and associated cables from the heap of tech in the corner of our lounge, the cable connecting the server to the internet got dislodged, and although the script fired as planned, it had nowhere to fire to.

So, for internet friends, here are our wedding vows, and the reading a friend did afterwards. If you want the music as well, here's a YouTube link for my entrance music - Reunion by John Williams, from the AI: Artificial Intelligence soundtrack.

Evilstevie: I give you this ring as a sign of our marriage and a symbol of our love. I will always be there for you, to comfort and support you, and share in the joy and happiness of our love.
Cherish my faithfulness, my loyalty, and my trust, they are yours forever.

Mary: I give you this ring as a sign of our marriage and a symbol of our love. As we face the future together, I promise to be a companion worthy of your friendship. I promise to support your hopes, dreams, and goals. I vow to be there for you always.
When you fall, I will catch you.
When you cry, I will comfort you.
When you laugh, I will share your joy.
On this day, together with our friends and families, we can cherish the memories of our individual pasts, and create new ones, as, through our union, we accomplish more than we could alone.

Reading: A Lovely Love Story by Edward Monckton

The fierce Dinosaur was trapped inside his cage of ice. Although it was cold he was happy in there. It was, after all, HIS cage.
Then along came the Lovely Other Dinosaur.
The Lovely Other Dinosaur melted the Dinosaur's cage with kind words and loving thoughts.

'I like this Dinosaur,' thought the Lovely Other Dinosaur. 'Although he is fierce he is also tender and he is funny. He is also quite clever though I will not tell him this for now.'
'I like this Lovely Other Dinosaur,' thought the Dinosaur. 'She is beautiful and she is different and she smells so nice. She is also a free spirit which is a quality I much admire in a dinosaur.'

'But he can be so distant and so peculiar at times,' thought the Lovely Other Dinosaur. 'He is also overly fond of Things. Are all Dinosaurs so overly fond of Things?'
'But her mind skips from here to there so quickly,' thought the Dinosaur. 'She is also uncommonly keen on Shopping. Are all Lovely Other Dinosaurs so uncommonly keen on Shopping?'

'I will forgive his peculiarity and his concern for Things,' thought the Lovely Other Dinosaur. 'For they are part of what makes him a richly charactered individual.'
'I will forgive her skipping mind and her fondness for Shopping,' thought the Dinosaur. 'For she fills our life with beautiful thought and wonderful surprises. Besides, I am not unkeen on shopping either.'

Now the Dinosaur and the Lovely Other Dinosaur are old. Look at them.
Together they stand on the hill telling each other stories and feeling the warmth of the sun on their backs.
And that, my friends, is how it is with love. Let us all be Dinosaurs and Lovely Other Dinosaurs together.
For the sun is warm. And the world is a beautiful place.

Guestbook

The wedding looms ever closer. The craft-project chaos of my lounge is gradually turning into stacks of boxes with neat little contents-lists stuck to them, Evilstevie has confirmed his time off work, and really, everything's on track.

I keep telling myself, and anyone who has a tizzy at me, that the venue is booked and paid for, the registrar is booked and paid for, and we have the rings - therefore a wedding will take place. Everything else is fluff.

But fluff is fun, and today's fluff is the guestbook.

The guestbook isn't really a book. We're doing it in the form of lots of luggage labels, which our guests can write on or otherwise decorate as they see fit, and pin to a line at the reception.

I'd quite like to pre-populate the line, to get the ball rolling. So here's my idea. If any blog readers who aren't coming to the wedding would like to add a message to our wedding guestbook, then pop it in the comments, or email me, and I will be able to print it out and stick it to a label.

I know to new readers this may sound a bit "internet! validate me!" - no. If you don't feel you know us, or you've nothing to say, then there's no need to say anything. It just felt a little bit strange not to include the online side of our lives in our wedding day.

Naidex

Following on from my last post, I carried on in the bit-under-the-weather vein for a few days and met with repeated frustration on the balloon-quest and several other things I wanted to push forwards with. It wasn't a great week.

Nevertheless, some wonderfully good things happened - we started to get RSVPs from wedding guests, and Pip has got a decent job that actually uses his skills and qualifications, and Steve had a much-needed full weekend away with a friend. I was able to get quite a bit of rest in, and then on Tuesday, I just turned into an incredible luck magnet.

The first thing that happened on Tuesday, was that I managed to book a new balloon decoration firm.

The second wonderful thing happened - Shopmobility had received my innertubes and my wheels were fitted and ready to collect.

The third wonderful thing was that the ever-lovely Carie, ably assisted by the charming Miss Kitty, gave me a lift into town to collect the wheels. While we were about it we had a spot of lunch and cooed over lovely little baby-hats. This seems to me like a marvellous way to spend a lunchtime.

I should have bought a lottery ticket at that point, but I had to go home and recharge my batteries, physical and metaphorical, so that I would be able to thoroughly enjoy my trip to Naidex the next day.

My PA picked me up bright and early in the morning and we managed to get to the NEC with only one minor burst of getting lost (the NEC is so well signposted that several roundabouts actually have more than one exit marked as "NEC" which is generous, I'm sure, but ultimately not helpful for navigation purposes). My Blue Badge was checked and we were ushered through to the disabled parking hangar, and from there on in... it was weird. But in a good way.

I've never been to a crip-centric event before and suddenly there were these three huge halls full of companies wanting to sell me stuff. Not to prescribe like NHS/Social Services/AtW and other 'official' groups do, and not to find a way of adapting their existing product or service to find a halfway point like shops do. But to actually sell. It wasn't all or even mostly wheelchair users, but everything was accessible and there were enough of us that it felt entirely normal to be at seated height (usually I feel a bit like I'm trying to navigate a foreign world made up of steps and buttocks). I also saw at least one other person with the e-motion m15s, which was nice and made up for the man who perhaps didn't realise how loudly he was saying "f---ing show-off with fancy wheels grumblegrumble etc."

There's some wonderful inventions out there. A few of my favourites were:

• A small phone, too small to be much use as a general phone, but that wasn't what it was for - it had just two buttons to be preprogrammed with emergency numbers and was small and light enough to be worn as a wristwatch (it also tells the time). Infinitely preferable to those emergency-button lanyards that reside uselessly on the bedside tables of elderly people up and down the country.


• Adjustable height kitchen worktops, so that a prep space, sink, or hob can be raised or lowered at whim enabling one kitchen to be usable for multiple people with different needs in the same household - like a woman who wants to sit down and a man who's tall and dislikes having to stoop all the time.


• SafeSpaces, which are basically like indoor tents. Designed with autistic kids in mind, they create a small, manageable, safe place for sleep and timeouts. They're soft, waterproof, wipe-clean, with low beds, and they're anchored to the floor 10 inches from the walls of the room so that the user can't hurt themselves. Inside, there's all sorts of sensory therapy stuff, and it was so soothing... I sort of wanted one myself!

Then there was all the tried-and-tested stuff - mobility scooters, wheelchairs, lifts, ramps - and I remember being thrilled to spot grab rails in a whole rainbow of colours rather than just boring clinical white/dark blue.

A number of Twitterers had been planning to go, and although due to the harsh realities of spooniedom some people couldn't make it, I was pleased to meet up with @GentleChaos and @FunkyFairy22 at lunchtime. My PA, although employed directly by me, has been involved with Social Services for several years, so we decided that she would go and say hello to a few familiar faces in the halls while the three of us chatted. It was marvellous, we thoroughly put the world to rights. It's been years since I met new "internet people", particularly on my own, and particularly meeting females, rather than being one of a couple of incidental females in a male-dominated group. I'd like to do it more often.

Unfortunately on the Thursday morning I woke up with no spoons (expected) and an absolutely stinking cold (wasn't quite prepared for that). Each is making the other that bit more unpleasant. However, once I've shifted the cold and can breathe through my nose again, we should be full steam ahead for the wedding!

Such Tweet Sorrow - applause

Previous posts:
Such Tweet Sorrow posted on April 12th, 2010.
Indescribable posted on April 18th, 2010.

For never was a tale of more woe,
Than this of Juliet, and her Romeo.

That may be true. But this afternoon, when I told Steve that the five-week Twitter production of Such Tweet Sorrow was finally over, and he jokingly asked "was there a happy ending?" the answer, strangely, was Yes.

I mean, okay, four out of six characters died. But the difference in the medium changed the place where the play ended and therefore the feel of the ending.

If you see Romeo and Juliet on stage or film, you barely have time to wipe your eyes at the end of the suicide scene before you are presented with the Prince's summing-up and a curtain call.

In real-time, however... Juliet drank the sleeping draught on Tuesday night. Romeo found her early on Wednesday morning. For about an hour he agonised over what to do... then his not-so-quick drugs took another hour to work, and all we knew was silence until Juliet awoke. She took half an hour to assess the situation, sent out a heartfelt goodbye to her sister (Jess, the "nurse"), and then it was silence again until Jess found the bodies. Those long silences really took an emotional toll on the involved audience (affectionately known as #teamchorus).

Too upset to be delivering a neat and tidy epilogue, Jess spent the afternoon and evening railing at her father and portraying despair in messages that were chillingly close to those sent by the young lovers before their deaths... followed by... silence. Jess being an altered character, no one knew whether she would be likely to do something drastic. I went to bed on Wednesday night half expecting to hear news that she, too, had killed herself - the relief on Thursday morning when she tweeted complaining of a hangover was immense. Especially since Jess was one of the more likeable characters.

Over the course of the morning, Jess (and the audience!) got to grips with the facts of the deaths with the benefit of a night's sleep. The summing-up was then delivered as dialogue between Jess and the Friar and although there was a sense of loss, there was also a sense of survival and new beginnings. It felt like a positive ending.

Apparently there is a curtain call tomorrow, which I am very much looking forward to. If nothing else, I need to tell Charlotte Wakefield that it's just Juliet I couldn't stand, and that since Juliet is now dead, I no longer bear her any ill will. I might have *ahem* been a little bit aggressive about my dislike of Juliet and I really hope the actress doesn't take it personally.

Was this an accessible performance? For me, yes. Certainly it saved me from having to deal with practical access issues in and around Stratford in order to experience an RSC production (although I still want to do that one day). And the beauty of Twitter is that if you need to sleep or medicate or stretch or rest or throw up, all of the play is right there waiting for you to catch up on when you come back. However, there were a lot of tweets, and I know several people had to drop out on that basis - in many ways it is easier to devote two hours of undivided attention to the play in isolation, than to immerse yourself into a production that has more in common with a role-playing game than a theatre visit.

I will definitely want to be involved in another Twitter-Shakespeare project. A large part of that is because it is a case of "being involved" rather than merely "watching". Accessible interactive theatre in your own home, where you respond to the characters and the characters respond to you - it beats TV.

All that remains is to stand and applaud:

The Cast
@romeo_mo - Romeo Montague - James Barrett
@julietcap16 - Juliet Capulet - Charlotte Wakefield
@LaurenceFriar - Laurence Friar - Geoffrey Newland
@mercuteio - Mercutio - Ben Ashton
@tybalt_cap - Tybalt Capulet - Mark Holgate
@Jess_nurse - Jess "Nurse" Capulet - Lu Corfield

Producer
Charles Hunter

Director
Roxana Silbert

Writers
Bethan Marlow
Tim Wright

All at Such_Tweet, The RSC, Mudlark, 4ip, and Screen WM.

My fellow #suchtweet Groundlings including #teamchorus and #mercutiogroupies

and the mysterious @jago_klepto...

Blogging Against Disablism Day will be on 1st May, 2010

Once again, the esteemed Diary Of A Goldfish is hosting the blogosphere's annual Blogging Against Disablism event. As usual, this is not a carnival of previously posted material or a "best of" selection - it's a co-ordinated effort of many people all posting fresh material on the theme of disablism.

Full information is available at the Blogging Against Disablism Day signup page along with links to archives from previous years.

Remember, you don't have to be disabled to join in. Disability is not an isolated experience and it's not something that anyone is immune from. I know I link to this every year, but I'm going to do it again - Lady Bracknell's One in Seven post spells out just how relevant, and how unacceptable, disability discrimination is to all of us.

You don't need to write an essay. You don't need to write at all. You can post video, audio, artwork, any format you like. This is about making our voices heard.

You also don't need to be filled with righteous anger or have your protesting hat on. There's room in BADD for everything and that includes some nice positive examples of the change that is slowly but surely happening. And you don't need to worry about getting all the words right - as usual, we have a Language Amnesty to account for cultural differences and to allow those who aren't politically involved to post without fear of being attacked for failing to use the most 'current' terminology.

Hope to see you there!

Indescribable

In my last post, I talked about the Twitter event Such Tweet Sorrow, a production of Romeo and Juliet being played out in real time over five weeks.

We're one week in and it's still a really tricky concept to describe. The biggest problem is that first, you have to describe Twitter itself which is still really hard to do for anyone who isn't already using it. Trying to describe the Such Tweet project itself, on top of that, before you can even begin to talk about how much you're enjoying it, what you think about it, how it makes you feel... it's nigh on impossible.

I'll give it a go anyway. I think Such Tweet Sorrow is most like an immersive fantasy game along the lines of Dungeons and Dragons or perhaps Knightmare. A bunch of people improvising within their given character descriptions interact with you; you are supposed to pretend that they really are those characters. Except that it doesn't require special equipment, like-minded friends, pens and paper, or time set aside to play, and it continues 24/7. As a Twitter user, it slots almost unnoticeably into the life which I am already living.

That's the bit that makes it a little disturbing. Due to the circumstances of my life - I am disabled, I work alone from home, I cannot drive and am waiting on a decent wheelchair - most of my interaction does happen online, and as such I do have several good friends (not to mention clients and suppliers) who I have never physically met.

There are also dozens, if not hundreds, of people who I consider to be part of my wider social circle. We're not friends in the sense of having heart-to-heart private conversations about our innermost feelings, but there's some shared interests, some common acquaintances, and we've had a couple of brief direct exchanges - we're friendly even though we're not bosom buddies. This is the area that the Such Tweet cast fall into. The stream of posts about whatever happens to be on their characters' minds - the progress of a football game, a trip to the pub, a crap day at school - is melding seamlessly into all the other incoming tweets about Dr Who, Mad Cap'n Tom's bid for Parliament, current affairs, Naidex 2010, and biscuit preferences. Every so often, I reply to an incoming tweet. Every so often, someone replies to one of my tweets. It's incredibly normal social networking and an outsider with no knowledge of Shakespeare or the Such Tweet project would probably not be able to pick out the fictional characters.

With it all being mixed in, the line between characters and real people gets blurred. I am reacting to the characters' tweets in the same way I would react to those of real people. The most striking example of this for me so far was yesterday, when @laurencefriar sent out a tweet about meeting some "courageous" disabled football supporters. Anyone who knows the Ouchers knows that the best way to get our hackles rising is to start throwing around words like "courage" "brave" and "inspiration" and I simply couldn't help the way it made me feel (ie: angry). I had to seriously remind myself that @laurencefriar is a made-up character who is supposed to be the sort of person who comes out with tripe like that. Then I thought, well, I'm supposed to respond, an emotional response to well-performed characters is entirely permissible and means the actors are doing their job right.

But it's made me start to worry about what's coming. The writers have admitted that they're not observing a religious adherence to Shakespeare's storyline, but it's safe to say that the basics remain in place - which means it's not long to go before there are a couple of violent deaths in my social circle.

If I find myself getting angry about "courageous" then who knows how I'll react to that?

Such Tweet Sorrow

And now for something completely different.

There is a bit of an art project happening on Twitter for the next few weeks. Under the title Such Tweet Sorrow, the tale of Romeo and Juliet will be played out, in real-time, in the social media environment.

No, we're not talking about a line-by-line recital of Shakespeare's work delivered no more than 140 letters at a time.

We're talking about a handful of people, each with a role that mmmmmmore or less translates over to modern times, tweeting in character about events, thoughts, feelings, as the storyline unfolds. At the moment they are setting the scene - so, for example, Juliet is tweeting about arranging a party for her sixteenth birthday in a couple of weeks, and Friar Laurence is blethering on about community outreach projects for disaffected youth, and Mercutio and his friends came fourth in the pub quiz. There's also a certain amount of incorporation of other social media, such as Juliet putting a guided tour of her bedroom on YouTube.

I'm quite fascinated by it.

One of the characters has already begun engaging with the audience - Mercutio tweeted that he'd woken up with a hangover and got in a discussion with a 'real' twitter user about hangover cures. From reading the tweets of one of the writers, it looks like the characters don't have to do this, but he's hoping they will. So am I, although I think it'll be a fine line to walk as they gain popularity... especially what with the whole "you cannot control twitter" can of worms. There's a space on the site for the #suchtweet hashtag and I'm not sure that's ever ended well.

The really confusing bit is that if the characters were real people, I'd have stopped following them already. Juliet is a naive and irritating 15-year-old over-privileged princess whose exclamation-mark use alone would have had me hitting the unfollow within an hour... but that's exactly who the character is supposed to be. Tybalt is the sort of sulky brat I'd prefer to avoid meeting, and while Mercutio would be great fun at a party I wouldn't give him my phone number. It's bizarre to keep reading all their tweets and reacting with "oh, FFS," and then remember that this is who they are supposed to be and it's integral to the story that they are vapid/sulky/whatever.

I'll be interesting to see how it develops over the weeks, both in terms of the characters and in terms of the audience. Usually you only care about what's going on in Verona for a couple of hours and it's constantly fast-forwarding to the 'interesting bits', not sure what will happen with this slow-burn thing.

I'm also really hoping to find out more about the smoke and mirrors part of it as well, the planning and preparation and involvement.

Why it's a really good idea to have a geographical number

After spending a couple of hours last night looking at different sorts of laptops (including Alienware - hardware: wow, prices: eep!), Steve and I had narrowed the choices down to five reasonable options that more-or-less met my criteria and budget. So this morning, after the First Cup Of Tea but before the actual Getting Up process, we fired up his eeePC to have a fresh look at these options and see if I could choose which one I wanted.

Eventually we settled on an Acer Aspire 5738, one of the younger cousins of my current (unwell) Acer Aspire 5500. Despite the reduced price offer on laptopsdirect, it was a bit over my ideal budget, but had all my need/want features and looked like it would have the longest to run before it became obsolete.

However, there appeared to have been a data entry error on the technical specs. In one place, it said it had 3GB of RAM. In another place, it said it had 2GB of RAM comprising 1x1GB and 1x2GB, and while I know my maths won't win any prizes, even I can spot the problem there. And then, it encouraged us to phone them and ask about the "double memory offer" which would bring it up to 4GB...

Still, data entry errors happen, so I figured the best thing to do would be to phone and ask for the correct information - and then, depending on whether or not I liked the answers, buy it or start looking at the second-favourite.

Problem. The number to phone about the memory offer was an 0844, and the main site number was 0871, and at the moment Steve and I only have mobile phones available, and these non-geographical numbers are expensive for us to call and don't get included in our "free" minutes. The Contact Us page gave a company address and named the business not as laptopsdirect, but as BuyitDirect. So we googled them, hoping to turn up a geographical number for the business address (yes, I know, Say No To 0870, but their site confuses me, not least because the google ads look like site links).

Instead, we found a series of accounts of failure and f*ckwittery that made us certain of exactly one thing - we weren't going to be giving them any money any time soon.

I'll cheerfully admit to my own laziness/incompetence/impatience when I'm buying new kit while still in bed on a Saturday morning - if there had been a geographical phone number on the site, I wouldn't have bothered digging for information about the company, and thus wouldn't have found all the negative reviews. I'd have rung them up, cleared up the RAM issue, ordered a laptop, and given them the details to charge my card for rather more than five hundred of the finest British pounds sterling. Their loss.

There is a happy twist, though.

On a whim, rather than going to the second-choice laptop (which was with a different retailer), we put the complete catalogue number of my preferred laptop into google. And lo, we found the same laptop on SimplyAcer, and not only that, but it was significantly cheaper and brought the whole thing neatly back under budget. The company provided a postal address and a geographical phone number as their main contact details without any messing about, and a link to their parent company gives not only geographical phone number and postal address but also a little map and photographs of their shop premises, handily situated just up the road in Birmingham, so if there are any problems we'll be able to physically go there to sort it all out.

Eagerly awaiting a despatch email now, although not really *expecting* one until at least the beginning of the working week... have I mentioned lately that I love my G1?

Retirement

This may be the last post I write on this, my trusty laptop that I have had since before I started this blog. As such, I wish to pay it proper tribute.

It wants to be a trusty laptop. I know it does. And it has been a trusty laptop, almost every single day for most of the three-and-a-bit years since I first took it out of the box and cuddled it. It has enabled me to shop, bank, and access services from my own home. It's provided entertainment and information and social contact, and has saved me from feeling completely cut off from the world.

But, time has worn on and three years of heavy use has taken its toll. Files are becoming corrupted, bits are sticking, and the fan is whirring away on overtime even when running nothing heftier than the original OS (Windows XP) and a single firefox window. The last couple of games I looked at buying, I did not meet the system requirements (although one of them I bought anyway, because of a limited-edition offer, and we seemed to more-or-less cope).

For the last few months, it's been 50/50 on whether my poor, overworked laptop will manage to complete the boot process, and over the last few days it has been getting worse still. Disturbing mechanical noises are coming from deep within the machine (although nothing is in there that shouldn't be) and we've reached a point where, in order to persuade it to boot, the operator must use the Etch-A-Sketch method - giving it a good shake and a couple of bangs to try and dislodge/reseat whatever is causing the problem. It pains me to treat my precious laptop so harshly, but we really have reached the point where anything I do to it is unlikely to make it worse. The time when it no longer works At All is unfortunately now within the forseeable future.

So, I'm shopping for a new laptop. I've set a fairly arbitrary budget of £500, as that's what this one cost. My "musts" are a decent size screen, a standard size keyboard, WiFi, and a CD reader. My "wants" are for the CD reader to also write CDs, and read (preferably write) DVDs; the capacity to play Sims 3 if I ever buy it; and the handy little memory-card-slot that enables me to just plug the memory cards from my camera straight in to copy my photos over; plenty of USB ports. I also want it to run Windows, partly because that's what I'm confident using, and partly because I want to be able to play my PC games. Recommendations welcome.

Acquiring new toys is always fun and exciting, but I do feel quite sad at the thought of parting company with this one. I will miss it. I'm not going to bury it in the back garden but the thought did cross my mind. It has been a good companion. Perhaps one day we'll resurrect it as a guest computer or something.

eBay Ettiquette

For some reason I decided I was going to look at clothes on eBay last weekend. I don't especially need any new clothes, but I felt it wouldn't hurt to put on a few bids well within my "affordable" range. I searched specifically for brands where I already know what size will fit me, but that I can't normally afford to buy new.

On Monday, I won Top#1, a strappy party top which set me back £10 (plus £2 for p&P). I received the standard automated emails from eBay, paid with PayPal, and today, Friday, it dropped through my letterbox, safe and sound in a durable envelope.

So far so good. Except...

On Tuesday night, I won Top#2, which is an asymmetric 'everyday' kind of top and cost me £1.49 (plus £2.16 for p&p including recorded delivery). In addition to the standard automated emails, the seller sent a message to let me know she had posted the item and telling me the Tracking Number. Yesterday, Thursday, the package arrived. I opened the sensible waterproof envelope and pulled out the contents - but instead of cotton in my hands, there was paper. Neatly folded soft grey tissue paper, secured in three places with three tiny little shiny stickers. I actually wondered if maybe it wasn't an eBay purchase but a present! I undid the stickers and unwrapped it to find my new top, carefully pressed and folded and with a faint but pleasant smell.

Obviously I got straight on the computer to give the seller of Top#2 maximum positive feedback and also to send a thank you email.

But now I feel uneasy about feedback for Top#1. I mean, there was nothing wrong with that transaction, I don't have any complaints about it at all, I'd happily shop with them again. But then there's the Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs).

As well as going 'above and beyond' in terms of presentation, the seller of Top#2 was clearly better than the seller of Top#1 in three of the DSR categories - communication (they told me when they had posted the top), dispatch time (the top arrived less than 48 hours after the auction closed), and postage and packaging charges (charged almost exactly the same, but for a superior signed-for postal service, and nicer packaging).

So, having joyfully given the really-made-one-hell-of-an-effort seller of Top#2 a perfect DSR of 5-5-5-5 on Thursday, can I really, on Friday, give the entirely-acceptable-but-nothing-special seller of Top#1 an identical perfect score?

But if I don't, am I being unfair to the seller of Top#1? According to eBay's Help pages, sellers who subscribe to Shops:
"... will be required to maintain the following minimum 12-month average DSR scores in each of the four areas:

• For a Featured Shop, maintain a DSR score of 4.4 or above


• For an Anchor Shop, maintain a DSR score of 4.6 or above

Note: Failure to maintain these requirements will affect your Shops subscription, and you could be downgraded to a lower Shop tier with a different fee structure."

It's not like the seller of Top#1 has "failed" to provide an acceptable standard of service, and they shouldn't get downgraded just because I want to differentiate between 'good' and 'great' service.

Any eBay sellers want to give me their input?

It's that time of year

A little song about Santa.

First of all, a big thank you to all the people who left such supportive comments on my last, rather depressing, post. Judicious application of cups of tea, hugs from Steve, a Chinese takeaway, a DVD (Quick review: Colour of Magic, I liked it, David Jason does a cracking job as Rincewind but I can't help wondering what will happen if/when they do Mort, which requires Rincewind and Albert to simultaneously be in the same room), and a good night's sleep have seen me back onto an even keel.

Now for some good news: my laptop, my gorgeous shiny laptop, is resurrected.

Last weekend some sort of particularly nasty... thing... triggered and wriggled its pernicious little way all through my system. One of the specifically nasty features was that it blocked access to the sites for my anti-virus and my anti-adware/spyware updates. It did something to the way my computer accessed google as well, so that clicking any results links from a google search would take me instead to sites for more nasties. The computer would freeze and/or turn off completely and every reboot pushed the nastiness deeper into the system.

Steve did his best with it but it was bedded right in there. Eventually we took the decision to scrub the computer completely and start right over from a fresh install of Windows. After all, we had all the original disks and codes and whatnot, plus a backup of most of my files on an external drive. The backup wasn't perhaps as recent as it should have been, but I know all the important files from this year were on there - all I'd be missing would be a few pictures, half-finished blog posts, savegames and stuff.

And lo, for on the third day it rose again, and here I am, trying to get back into typing on a full-size keyboard (Quick review of eeePC: Handy. Functional. Light. Portable. Small. Very small. But bigger than a phone. On the whole I liked it. But, how can I say this... it's an ideal secondary computer) and desperately trying to remember my passwords for the sites on which I was logged in permanently. I've got most of them now, although I haven't done any shopping yet.

One slight hitch - you know how I was all relaxed because, hey, backups of most of my files on an external drive, nothing to worry about! Well it could help if I could find the aforementioned external drive. It's about the size of a cigarette packet and is somewhere in this house. I'm fairly certain it's not in the kitchen, toilet or bathroom. Unfortunately that's not helpful as this is a three-bedroomed house containing two geeks and therefore any amount of likely-looking wires, defunct remote controls, old mobile phones and various other oojamaflips which get your hopes up but turn out to be Not What You Were Looking For.

Other than that I really need to get on with my Christmas shopping. I think we've already passed the last guaranteed date for getting stuff shipped from the US to the UK before Christmas. I'm also now horribly aware that although within the UK, the last date for which the Post Office guarantees delivery of packages before Christmas is something like 20th December, that doesn't mean by extension that it's okay to order stuff on the 19th and expect it to arrive on time, as it has to be processed first. For our place, depending on factors like how many people we have working, how efficiently our deliveries arrive, and so on, we can process about 150 normal-sized orders in a day. If, on the 19th, we suddenly have 400 orders to process... well, we'll do our best, work overtime, draft in as many extra hands as we can fit in the room, but the room is of finite size and the day is of finite length, so it's likely some people will end up disappointed. Now is the time for online Christmas shopping if you want to be sure of getting the things you need without a panic.

Despite having no idea what to get anyone, I was all super-efficient and made sure people can have an idea of what to get me and a fuss-free way of getting it by making an Amazon wish list. But now I'm worrying that it was a little bit... off... when Mum said "so what sort of things are you after?" to respond by emailing an Amazon link - it feels like making demands. I did follow it up with a more personal email explaining that it's just some ideas and I don't care whether I get all/none/some of the stuff on the list. But even so I can't help thinking that a handwritten letter to Santa, referencing my intention of compliance with the "being good" clause for another year, with pictures cut out of assorted catalogues and stuck on with pritt stick to indicate the Things I Would Like Please, would have been more acceptable.

Actually that's another thing I'd like - a book of etiquette and household tips for such things as Making Christmas Lists As A Grown-up, Avoiding Being Healed At Dinner Parties, and Extracting Loved Ones From The Duvet On Cold Winter Mornings When They Have To Go To Work. I have Nanny Ogg's Cookbook which has much valuable insight, and VideoJug which offers a lot of practical help, but I still often feel like I'm floundering with things like this.

St Ebeneezer

As the esteemed blogger Scaryduck (I am not worthy, etc) recently observed, St Ebeneezer's Day - "the first day that Christmas displays appear in shops and public houses" - has well and truly occurred.

Speaking from the trenches of mail-order dispatch of classical music, I can confirm that the rush has started. The volume of orders is increasing, and the orders being placed have more than a sprinkling of titles like "Concertos and Cantatas for Christmas", not to mention Bach's Christmas Oratorio (available on CD, SACD and DVD from just about any record label you care to name).

I'm guessing that quite a few of the people who read this blog are likely to do at least part of their shopping online, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to make a few generic requests and give a few pointers, on behalf of all those dispatchers for small businesses out there who remember last Christmas and are fearing this one.

... actually, thinking about it, this may work better as a series. Other readers on the frontline should feel free to make additions in the comments.

So onwards, with Part One - Placing Your Order.

Fill out the form properly.

It's not really a difficult form. Put your postcode in the postcode box and your address in the address boxes. If you don't know your address and postcode, go and ask a responsible adult.

For each new line, use a new line of the address box - don't just type in twenty spaces, or half a dozen full stops. You can click in each box, or you can use the TAB key to scroll through them. While you're at it, why not let the shift key enter your life? It's not just there to make the keyboard look nice.

"As Above" is not an address. Nor is "as previous order," as I can't actually see your previous orders unless I stop everything and start rootling around in the database. And please, for pity's sake, don't think you're being clever by asterisking out the first few letters of each line of your name and address "for security". We need your proper address in order to send you the things you have ordered. The postman will not take packages to "** ***ley Road", okay?

You should also know that it's not "the computer" that fixes these things so that you get your goods. It's me, putting my Stalker hat on with the help of Google in a way that would probably have you feeling quite uncomfortable if you knew about it. You may also like to remember that all the time I spend correcting your address, I'm not shipping orders - you're holding up the queue!

Contact details

We're not asking for the fun of it, nor are we likely to sell your data. If we've said that we won't pass your details on, then we really won't. It's one of those big business/small business things. A big business is only ever about the money. A small business, on the other hand, is personal, and all of its employees are going to be trying to provide the sort of service we would like to recieve from others. So we won't pass your phone number to other companies owned by the same multinational conglomerate, or "relevant third parties", and we won't flood your inbox with spam. We're asking for fast contact details because if there's a problem with your order, we'd prefer to be able to let you know as soon as possible, and give you a chance to change your order, rather than waiting for you to contact us several weeks later because your goods have not arrived.

Your credit card 'security code' is NOT your PIN.

Your security code is the last three digits of the little number on the back of your card, where you put your signature. It's not a difficult thing to find. You never type your PIN online. If you type in your PIN where you should have put your security code, all that happens is that your credit card gets flagged - security code not matched - and you may have to wait longer while we check to find out whether you're (a) incapable of reading simple instructions or (b) a fraudster trying to use a dodgy credit card, and let's be honest, neither of those are good really, are they?

Reasonable Requests

Most small businesses will do their best to meet any requests you make, it's part of what makes us different to Amazon and Tesco. Perhaps something is a gift and you want to be sure it's sent to the recipient without the price on it - no problem. Maybe you are on holiday and want to delay posting to make sure your package won't arrive while you're away - easy. Maybe you want your order shipped in as many lots as it takes to make sure that each parcel is no bigger than the pannier on your bike - we can do that. But please, please, let us know early on. Preferably before you place your order. If we know your requests before the order comes in, then we can do our best to meet them. We won't be able to get the package back off the Post Office if you only put in your request after the order is dispatched.

Still to come: Costs and charges, Royal Mail, and Other Issues.

And now, by request of a friend of mine, a short commercial break for a friendly online mail order business. Adults only, I cannot stress this strongly enough, adults only may wish to look at Temptations for all their adult toy needs. Temptations is run by a couple of entrepreneurs with a long-standing interest in adult toys, aiming to provide the sort of service levels they would prefer to recieve when shopping online for such items. Please don't click that link if you're under 16 or easily offended.

Under-16s, and those who are not in the market for the kind of wares Temptations stock, may prefer to visit the 100% family-friendly appropriate-for-everyone Web Of Wool to spend their money.

Edit 20:17 07/09/08 broken link fixed.

BADD Blogs Of Note

Following on from Blogging Against Disablism Day 2008, I thought I'd post a list of links to the posts I thought were particularly good, for all those people who for some unfathomable reason might not wish to dedicate several hours to reading each and every one of the huge number of posts submitted to the event. I've read about 70 so far, and despite already having an interest in the event and the issues surrounding it, I'm reaching saturation point.

Having realised, about ten posts in, that I was considering most if not all the posts to be really quite good and making really quite important points - even if I didn't entirely agree with everything being said - I got snippety and have ruthlessly cut this list down to my absolute favourites.

Starting off gently, Rudy at Coping With Disability makes a good, and often overlooked, point in this succinct post about the importance of communication.

Ruth at WheelieCatholic writes interestingly about enabling the ableists.

David at Growing Up With A Disability has written a very engaging post about mistaken identity.

Jeanie at Midlife and Treachery has done a darkly humourous post about the bad habits of ableists.

Cherylberyl at Disaboom has posted her well-researched paper explaining about the Tiny Tim and Supercrips views of disabled people.

And finally (for now), in No Quarter Asked Or Given, Jade Lennox explains how even people who think about how to provide accessibility don't always understand how it is applicable to their world...


I'd also like to quickly say, thank you to everyone who has commented or linked to this blog. I appreciate each and every one. Unfortunately the much-requested t-shirts are currently beyond my competence, but anyone who has iron-on transfers should feel free to go ahead.

An Engineer's Guide To Cats

While I don't usually regurgitate the b3ta newsletter onto my blog, this was one of those things. Those special things. Those things that just, somehow, wriggle into your consciousness rather than being a two-minute giggle that is forgotten with the next shiny object that rolls past.

The Engineer's Guide To Cats, by Paul Klusman with TJ Wingard, is nominally about cats. Indeed, Paul opens the video with "The purpose of this presentation is to educate engineers, and the general public, about cats."

Nice idea, but really, I think this is the ideal film to educate the general public (and possibly, cats) about engineers. An oft-misunderstood species, I have believed for many years that engineers make superior boyfriend material (although Dilbert may be interested to know that NASA have not hidden me on the moon yet) but I have been unable to explain WHY. What is it about a man with a scientific calculator, a leatherman, and a roll of duct tape, that is attractive?

I still can't explain it properly in actual words. Could it be the intelligence? The single-minded devotion? The attention to detail? The defeat of self-consciousness? I don't know. But I defy any woman to watch these two play with their cats and not melt a little bit inside. That's what it is about engineers.

Boo, Erk, Yay

A mixed day yesterday. Still recovering from having overdone it during the week, but then, I'm at home with the wonderful Evilstevie, Maker Of Cups Of Tea Extraordinaire, so it could be very much worse.

Feeling like this, and knowing that feeling like this is a regular thing, and being in a fairly large house (certainly lots larger than the flat), and knowing that Steve will not always be on study-break, I have finally decided, for definite, that I am buying a Roomba. I found a proper online store in the UK that sells them (as opposed to someone bringing one back from the US), compared various prices and specifications, and chose which one to buy.

Put it in the basket, signed up to the site, chose my options for delivery and gift-wrapping and carbon-offsetting and god knows what else, finally got to the 'now give us your credit card details' bit... and noticed that something had changed. The previous pages had been secure. Yellow address bar, https, little padlock sign, all tickety-boo. The credit card page, however. It still said https, but it wasn't yellow any more, the padlock had a line across it and further investigation offered the warning "some of the information on this page may be readable by others", and I just know that the day I take that chance is the day some bugger steals my credit card details and runs up thousands of pounds' worth of debt that I, having taken the chance, am fully liable for. Paranoid? Perhaps.

Tried to ring them but their customer service line is closed at weekends, so I emailed them instead. Boo.

On, then, to "erk". A friend of ours who lives nearby wants to have a fireworks party on Monday. So yesterday, I had a cuppa with his girlfriend while he and Steve went out to buy some fireworks.

Remember kids, you can't say "firework" without "erk!"

They came back with over £100 worth of fireworks. I asked them, did they bring any sparklers? I like sparklers. The answer was no... they went to an industrial-fireworks place for the stuff and the only sparklers available were in packs of over a thousand. Which would, I admit, be overkill for a party of maybe a dozen people, but makes me even more anxious about the nature of the fireworks they have purchased.

Some of you know Steve. Look upon the following sentence and tremble: In terms of this firework party, Steve is being the voice of moderation. He's even made sure they have purchased a remote detonation system. This is not like Steve. Steve is usually the one shouting for more flammable materials.

And finally, the yay - I got my Ravelry invite! YAY! I've already hooked up to several people I know and I'm sure more will follow. If you want to find me on there, I'm on as batsgirl. Still working on bringing it up to date - so far I've only listed two 'projects', the first scarf I did and that knitting on screwdrivers thing. It does seem a very sensible way of organising things, although I'm still finding my way around it.

Oh, and I've written my letter to WDC, I just need to remember to print it. Thanks to everyone who made suggestions :)

As regular readers know, I have a neighbour, S, who has a drug problem. I'm calling it a problem because things like this happen. That's a problem. I don't consider telling you this to be a breach of confidentiality as she herself tells most people within thirty seconds of meeting them.

The thing is, S is a nice girl. I'm calling her a nice girl because of things like this. We have cups of tea and chats and occasionally go to the seafront for an ice cream together or something. I would go so far as to call her a friend, albeit not a friend I would lend £20.

S's habit and attendant mental health problems mean that she is classed as a disabled person by the benefits system and social services and as such she has help coming out of her ears - not just family and friends, but also plenty of money and more home-visiting social workers and community health workers and 24/7 helplines than you could shake a stick at. Then there's a plethora of voluntary and religious groups such as the Salvation Army offering her cooked meals, secondhand furnishings for her flat, company and friendship, and the salvation of her eternal soul. So the last thing she needs is me trying to "help" her, because really? Drop, meet ocean. Everyone she meets wants to "help" her.

But. She's my neighbour, she's a friend, and as such, I do worry about her sometimes. I want to make sure that I'm not saying stupid things or being counter-productive to her therapy. There's also been a couple of times when I've seen her and she's scared me - semi-conscious and white as a sheet, unable to open her eyes properly or speak in complete sentences. Is that what people usually look like when they've been using heroin, or is there a major problem? I don't so much want to know how to "help", as how to avert potential disaster and Not Cock Things Up. You understand where I'm coming from? It's sort of a case of, do I want to save her, get her back on her feet, look after her? No. But do I want to make her problems worse? No. Do I want her to die in front of me because I didn't know what to do or when to do it? Really not.

How would one find these things out? Well, I have the whole internet at my fingertips and I figured a good place to start would be NORCAS, the main drugs and alcohol charity in East Anglia. From the front page of their website (my emphasis):

"Our mission statement is 'To reduce the harm to individuals, and thereby to society at large, from the misuse of drugs and alcohol'. We are here to work with anyone experiencing problems with alcohol, drugs, tranquillisers or solvents, including families and carers."

Marvellous. I was a little disappointed that the website contained not much apart from a list of websites and the disclaimer "These websites may contain views which are not supported by NORCAS", but it did have contact details so I emailed asking for specific help. I outlined the situation and asked:

"I need to know at which point I should get worried or call for help, and who I should call; I need to know if I should be talking about it with her, or trying to keep conversations completely off it; I need to know how to make sure I'm not being counter-productive to [the rehab/therapy bunch]'s approach."

Today I finally got a reply.

"For your own information and to further support your friend, there are various organisations offering advice and information that can be found on the web and via telephone..."

So not you lot, then? And if I email them, will they just give me addresses for other people I can email? Talk about buck-passing. Your mission statement says you'll help, not just "signpost". So far you've given me no more help than Google.

"It would do no harm to encourage your friend to seek support from an agency such as NORCAS and if she is already doing so, supporting her in this. It may also be supportive for her to know that she can talk to you."

No. I don't want to be yet another counsellor. I want to know what tack I should take in order to not put my foot in it.

"If you are concerned about your friend at any time and believe that there is a need for medical intervention, I can only advise that you contact the ambulance service immediately."

Right. I'll also get the kettle on for Tom's colleagues so that they won't get too frustrated having been hauled out to tell me "this is what heroin users always look like, there's nothing wrong with her and nothing we can do, you are wasting our time."

Paul Allum of NORCAS, you are as much use as a chocolate teapot. I'm not sure why you get paid and I can only hope that the help your organisation offers the addicts themselves far exceeds the so-called help you've offered me.

Okay, so I'm not actually going to send that as a reply. But I'm tempted (and I kind of hope he googles himself and finds this). Any suggestions on a more polite response, or should I just leave it?

Oh, and a quick knitting update - I'm on the home stretch of the second sock and hope to have a finished pair within the week.

Incredibly active week

Maybe it's the weather, maybe it's Steve, I don't know, but I'm feeling better the last week or so than I have in months if not years. So I'm taking full advantage and have been (by my standards) exceptionally busy. I've done something most days, and even when I've woken up going *pop* *crunch* *yelp* "oh god, that was stupid, when will I learn when to stop" I haven't actually regretted overdoing things. The ever-lovely Steve has helped by making sure I haven't had to use up my energy on anything like washing-up or cooking or grocery-shopping or cleaning the bathroom, it's just been a holiday from all of that, a week of energy expenditure almost purely on enjoyable things.

Following the pizza and the cookie crumble from my last blog on Friday, plus the joy of the postman turning up with a package of Sock Kit, we packed my suitcase and zoomed vaguely westwards to Chateau Evilstevie.

On Saturday afternoon, we went to the B3ta Birmingham Bash. We managed to stay for about two hours which was good. Gorgeous weather meant that smokers and non-smokers were all happy sitting outside by the canal watching the world go by.

On Sunday afternoon, with me insisting that tired or otherwise the weather was too good to waste, we decided to go to the park for ice cream, relaxation, knittings and photography. On the way to the park, we stopped at the house of a couple of friends, where we were invited in to join them for a barbecued beefburger. Yum.

On Monday, we went into Leamington to have tea and scones at the Victoria Coffee Shop.

On Tuesday, all that was planned was me going to the knitting group in the evening. Unfortunately Steve made the mistake of mentioning that there's a big Hotel Chocolat in Dudley's Merry Hill shopping centre. Off to Dudley we did vrooooom. After dribbling in Hotel Chocolat, we got some lunch and then I decided I wanted a haircut. Well... I've needed a haircut for some time, but I never get round to it - it's not the sort of thing I plan in advance, you know? So the last haircut I had was for my mum's wedding last September. Oops. The first EMPTY hairdressers we went into told us they couldn't possibly manage to do my hair as a walk-in, so we wandered along to the next one, where they took me in and then Steve went to amuse himself elsewhere for an hour.

Tuesday evening was the knitting group, same as always, very enjoyable. I shouldn't have gone out during the day though, cos I was SPACED. I just couldn't follow a conversation. But, I was given a couple of very useful hints and tips on the Sock, and I've got a new project as well. I'm doing a jumper for Littlun. It seems kind of tricky to find patterns for kids that age/size, probably because they grow so much that it seems a little futile to put many pounds and many hours into creating a beautiful garment that they will get to wear (read: spill ice cream and/or ribena all over) about four or five times before they've grown out of it again. But, it will make Pip happy. The pattern book I got was Miss Bea's Seaside. I'll be doing the "Breeze Sweater" (5th pic down on that page), nice and simple, although the ribbing for the cuffs is a bit different. Instead of the usual knit-two-purl-two, it's RS K5: P1, K5, P1, K5 etc and WS P4: K1, P1, K1, P3, K1, P1, K1, P3 etc, looks like this.

Wednesday, we went back to the Victoria for another cup of tea and scones. I went into Monsoon (70% sale!) and bought BARGAINS. Steve was extremely patient, following me around the store and holding the things I wanted to try on as I revelled in being able to have one hand on my stick to prop me up and the other hand to rummage through the racks - one of the most difficult parts of shopping for me is running out of hands.

In the evening we met up with a friend for dinner and Steve got TOYS. (note from Steve here: Toys=PC and diskless terminal which were going to be skipped as the company's being dissolved. Obtained with other bits by a mate who used to work there for "a nominal fee" - £2 apparently. Pizza exchanged for the toys :)

(Mary regains control of laptop) Thank you darling.

Thursday, was packing of suitcase and heading off home. The A14 was/is a nightmare, as half of it is closed. It took us almost twice as long as usual to get back. We had to stop for an extra break at Billingford Windmill which looked lovely in the sunset. Only Steve took photos though. I was too busy hanging out of the open passenger door with my head between my knees (the usual attitude of prayer to the gods of Pharma, accompanied by an under-the-breath chant of "please let these painkillers work soon") scaring the locals. No, really. A nice lady actually came out of her house to come over and ask if I was okay, did I want a glass of water, if you go for a little walk about a hundred yards that-way, there's a little bridge where you can just relax and it doesn't smell so much of cow dung... which was nice of her. I don't like it when people fuss, but it is nice when people (1) show concern for fellow human being in obvious distress or difficulties and (2) are friendly.

Friday we went to meet some assorted friends in Norwich at the Cider Shed. It's a nice place, really relaxed. My stepdad plays there sometimes. We were sat outside as there was an under-14 in our group and they aren't allowed in the main bar, so it was a bit chilly. Chilliness was easily combatted by my ordering a nice cup of tea (and it was a nice cup of tea), so just to add to that "Friday night out" feeling, I got the Sock out as well. Socks are a very portable form of knitting.

This picture contains many elements of today's blog so far.

Saturday, I started writing this, but there was a bit too much for me to finish! We went and had lunch with Pip and the Littlun. This was a bad idea, as they're getting over ILL and so Littlun's temper and appetite are not as they should be. He ate about one small slice of kids' pizza, half a carrot stick, and a few grapes, in between grizzles and grumps. So we went to the beach, the boys dug a big hole, and we put the boy in it. Many jokes about "they sent me down t'pit when I wa but two year old..." and so on. It was fun.

Steve goes back home by himself this morning - definitely this morning, as this afternoon is Lowestoft Carnival so the roads are either closed for the afternoon, or jammed up. I am going to miss him very much. The only reason I'm typing this rather than having a cuddle is because he's asleep and it's important to be well-rested before tackling the A14, but I may have to go wake him soon.

Rejected, again.

At the beginning of June, I found out that the Department of Work and Pensions had turned down my application to renew my Disability Living Allowance.

My condition and the way it affects me hasn't changed in the least, so by my logic, the amount of DLA I am legally entitled to shouldn't have changed either.

After a bit of a panic and a lot of support from friends, family and other bloggers, I started the process of asking for an explanation of the decision and a reconsideration. I assembled every scrap of additional evidence I could get my hands on and wrote a detailed refutation of the "explanation" they gave me for their decision. If you want to have a browse through my blog archives for the last two months you will get an idea of how much this took out of me.

Today I got their decision. It's actually some four weeks earlier than expected, so yay them, they get to tick an efficiency target. However, in their words, "we have not changed our original decision". I can't walk to the bus stop, I can't cook a proper meal on my own, I can't do or I have difficulty doing a hundred other everyday things and I fall over a lot... but they have decided I have no care or mobility needs.

I am stunned.

I'm not a fraud or a faker. I told them the honest truth and described the difficulties I have and the help which I need, no more, no less. Two years ago, the facts I told them resulted in me being given the middle level of DLA Care component and the higher level of the Mobility component. Today, those same facts result in zero. How can this be right? How does this make any sort of sense at all?

I have the right to appeal to an Independent Tribunal.

What I do not have, is the capacity to appeal to an Independent Tribunal.

I simply cannot do it. Jumping through hoops and visiting their doctors and fighting That Bloody Locum and dealing with legalese and trying to find someone who can represent me and all of this, while coping on a very much more restricted income, and knowing that there's still a good chance of them turning me down yet again... no.

This mess has already done me more harm than good. If I am prepared to lean a bit more heavily on the support offered by my friends and family, then I can get by with just the Incapcity Benefit. But I can't fight battles at the same time. It makes me feel sick to be giving up like this, and it makes me angry that someone in the same position as me but without the friends and family would be so utterly stuck.

Pip (and Littlun, of course) has looked after me today. Many cups of tea have been applied and both shoulders utterly soaked by a sobbing Mary. I'm sure it's not the day he had in mind, poor git. Steve has also been lovely, in a long-distance kind of way, listening to the tears and saying all the right things. I've also had a brief but reassuring phone chat with my mum. The consensus is that it's not right, and it's not fair, but it's also not the end of the world and we've got through much worse than this before.

On the positive side - and there is one - my condition may improve a bit now, because a certain amount of stress has been tossed overboard. I can get on and enjoy the summer rather than back-and-forthing with the DWP. I can sit outside in the sunshine without thinking "ooh, I must save my energy for filling out reams of paperwork". I won't have to worry, every time I have a good day, that someone might notice I'm moving a bit easier or not leaning on the stick as much, and report my one-off good day as me being "better". And I don't have to listen to the DLA unit's hold music, a bonus which is almost worth the money on its own.

In other news, the Lowestoft Airshow is almost upon us - this coming Thursday and Friday. God only knows what the weather will do, and as such, plans are near impossible to make. I'm going to start in much the same way as last year - rest up beforehand, buy plenty of milk/juice/etc before the tourists descend, and generally arrange things so that there is nothing I *need* to do. Those of you I know in real life, are any of you planning on being round this way?