Time Off Part 2

 

Wednesday July 26th 2023 -

I woke up with the stress of everything still there. As much as I hate it, I’m going to have to pay for the car repair, and pay with it with a credit card that isn’t mine, as mine is maxed out. 

We watched some episodes of New Amsterdam, Louise did great doing what she called “making things up” from what we have food wise, using my fortnightly shopping idea. 

As if shit wasn’t bad enough already, the fridge freezer is freezing up things in the fridge no matter what setting we put it on, so we can’t store fresh vegetables safely at the moment, which is a shame as it should be salad time now.

Well, if it wasn’t pissing it down outside constantly.

Still, it has saved on watering the plants. 

We spent some lovely time outside on the back garden, which was so nice. That’s been a great thing about moving to a house - we have a garden, even though we have left it to nature for the most part. However, leaving it to nature means that we’re getting some fantastic wildlife. You’ll see that from the photos. 

During the day I made two phone calls in the hope of it helping financially. Firstly I was on hold for two hours before getting someone from the HMRC, as I was looking into a suggestion where I could claim tax benefits as the sole earner, but then was put on hold again for half an hour, before going to another department, who said they were not being closed down to be moved to the Jobcentre service’s own Universal Credit system, because the government want to cut down on civil servants, probably because politicians are making too much f***ing money! 

The second phone call was an hour and a half on hold with our electricity suppliers, only to be told that their “lines are now closed!” Hey, answer the phone you f***s! I ended up going online to once again inform them that we moved here on November 1st 2021, and weren’t the previous tenants that owed them money, which they were still taking from our card payments. 

I didn’t want card payments, so tried to move both gas and electric to another supplier when we moved, but they only “allowed” gas to be moved.

I bet we’re going to continue paying the previous tenants’ debt off for them. Bastards!

I thought in the evening that I could test the upgraded internet box from 3 Mobile. It’s supposed to be better than the previous one. It’s shit!

A shame as the previous one runs out in a few weeks. 

I asked if anyone was available for “a quick chat”, got a response from a “podcast expert”, who didn’t follow the link in their direct message on X (the stupid new name for Twitter, because Elon Musk is a cock), and then Sean from Review It Yourself said he was available. Six hours later at 2am we stopped chatting, but I did have to switch to the old internet because the new one kept crapping out. 

I think we all needed the chat, because it was between myself, Louise and Sean. 

Thursday July 27th 2023 -

After getting to sleep sometime after 3am, I woke up at 10:30am. 

Louise made a lovely brunch of white chocolate chip pancakes served with summer berries and maple syrup. 

I was still in a low place for most of the day, only feeling ever so slightly better at about four o’clock. Around that time my good friend and work colleague Matt sent me a heartwarming message on WhatsApp.

At ten past six Matt popped a phone wallet through the letterbox for my iPhone 14, which is a contract upgrade. A kind and generous soul. 

Stu from Dangerous Amusements also left me a lovely positive message on Instagram. Thank you. Chris from Walking Tall left a message on Twitter as well. Thank you guys.

I finished my edit of what we're calling Side B of the Toppermost of the Poppermost look at July 1963, and sent it on to one of my two co-hosts on that show, Ed Chen, to take my rough clean up of the episode, and do his magic before putting it out possibly this weekend.

Louise made a lovely homemade cheese and red onion pizza for dinner with a base she made herself as well. 

We watched episode five of Marvel’s Secret Invasion. We started episode six, but I had a group chat to do at 11:15pm U.K. time.

It was a lazy day essentially, again marred by the continued car trouble. We tried to get past it, without much luck. The back garden helped though, even though it’s incredibly wild, but as mentioned previously the wealth of nature visitors to the garden is because of that naturalness, and makes it special. It’s like a nature reserve outside our own back door. 

We’re getting goldfinches and so many bees because of the thistles and ragwort. We even have a bee colony living in a little bee hotel that we placed in our garden last year. 

The group chat was so good. I was joined by Graeme from Klassic Studios, Cam from Jacked Up Review Podcast, Max from Bitches With Beards, Ken from Techmobility, and Doc Heath from Therapy Bites to discuss the subject of AI.  Doc took care of the technical side of the show, using their own Ecamm account to provide a wonderfully produced livestream video episode, which is available to watch right now on their YouTube feed. 

As shown in the photo there was an issue with Cam from Jacked Up Review showing the logo for Techmobility, and Ken from Techmobility showing the logo for Jacked Up Review, but that didn’t stop us from having one heck of a conversation about a subject that we could talk about for so long. 

Of course I fell asleep late.