Life in a computer game... housy woes and little triumphs.

Recommended music for this blog: Nina Simone - Ain't Got No, I Got Life.

My regular readers will know that I was bitterly cold when I returned to Liverpool after Christmas. Dee and I decided to do something about the situation. As well as burning so much gas we caused some sort of pipeline crisis in the Ukraine, we thought we might invest in a draft excluder and perhaps a curtain for the front door to try to stop what can only be described as the raging blast of cold air that comes through. (I was actually going to describe is as a raging zephyr, until consultation with the dictionary revealed a zephyr to be a gentle breeze.) The hallway is the coldest part of the house and so we put it in our sights.

In an unrelated matter our landlord fixed our broken burglar alarm a few weeks back. Not that he will admit it is called a burglar alarm, because he says there are no burglars in Liverpool, only intruders. So in his mind he fixed the intruder alarm, and I was happier for having a working burglar alarm. (On an interesting aside, there are no burglars in my home town of Carrickfergus, only burgulars. Anyone know what I am talking about?) Anyway, back to the matter in hand. The problem with our alarm was that he changed the codes. Not a huge problem you would imagine, except that Dee kept getting it wrong. That meant she kept setting the alarm off, and having to press as many buttons as possible to shut it up... and eventually landing us with an unusual household woe.

On Saturday I set out to find some cut price curtains, having recieved a tip about some £3 drapes at the Next Clearance store around the corner. Disappointed by the brown curtains with blue outline drawings of monkeys on them I found at Next, I soldiered on to some other establishments, eventually picking up a nice stripey blue pair at B&Q for a fiver. I do want to point out that price was a more important factor than loveliness. I was prepared to settle for almost anything without animal prints. And so Saturday 10th January 2009 became a first for me, as I hung my first curtain. I sawed the pole to the correct length, fitted it to the wall without the aid of a drill, measured the curtain, hemmed it (for it was a HIY curtain) and hung it. Here we are together...

Again, just a reminder that loveliness was rated secondary to price. We are looking forward to taking it down in the summer. Anyhow it has proven to be remarkably effective. We have to keep the milk and stuff in the fridge now instead of just leaving it lying around the hall. The next challenge is the draft excluder. Friends have suggested that since I couldnt find one in the shops, I should make one myself out of the other curtain. Stay tuned to the blog to see if I take up the challenge.

Just as Dee and I thought our housy woes were over for the time being, disaster struck. In our haste to leave the house to go to dinner at Erinne & Pauls ('twas lovely) Dee got the code wrong. In her haste to type in the correct code to stop the alarm from going off, she got it wrong some more... and seems to have put it into a different mode. It still does what it usually does, but it also has a new handy feature. Any time it senses movements using the downstairs sensors, the control panel makes three loud beeps. So if someone walks across the room, we all hear three beeps. If someone goes to the kitchen sink to get a drink of water, three beeps. Last night as Dee ironed, the alarm beeped every time the iron travelled to one end of the ironing board or the other! It feels like we are living in a computer game, as every movement is tracked and the other players are warned that someone is coming!

In the absence of an instruction manual, we are struggling for solutions. This morning I had to go to work early and Dee was going late. No hope of a lie-in for Dee though, because I was moving around downstairs from about 6.30am... and guess what... thats right, three loud beeps every time I moved a muscle! In fact as I type this I can hear it going off. At least I know she hasn't fallen asleep on top of the school books she is marking!

That's all for this week folks... hopefully I'll have a solution for the alarm before the next blog. But just before I go, there is time to introduce a new feature... the website of the week... and I'm starting with a good one.

Website of the week: Bloons A very addictive little game in case you need an excuse to procrastinate.