The gas people finished their upgrade on Friday, and I found a note in the letterbox telling me I had a nice shiny new gas meter, and that it was turned off, and how to turn everything back on.

Following the instructions, I started with the stove… after much spluttering it seemed okay.

Hot water service… well curiously it seemed okay. Plenty of hot coming out of it. So, what else?

Central heating. I was just pondering how I was going to get on with this without having the instructions, when I found the instructions. Bless her, the people who used to live here had left them in a cupboard.

Reading the instructions it rapidly became apparent that the visible controls of the central heating, the thermostat on the wall near the front door, wasn’t where the pilot light needed to be lit. There was another unit, somewhere. I had a thorough look around the house for it, and couldn’t find it. Must be in the roof, I thought.

I gave my sister’s husband Adrian a ring. He is now the default point of contact for all things house or building related. I can’t tell you how handy it is having an architect in the family now. He also reckoned it was in the roof, and given I don’t have a ladder long enough to reach the trapdoor, volunteered to bring one over.

We had a look with a torch and sure enough, there it was, happily sitting about 3 metres from the trapdoor. I tried to see if I could shinny up there, but (insert chicken noises here) couldn’t see a way of doing it without putting my weight on bits of the ceiling I wasn’t sure would take me, or bumping my head on a pipe directly above the trapdoor.

Adrian, being the skinny, agile, braver soul that he was, happily went up there, and got the thing re-lit. As thanks I bought them dinner.

But now I regret not going up there myself. I don’t know why I was so hesitant. Both the central heating and the old water heater are up there, as well as some of that horrible loose insulation stuff, so obviously various people go up there from time to time. Another thing for the list of things to buy, perhaps once the back room is tidy enough to fit it, is a tall ladder, with first priority being to go up in the roof and have a good look around.

…
Fast forward to this morning. The water heater hadn’t, of course, re-lit itself. With the hot weather over the weekend, it took three days for it to run out of hot water. Thus, since I was in a hurry to get out of the house this morning, no time to fiddle with the pilot light, and a cold shower for me.

Thankfully easy enough to light tonight, when I had a moment to read the instructions.

It’s days like these that you begin to appreciate why some people go and spend thousands installing and running home airconditioning. Yikes. I suppose we should be grateful it didn’t quite reach the forecast 43°, but stopped short on a mere 42.4°C (108.3°F) instead.

I spent some time today listening to the bushfire updates on 774. It also makes me grateful I live in an urban area, where the risk of things like burning embers is minimal, and the worst I faced today was excess sweat.

By the way, I think they’ve fouled up the Nylex sign renovation. It’s very hard to read now. Admittedly not quite as bad as this picture suggests, but what is almost impossible to read in a picture (it says 41° by the way, taken this afternoon) is very difficult to read in person.

(Compare: May 2004)

PS. A trip into the city in a nice airconditioned train and a walk around Melbourne Central seemed like a good way to escape the heat. The plan went to pieces on the way home when the trains were messed up, leaving us waiting for 15 minutes at Flinders Street in the heat, and when a working train turned up, it was one of only 6 non-aircon Hitachi trains left. Opening every window can only help so much.

On my nature strip this morning is a little bulldozer. Unfortunately it’s not a late Christmas present. Some guys from the gas company have been digging up various bits of the street all week, including parts of my driveway around the gas meter.

This has meant the gas has been disconnected between 8am and 5pm each day, thus requiring me to have to have my morning shower by 8am — something of a challenge at times. I certainly hope this won’t be the case over the weekend.

And the reason? High-pressure gas upgrade. Woo hoo! What does it mean for me, the humble consumer? I have no idea. Hotter hot water? It’s hot enough. Higher cooker gas flames? They’re high enough.

By the way, I can’t work out how my nature strip remains so lush and green of its own accord, while my lawn is dying from lack of water.

My old bank sent me a Visa bill the other day.

I wonder how many more bills they’ll send before they remember that I cancelled the card several months ago, and one of their staff cut the card up as I watched?

(I can’t believe I didn’t blog about that, as they tried to charge me the card’s annual fee about a week after the card was destroyed. But I can’t find it, so I guess I didn’t.)

Quiz question for you. No cheating, leave your answer in the comments.

Before 11th September 2001, how many buildings were in the World Trade Centre in New York City? And what happened to them?

One of the things on my To Do list that I did get done over the holidays was to invest in some new desks. The old big desk doesn’t suit the new home-office at all, partly because it’s so damn big and doesn’t fit into the space properly, but also because it’s dull corporate grey, and the room is much more open to the livingroom and the rest of the house, making it somewhat unsightly.

I ended up buying two new Zed desks at Freedom, which will fit all nice and Kentucky along one wall, opening up the rest of the room a lot, and providing a nicer look than the dowdy old desk.

The new desks will eventually get new LCD screens (now that they’re down to a half-decent price) to save space. The CPUs will live down below, out of the way, which should mean the whole setup is much tidier.

Problem is I don’t know what to do with the old desk. It would appear the office furniture places you see around the place will only take job lots from big companies, they aren’t interested in one-offs. Even a tip-off I got to a company that does take one-offs led nowhere. So now I’m pondering what to do with it. There’s always Freecycle, but I was hoping I could at least get a teensy amount to offset the cost of the new ones.

Ebay, perhaps?

Update 10:30pm: Listed on Ebay.

Well it had to happen sometime… the summer holidays have finished for me. Back to work today. Of my to do list:

• Completed: 2
• Substantially done: 4
• A little bit done: 2
• Thought about, but ultimately, not even started: 4

Hmm. Could be worse. Could be a lot better. But at least I spent plenty of time relaxing, which is, after all, the point of a holiday. Right? Right?

Marita, Justine and I went down to Sorrento yesterday for a gallery opening. While we were there, we had lunch and took a walk down to the beach.

(Click on the picture to see it without all the navigation guff getting in the way)

The traffic was pretty bad on the way down, making it a 2 1/2 hour trip from Footscray. (If the government was serious about getting 20% of trips onto public transport, it’d warrant a fully-loaded bus all the way down the Nepean Highway at least every 10 minutes… rather than one every hour-and-a-half as at present.)

Provided the timing was right, it would have been quicker to go down to Queenscliff and catch the ferry across. Maybe next time.

• Last time in Sorrento: around the bay in a day