Having been awake half the night coughing, I gave myself an hour’s lay in bed later than normal.

Just as I got into work, the main server decided that it was bored of serving things and just wanted to play with its SCSI bus. I gave it a nice sharp power-cycle for its troubles (it was otherwise unresponsive). After the reboot it showed no indication in dmesg what the problem had been.

I was then able to get to my e-mail.. but before I had a chance to read very far one of the secretaries called me shouting “HELP!” ‘cos she couldn’t log in. There seemed to be no reason for this but a quick reboot worked wonders on the Windows box.

So, back to the e-mail.. where there was a report of a box in teh Uni getting broken into using the SSH crc32 hole and being used to scan the rest of the Uni.. so I had to check out all our hosts, just in case.

With all that, plus Sun Maintenance Schedule organisation loveliness (which I’m not going to rant about), the glossy photo paper and normal paper being exchanged like nobody’s business in the A0 printer and a colour laser printer which mailed me lots saying that the paper was empty when it wasn’t, my day wasn’t that fun, really.

Still, it’s now time to go home. Thank goodness!

Why is it that coughs always start playing up just when you want to go to bed and sleep?

I hate tickly coughs which do no good but keep you awake.

Blurgh!

Dit..d-dit..d-dit..d-dit….

The cold has counterstruck, breaking through the defences in the region of throat. A cough has been initiated.

More at 11….

Well, it’s back to work this morning, though I did lay in for an extra half an hour ‘cos it’s out of termtime now so the bike racks won’t be full.

The weekend was fun, though a little short.

Saturday was spent first doing the normal shopping at Sainsbury’s followed by travelling to London at lunchtime to meet some friends ready for the “By the Gods” Xena fan club meeting in the evening. Although I’m not really a “fan” as such, I enjoy the show but I’m not fanatical, the bunch of people who Alec introduced me to are really nice and fun to be with.

Anyway, I got rained upon just before reaching Charing Cros Police Station. The foyer of the Police Station is where we arranged to meet as one of the people is a sargent there. Off we went to TFI Friday’s around the corner where we had a good lunch, though the service was a little on the slow side.

By the time the food was consumed it was pretty much time to go to Page’s Bar in Westminster, though Jo couldn’t resist taking us to a couple of Aussie shops for supplies on the way back to the nick (to pick up Maureen’s car).

Once at Page’s, Maureen and Jo went ahead taking the copious amounts of sweeties she’d been asked to get from Makro’s by Dean into the bar whilst the rest of us queued outside.

Much fun was had by all during the evening, including the Sing-A-Long to the musical episode “Liar,Liar” which includes a very amusing cover of “There’s Always Something There to Remind Me” which is nothing like Burt Bacarat(sp?) would have imagined. Then the “Techno re-mix of Zorba The Greek” Dean forced us to dance to was landed upon us, which was rather exhausting and in the smokey air left my throat rather sore and my voice non-existant.

The drive home afterwards was uneventful, thankfully, so it was to bed at about half one.

Sunday morning was spent in bed reading “The Truth.” This was not planned. I’d woken up at 9am and thought “I’ll just have a little read and get up at 9:30” then started reading. The next I knew it was 11:45am and all my plans for the day were out of the window. It was a good thing I didn’t need to talk to anyone as I’d lost my voice from the cold I have and the night before’s excesses.

Idid manage to wash the car and scrub most of the wax I’d accidently got on the plastic bits the last time off so it doesn’t look so horrid.

At 7pm I felt a little tired so decided to have a lay down for a bit.. and woke up at 9pm! I watched a little telly, put the rubbish out then went back to bed and started reading another book as I’d finished “The Truth.”

I think I need longer weekends when I have social things on.

My cold, although not entered the nose, is happily playing with my throat and my sinuses.. I hope it gets bored and goes away soon!

I woke up this morning feeling nice and warm in bed. Hmm.. why isn’t the radio playing as usual? What’s the time? Eeek!

As you no doubt have realised by now, I’d overslept and not because the radio alarm hadn’t gone off either, I’d slept right through that and woken up about an hour later than normal. Oh Well.

Anyway, it was a case of a quick splash and dash to get ready before donning my waterproofs and cycling through the lovely rain to work.

On a positive point today, my cold seems to have pretty well gone other than a slight tickle in the throat. Of course, it could just be regrouping ready for an attack on my bronchial tubes, but I hope not. All those A-Z vitamins and orange juice seem to have done the trick.

The dreaded cold lurgy’s got me!

So far it’s half a sore throat with lots of mucus, a fuzzy head and slight shivery feeling.

Maybe I should drop off at Tescos tonight and buy some Limsip.

Oh-well.

Last night’s house warming was good. Got home at about 1:30am.

Unfortunately, I woke up at 7:30am as I would on a normal work day, and couldn’t get back to sleep. Oh well.

I dozed and watched telly a bit then noticed it had started raining and it was too late to wash the car. So, I rummaged through the video draw and pulled out “Labyrinth” and watched it, fast forwarding through David Bowie’s cringe inducing dance routines.

So, it was lunchtime, talked to my parents on the phone as usual, made some doorstep chicken roll sandwiches and ate them.

Why is there so little to watch on telly on a raining Sunday afternoon?

More rummaging and other videos were watched, finished off by “Contact” with an intermission for Scrapheap Challenge. So, at least there’s one decent programme.

The Channel 4 “100 Greatest Films” programme is reasonably entertaining, though a little content-less.

Back to work tomorrow morning, I suppose.

Hey-ho!

Plans for the weekend:-

• Get my hair cut.
• Go to a house warming party for one of the postgrads who’s just bought a house.
• Go to Sainsbury’s
• Pay gas, telephone and credit card bill.
• Wash the car and hopefully get the waxing done before it gets dark this time.

As you can see, it’s going to be a whole bundle of fun. Actually, the house warming might be fun if it doesn’t turn into a party full of shop talk.

Seeing as I’m not in a very optimistic mood today this doesn’t bode well, however. Oh well.

This morning the documents for my new car insurance arrived. I suddenly remembered that I’d forgotten about a claim I’d made which had been recovered in full from the other party in June last year.

So, mindful of this I phoned up the company (Bell Direct) this evening and told them the complete details, namely:-

I was driving southbound on the M1 near Nottingham in the middle lane, passing traffic on my left doing about 75mph. A white mid-80’s Mazda 323 goes past me in the “fast” lane about 10 mph faster than I was going. When the car had got about 10 yards in front of me I notice that it’s slowly drifting into the central reservation, over the rumble bars and finally, after about 10 seconds or so into the barrier.

The car then swirved across the road, over corrected, swirved again and fell on its side. At this point I had already started slowing down. However, seeing that the car is about to hit the central reservation again, a lot harder and whilst spinning, I know it’s going to slow a lot faster than I can and it will be bouncing across towards me. After seeing the whole newtonian physics of the situation and simulating it in my head I put my foot on the accelerator and headed for where the car was about to not be. (It’s amazing how slowly events happen during a situation like this.)

Anyway, by the time I was level with the car, it had just hit the barrier with the driver’s roof pillar and was starting to bounce back towards me at high speed, spinning rapidly.. it must have past behind my vehicle missing by inches.

Anyway, bits of the spinning vehicle or stones thrown up by it hit my car causing a large number of stone chips and one small dent with a paint gauge on the rear driver’s side door. Cost of the repair, £850.

Anyway.. Bell Direct thank me for the information and then after putting me on hold for about a minute tell me that the premium would be increased by £71 because “statistically, people who have had a no-fault claim are likely to have a fault claim within 3 years!”

I told them where to go.. they told me where to send their welcome pack.

I then tried to call Direct Line insurance to renew my current insurance, but I got a very kurt response as soon as I got connected, “Our systems are down for an upgrade, call back in a few hours. *click*” Very nice and polite, I must say.

Update:

I’ve managed to get through to Direct Line and have renewed my policy. All I have to do now is send back the stuff to Bell Direct.

Ho-hum.

Well, apparently, the bike shop had the brake/gear levers in yesterday.. but he couldn’t fit them ‘cos he didn’t have any fitters.

Today I took it in.. it’s there now, being repaired and pampered as we speak.

I do hope he hasn’t found anything more he can say is broken and needs to charge me for. The problem with the gear changer was exaserbated by the bike shop not replacing the cable which meant I couldn’t even soldier on with a partly working gear train and had to get a replacement.

I’m not going to that bike shop again.