A Load Of Rubbish

I think one of my big pet peeves is litter. It’s unsightly, unnecessary and often dangerous. I see quite a lot of litter left around when I’m walking the dogs. It’s not unusual for one of them to pick up some discarded fast food container or even some semi-discarded food. In a way they are helping to clear up some of the mess but it doesn’t really do me much use when they are regurgitating the stuff hours later all over the floor. Eddie even managed to find a whole string of link sausages the other day – God knows where they came from.

In fact some dog owners are amongst the worst offenders. I always pick up any mess after my dogs (I think most dog owners do) but there seems to be a significant minority who just let their pets crap at will and expect other people deal with the mess – whether this is some poor sod standing in it or property owners clearing it up themselves. If I am picking up after my dogs and there is other mess I will pick it up as well. I know quite a few other dog owners who will do this and I appreciate that sometimes it can be hard to see where the dogs have been (e.g. if it's dark or they have dumped in a pile of leaves) but I am convinced that some people just leave it – since it is often in the middle of the pavement and whatever creature defecated must have been the size of a small horse.

I think what really annoyed me recently was a pile of rubbish dumped in Carron Dam which is now supposed to be a nature reserve. This consisted of a Pringles canister, a semi-full can of Red Bull and a broken bottle of Bucky (as they always seem to be). I actually took it on myself to remove this and stick it in the litter bin. The only problem is that I didn’t have a bag with me so I had to carry the rubbish to the entrance of the Dam - juggling the litter as well as two dog leads. For some reason, by the time I had made it to the bin my left hand had developed a cramp which seemed to stay with me for the rest of the day.

If it wasn’t bad enough dealing with rubbish left by other people I had the joy this morning of clearing up after myself. The previous night’s storm had blown over our recycling wheelie bin, leaving the best part of a fortnight’s food packaging all over the back garden. I think someone has got it in for me.

The Power Of Woodchip

I’ve had the last week off work and decided to take the opportunity to sort out my home office (the virtual shed). It’s not the biggest of rooms – just over 4 square metres so I imagined that it wouldn’t take that long to do. I envisaged that the worst thing would be removing the woodchip wallpaper that covered the entire room. Woodchip is one of those things that were very popular in the 1970s and is usually used to hide plasterwork that has gone to Hell. It also means that it will have been painted over several time and will be a bugger to remove – in the case of the former owners of our house in bright orange and pea green. For this reason decided to invest in a wallpaper stripper.

I must admit that I didn’t really know what a wallpaper stripper involved but it is essentially a steam cleaner with a plastic tray that concentrates the steam on one small area of the offending wallpaper. I have to say it works a treat as the scraper just slides in under the steam treated woodchip. Unfortunately, after tugging on one bit of paper, a huge great chunk of the ceiling came away with it. As I have already intimated, where woodchip wallpaper has been used it is possibly the only thing holding the house together. Why this isn’t used on aircraft fuselages or in Formula 1 chassis design is beyond me but when used on houses it is structural rather than decorative. Why did I remove it? Because I’m an idiot, that’s why.

Clearly the whole job was going to take longer but I did discover a filler which speeding things up a bit: Polyfilla One Coat – a substance not dissimilar to marshmallow and with a similar weight but which dried within a day and was a doddle to sand afterwards. I decorated the rest of the room in those old favourites of magnolia and brilliant white and  laid carpet tiles in place of the knackered and cold laminate. It’s a big improvement although much of the space saving compared to the old office is actually technological: a KVM unit means I can have my works laptop and home PC running off the same mouse keyboard and monitor and I’ve managed to hide much of the cabling beneath the desk.

I was hoping that this would be my last DIY decoration job for a bit. I was half considering Artexing the ceiling to smooth over the repairs but that is the equivalent of woodchip for hiding duff plaster. I’m quite happy with what I have done and have no desire to waste another week on home repairs. Unfortunately, my mother-in-law called to say that her washing mashing was leaking. I’ve gone round and fixed the problem (a loose washer on the water supply). Unfortunately, the water has made its way underneath the lino and soaked the floorboards. It looks like I’ll be losing another weekend sorting that one out.

Alarm Call

Clock Radios have been around for years. I’ve had a few in my time and the latest one incorporates a DAB radio, which is nice. However, for what should be a simple device I am always amazed that no-one ever manages to get these things right. Here are a few of my gripes:

I use clock-radios to wake myself up, so why are the damn things illuminated such that I can’t get to sleep in the first place? My latest one is just as guilty as any other I have owned. The clock face is supposed to dim, and it does, but I can still make out shadows from the thing. I’ve had worse and usually end up covering the clock with a book or something but why can’t the designers of these things switch off the illumination altogether once the alarm is set?

Why can’t you tell the time? My old clock radio had the irritating habit of gaining a few seconds each night. I set the alarm so it would switch on just before the news but over the course of a week I would be woken up earlier and earlier, losing a few valuable minutes of kip. I have “radio-controlled” clocks and even a watch which will automatically set itself so why couldn’t these be incorporated into clock-radios. Actually I think my new DAB radio will do this.

Wake me up gently. I did have a device at one time which acted as an artificial sunrise and would slowly illuminate the room prior to making some bird noises. This was actually a nice way to be woken but I tended to sleep through the bird noise. Wouldn’t it be easy enough to incorporate some sunlight friendly LEDs into the back of the radio?

… and gently off to sleep. Many clock radios have a sleep function but they usually switch off suddenly. Wouldn’t it be better to gradually fade them out? This might work well with getting young children off to sleep.

Thank God it’s Saturday. I know it’s my own fool fault but I sometimes forget to disable the alarm at the weekend. Wouldn’t it be better if the alarm could work this out for you?

Houston, we have a problem! As electronic devices go, clock radios are pretty simple, so why are they so damn hard to program in the first place? This may sound like ludditism but it shouldn’t be that difficult just to set the time that you want to wake up. My old clock-radio had the insane scheme of having the hours set by the right button and the minutes by the left. I could never remember this. The new one is a bit better but it involves repeated button pressing to determine whether hours, minutes, the DAB channel, the backup FM channel, the backup-backup bleeper or the second alarm is to be set. After all that I discovered that I had forgotten to set the radio pre-sets and ended up with static.

So far I like the new alarm but it will only have to go wrong once for me to suffer from insomnia as to whether it’s going to work or not.

In My Shoes Or In My Dreams

I remember my grandmother giving me a good piece of advice when I was young: make sure you have a comfortable bed and comfortable shoes because if you aren’t in one, you’re in the other. I think I’ve come around to the advice on shoes. I’ve tried getting by on £10 trainers but they are a waste of money – uncomfortable, poor to walk in and wearing out in a hopelessly short time. That’s not to say I spend a fortune on shoes but I’m prepared to spend enough not to hobble myself.

I’ve also tried to spend a reasonable amount on beds over the years. The average bed has lasted me about 10 years – about twice as often as I tend to swap cars. Maybe beds don’t have as many moving parts but considering the amount of time I spend sleeping compared to driving it should be a bit more often. Our current bed was well past it’s sell-by date but I was loathe to swap it because it was pretty decent to begin with and wasn’t too cheap either. However, the mattress was really shot beyond redemption and the frame, which I bought when moving house, wasn’t one of my better ideas.

We tried a few beds out at various high-street retailers. The array of beds available is quite bewildering, as are the prices, but I couldn’t really make out what the differences were. Some were made out of foam and others sprung. There also seemed to be a difference depending on the number of springs but this didn’t seem to correlate to obvious differences in firmness or comfort. I also couldn’t determine why one bed could cost as little as £300 and another £3,000. I needed to do some research and actually found a huge amount of information on this website.

From what I gathered it is all about the materials used and, having looked around, the difference in bed construction is more obvious. I certainly worked out what to avoid but what I did realise is that following my grandmothers advice was not going to be cheap. What I have done is follow the same strategy as for my shoes – I’ve not gone for the most expensive but I have gone for something decent – in fact I ended up going with John Ryan themselves and the bed was delivered last weekend.

So far it is rather like having new shoes: I can tell it is a huge improvement over my old bed but the bed doesn’t quite feel like mine yet – rather like sleeping in a rather expensive hotel bed. However, the one thing I have noticed is that I have woken up feeling rested (and without back pain) which I haven’t really done for a while. If the bed lasts for a typical time, it will cost me less than £100 per year – about the same as I spend on shoes – and yet spending 10 times that much each year on a car seems reasonable?