You might have thought it was April 1st if you’d read this article in the paper today. But no, the Foreign Office really has produced a special guide to travel specifically for WAG’s… Included are important tips such as how to cope if you break a nail or your hair extensions turn green, how not to delay a flight unnecessarily, and the importance of not wearing a camouflage bikini in the Caribbean…
Category Archives: General
Shameless Self Promotion…
In a bid to get rid of some of my clutter, and to perhaps raise some money towards the new fridge (!) I’ve started a shop on a website called Etsy called Displaced Moose! selling some of my crocheted scarves etc. Please have a look! Special deals on shipping available in the UK!!! 🙂
The Fridge is Toast
As Beth mentioned in her post today, our Fridge-Freezer is toast… Well the fridge part is – and you could probably make toast on the back with how much it is running – however the freezer is freezing very nicely.
The problem has been coming on for a while. Before we went on holiday, we had a nice little glacier growing down the back wall inside the fridge. Everything was nicely chilled, but it didn’t seem overly right, so after a discussion with Beth we turned down the power on the fridge, which resulted in a lot of the ice melting. This unfortunately collected in the bottom of the fridge as the drain at the back was blocked, so Beth cleaned that out by putting some warm water mixed with a little bleach down. This cleared the blockage, but unfortunately when we came back from holiday the inside was a bit cool, but not exactly cold, so we turned the fridge up.
This made it slightly cooler, but not much, so again after some discussion and a bit of research online we decided to totally defrost the freezer part of the unit. This improved the situation slightly as the fridge compartment got a bit cooler, but again not cool enough – and to keep it not cool enough the motor on the fridge was running permanently. As a result, today we called out the repair man.
He spent fifteen minutes looking at it, checking the replaceable parts and since we’d already cleaned the outflow, defrosted the freezer and all the other possibilities announced that it wasn’t viable to repair – all the other options related to either problems with the gas in the heat exchanger at the back, or other things that couldn’t be easily fixed. The only option was replacement.
Here comes the next problem, our fridge/freezer is built in, hence the manufacturers bump the price up a bit, and it’s a special order too. They had a suitable replacement that was the right dimensions and the right proportions for doors, but it has to be ordered in.
Hence why we have what is pictured above in our living room. It’s one of those party beer coolers that they usually sell for barbecues, in this case with Stella Artois branding all over it. However with the shelf removed it can take a couple of bottles of milk, a few yoghurts, some margarine and some packs of meat – all the stuff from the fridge that will go off!
A Nice Write-Up
Catching up with updates and links I came across this nice complimentary write up of the blog from Jon Tackabury over at Binary Fortress Software, listing sites he regularly reads:
A frequently updated, very well written and often insightful blog that I love reading. It covers such a wide range of topics it’s always fresh and enjoyable to read. Often times there are multiple posts per day, all of them verbose and a pleasure to read.
As another ego boost, it’s listed between Ars Technica and Coding Horror…
Why Smile makes me Smile
For a number of years I’ve been a happy customer of Smile, the internet division of the Co-operative Bank. As you may know, Smile has some of the highest customer satisfaction levels of any UK bank – you can see a selection of their awards listed here.
To show you why, I’ll give an example. Last week I needed to order some foreign currency for our upcoming trip to Taizé, and also for a later trip to a wedding in Canada. As a result I needed three currencies – Canadian Dollar for Canada, Euro for France, and a few Swiss Francs as we are flying in to Geneva. The Smile website has a fairly simple interface for ordering currency which just asks you for an amount in sterling, and a currency, so I had to do it three times, once for each different currency type.
At this point, ask yourself what your bank would have done? I’m sure that 99% would expect your bank to have processed and charged for three separate transactions, but not Smile. I got a nice little note from one of their staff members who had spotted the three orders going through and had put them all into a single order for me, and only charging once for the handling.