Wednesday, August 08, 2007
A day to paint for
Having running out of excuses again, done a bit more fascia board today. Primer onto the penultimate lap. More of the excellent blue gear from Dulux - the only catch being all the disclaimers about what might happen if you get any of the stuff on oneself. And being runny, it seems to be all over the handle most of the time so I hope my hand survives the experience. Got a fair amount on the wisteria so that might be a test of sorts.
Rather than moving onto the ultimate lap, put a coat of paint on the gutter from our extension - a long stretch of plastic pipe running at a gentle slope down to the gully. Viewed at the right angle it droops between each pair of brackets - perhaps they should have been rather closer than 3 feet centres. But I am not going to put another lot in between the first lot - not today anyway. Far too hot. The main lesson is, I think, not to paint exterior plastic. The black it comes in may not be one's favourite colour but it does dull down a bit and does not need repainting - plastic seeming to throw the best laid paint off after a while.
All in all, been a big week for DIY. We are now the proud possessors of two small stretches of posh blue lino upstairs - the carpet and flowtex it replaces having been declared unhygenic. Very nice it looks too - the surprise being that you can pay a lot more for lino than you need to pay for carpet. You can even have it pretending to be tiles. A far cry from the days when lino was what people in Coronation Street had in their kitches.
Down to one small loaf a day from the baker. Is it the hot weather or is it a bit of subconscious slimming following exposure of moderate amounts of flab on Welsh beaches? At a more practical level with BH not being into bread much at all, one small loaf is not enough and two small loaves is too much. There is a limit to how much bread puddding and bread and butter pudding one can absorb. The terrible trials we retired folk have to grapple with.
On the Grauniad front, we have had a number of cases recently of the courts deciding what needs to be done in the health service, usually about whether this or that fine new drug ought to be prescribed as part of the service. I would much prefer a world when such things could be decided in a sensible way without having to pay for all the paraphrenalia of lawyers: hard to see what they bring to the party apart from costs that a decent management consultancy couldn't manage. To me - from the sidelines - it all seems fairly simple. We already have a central body which decides whether routine use of such and such a drug is a good use of public resources. Let them carry on. Maybe one has to omit the weasle word 'routine' which opens the way to possibly painful and probably expensive arguments in individual cases - given our propensity to make a fuss when we wind up on the wrong side of such a decision. Then, when a drug has been declared to be fit for use - this being a quite differant matter from a value for money judgement in the context of a national health service - people who are rich or keen can pay for it. And while one may not care for rich people being able to pay for some horrendously expensive cancer drug which buys them a bit more time than poor people can afford, I think stopping them is the greater evil. Here endeth the lesson.
Rather than moving onto the ultimate lap, put a coat of paint on the gutter from our extension - a long stretch of plastic pipe running at a gentle slope down to the gully. Viewed at the right angle it droops between each pair of brackets - perhaps they should have been rather closer than 3 feet centres. But I am not going to put another lot in between the first lot - not today anyway. Far too hot. The main lesson is, I think, not to paint exterior plastic. The black it comes in may not be one's favourite colour but it does dull down a bit and does not need repainting - plastic seeming to throw the best laid paint off after a while.
All in all, been a big week for DIY. We are now the proud possessors of two small stretches of posh blue lino upstairs - the carpet and flowtex it replaces having been declared unhygenic. Very nice it looks too - the surprise being that you can pay a lot more for lino than you need to pay for carpet. You can even have it pretending to be tiles. A far cry from the days when lino was what people in Coronation Street had in their kitches.
Down to one small loaf a day from the baker. Is it the hot weather or is it a bit of subconscious slimming following exposure of moderate amounts of flab on Welsh beaches? At a more practical level with BH not being into bread much at all, one small loaf is not enough and two small loaves is too much. There is a limit to how much bread puddding and bread and butter pudding one can absorb. The terrible trials we retired folk have to grapple with.
On the Grauniad front, we have had a number of cases recently of the courts deciding what needs to be done in the health service, usually about whether this or that fine new drug ought to be prescribed as part of the service. I would much prefer a world when such things could be decided in a sensible way without having to pay for all the paraphrenalia of lawyers: hard to see what they bring to the party apart from costs that a decent management consultancy couldn't manage. To me - from the sidelines - it all seems fairly simple. We already have a central body which decides whether routine use of such and such a drug is a good use of public resources. Let them carry on. Maybe one has to omit the weasle word 'routine' which opens the way to possibly painful and probably expensive arguments in individual cases - given our propensity to make a fuss when we wind up on the wrong side of such a decision. Then, when a drug has been declared to be fit for use - this being a quite differant matter from a value for money judgement in the context of a national health service - people who are rich or keen can pay for it. And while one may not care for rich people being able to pay for some horrendously expensive cancer drug which buys them a bit more time than poor people can afford, I think stopping them is the greater evil. Here endeth the lesson.
# posted by Jim @ 8:44 AM 
