Week of 21st March, 2016

4 Shift Days to Retirement

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Monday, 21st March

Some rushing about today. First up, Mum has a minor problem with weeping isolating valves under her kitchen sink. I heard about this over the weekend, and was expecting a call from a friend of our tame Polish plumber, Maciek. He's away at present, so he handed off to a friend. And the call came in just as I was going out to help Jenny assemble a wooden raised planting bed (to be screwed together - three planks high, 2no 4 inch screws at each end of each plank, so 48 screws) My electric screwdriver was required. Well, actually, it's a 14 volt battery electric drill, but it does the job.

So attend Mum's first. Not too painful, except for access to the valves. Whoever installed the sink unit cut everything very tight around the plumbing. Luckily, actual valve replacement was not needed - mere repacking the spindles with PTFE tape sufficed. So I paid him, and toddled off to Jenny's.

Where the wooden bed frame screwed together reasonably well, except one corner, where I was forced to work left-handed, which was not easy - and probably ruined the #2 Pozidrive screwdriver bit I was using, since it was much more difficult keeping drill and screw correctly aligned. But it's all done - and the amount of stuff that Jenny found while she was levelling the ground to take the bed was remarkable. There were 2 layers of anti-weed cloth, and considerable broken paving slabs - not to mention some plastic lawn edging. Now she has to get 850 litres of soil delivered and installed - and garden centres normally deliver this in 4 foot square bags, from the back of a lorry, with a crane. Not good when you need the contents of the bag in the back garden of a terraced house, to which there is no vehicle access. What am I bet that I'll be asked to provide extra labour to carry the soil?

I did all this using Jane's car, Nyree, because she wanted it parked near the school she collects from. So I drove up to near the school, and parked up, before meeting Jane in Mum's favourite cafe for coffee - well, I had lunch, since I hadn't eaten, and it was well past lunchtime.

Quite a day - and there will probably be lots more like it, after I retire.

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Tuesday, 22nd March

This afternoon I had more errands. Yesterday, I wondered about moving all that soil at Jenny's. And yes, today came the request for help. 850 litres of soil weighs the best part of a ton, so the only way to move it manually is in small batches. And it was in a 4 foot square bag, delivered on a pallet.

Then I could do some shopping, and pick up more knitted Easter chicks from cousin Liz. These are for Katy, and she now has 38. Noises were made about having 90, but I don't think that's going to happen.

Finally, I did some financials.

Before all that I looked at the failure of ads-pi to lock his instance of ntpd to GPS signals. And in the process, I've either broken ads-pi, or corrupted his microSD card. If it is corruption, this is annoying, since there's significant work preparing everything again - I didn't manage to make a backup image. If ads-pi is terminally broken, which I believe is not the case, I'll probably do the work anyway - that install is well out-of-date. It's Raspbian Wheezy-based, using the image dated 2015-05-05, IIRC, rather than the current Raspbian Jessie, which means I will have to start learning about the dreaded systemd, as well.

I say "dreaded" because, while I have no opinion on the necessity for a newer init system, I believe systemd goes far beyond that. As an init system, I have no quarrel with it, but when it spreads its tentacles throughout the system, replacing everything in sight, that's when I feel it's not a good idea. Unfortunately, the rest of the Linux world (or a very large majority of it) believes otherwise. But I don't have the programming chops, nor yet the influence, to change that, so I'll just have to live with it. Don't expect me to "go quietly into that good night", though.

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Wednesday, 23rd March

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Thursday, 24th March

Last 2 days of this fortnight now completed. Just 2 shift days left before I retire. Can you tell I'm looking forward to it?

Work was the usual for a 10 shift, albeit not as busy as one might expect for a Thursday, just before a holiday. But tomorrow's missing lists are empty, now that I've filled the late evening PasB.

Travel was it's usual shambolic self. Just not on the District Line, this time. No, on this occasion it's a drivers' strike on the Piccadilly Line, starting at 21:00 Wednesday, supposedly for 24 hours. But the Piccadilly Line is closed until Friday morning - and that will be a Sunday Service, it being a Bank Holiday. I believe Jane has plans for outings - I just don't know what they are yet. Hopefully, not too far, not with railway and road works, which will make long-distance travel a misery.

I've received my final salary, including the tax-free element of the redundancy settlement. And it's almost exactly what I was expecting - not twice the size, which would have meant HR and Salary have both dropped the ball, and I have been taxed on all the redundancy, despite my efforts to avoid that. But all is well on that front. My first State Pension payment will be in a month's time, and every 4 weeks thereafter.

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Friday, 25th March

Good Friday

Cafe outing with Jane's Mum. Then, having been paid - see yesterday - I visited the local Staples, and picked up another Seagate 2.5 inch 2TB USB3 drive - this one has a grey/silver lid, but inspiration won't let me rename it. I need this one to rescue data from adelie, who I suspect will soon fail to boot, as rockhopper already has. And that rescue transfer is running as I speak - all 414GB of it, at about 5MB/sec. This is going to be long. I hadn't realised adelie is so slow.

The Amazon Basics USB3 hub now has 4 USB drives plugged into it - 3 Seagate 2TB, and one Seagate 1TB, all 2.5 inch, hub powered. And it continues to work very well. The only change I need to make is to get a 2 metre USB3 A to B lead - and that's on order, from Amazon.

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Saturday, 26th March

We (that's Jane, Jenny, Sarah and I) took Mum to the garden centre at Syon Park today. Everyone else is a gardener of some degree (me, not so much) so after brunch in the cafe everyone else betook themselves to the plant and garden equipment displays, while I sat and consumed coffee.

Eventually, we had to leave, because Jenny had to go to work. Jane and I took Mum home, did chores, and then departed. I got myself a (long overdue) haircut, and then things quieted down. I'll have to collect Jenny from work at 10, because she has an early start tomorrow. Back in the day, if I had less than 10 hours between work shifts, I got an extra payment (a "less than 10 hour break penalty payment") Now, not so much.

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Sunday, 27th March

Easter Sunday

Katy buttonholed me to get her Kindle updated - after the March 22nd deadline. Of course, it's difficult to physically identify the hardware version for anything older than the Kindle Keyboard, especially when the battery is flat as a pancake. So first I'll have to charge it.

This Kindle is even older than Jane's, but at least I got that one done before the cutoff date. And I'll have to do cousin Liz's as well - when it comes into my hands, which will probably be next weekend.

Our clocks went forward last night. We call this Summer Time (Merkin: Daylight Saving) and it's a chore to adjust all the mechanical clocks. Luckily, Sunday morning is close enough to normal clock winding time that I can combine the two tasks. Some people, of course, appear to have it worse... And yes, that is an April Fool gag.

<pause>

Or I thought Katy's Kindle was older than Jane's... It looks like it's actually a 4th generation, from 2011. And once I'd got it charged enough to check things, I put it on the wifi here, and selected Menu|Sync and Update. Which failed, as expected. But when I checked back later, there was the "03-2016 Update Successful" file, which is the sign of a successful update - even though I hadn't done anything else. This is good. Hopefully, Liz's Kindle will be as painless. But Liz is technically illiterate - she has to do, and write down, anything before she feels confident about it.

The backup of adelie is complete - all data is now safe on the new Seagate drive. This is good. I should perhaps see if rockhopper can be persuaded to stand up long enough to recover his data.

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