restoration

I celebrated the fact that I'm on holiday with a trip to the dump, then for good measure cleaned the chickens' roosting board.  Trade at the dump was pretty quiet, and almost nobody there had brought garden refuse, confirming my suspicion that by the week before Christmas very few people are thinking about their gardens, let alone doing any gardening.

After lunch I did get out into the garden.  If I haven't mentioned the garden recently, it's because one way and another I haven't managed to get much gardening done.  Today the ground was wet, but I managed to work my way round the edges of the rose bank, pruning the roses and honeysuckle where they've grown out over the lawn, and cutting the grass where it had grown long and straggling up into the roses, sheltered by the thicket from the lawnmower.  Cutting the grass is a slow process, as I have to rake each section through with my hands in a virtual fingertip search, to make sure there are no toads hiding in there.  A robin watched me sharp eyed as I progressed, and the piles of snail's eggs I uncovered won't last long.

Meanwhile, the Systems Administrator went back to the dentist for the next stage of root canal treatment.  The good news is that the pain the SA experienced all last week is normal, not the signs of infection or anything untoward beyond the final screams of the nerve dying back.  That tooth is taking longer to die than a Puccini heroine.  The bad news is that after the dentist spent a final session drilling, the SA can expect another five days or so of pain, though he did say cheerfully that the SA should be fine to eat lunch by Christmas day.  After three quarters of an hour in the dentist's chair the SA said it felt like being punched in the face, and that's before the packing of novocaine wears off.  The final appointment for a permanent filling is booked for the second week in January, and in the meantime the SA has been told not to eat toffee, or anything sticky.  I think it is worth the unpleasantness, though, since with any luck the tooth will be good for another two or three decades after this.  I still have an incisor that died for no discernible reason back in the mid 1980s.  It went blue over time, and I eventually had it veneered for cosmetic reasons, but it is still firmly attached to my jaw.

Last night the SA's laptop came back from the menders.  It failed due to a problem with the motherboard, which the firm were able to fix, so the SA can retrieve the data from it.  It is amazing how much information one accumulates on a laptop nowadays.  Ours includes all the weather records since early 2011, the code number for the part to mend the kitchen tap which we got from the kitchen company the last time it went wrong but can't keep asking them, and the SA's tax records for the past umpteen years.  Vows have been taken about regular downloads to a back-up disc in future.  They haven't yet been followed through, so far as I know, but the toothache intervened.  The computer repair company said that they were very busy, with a lot of people getting their machines repaired at the moment.  I presume that's a combination of people trying to make them last longer in the recession, and people like us realising quite how much stuff they now have on their laptops.  Your machine is almost as finely and individually tuned to you as your gut bacteria, and if it goes down permanently before you've transferred to the new one you lose all your bookmarks, apart from anything else.

The SA has promised to mend the tap, as soon as the tooth has stopped screaming.  It is dripping at an interval of slightly less than once a second, and getting worse.  In the good old days you bought a washer, but with mixer taps you have a thing called a cartridge.  There are lots of different sorts, of course, so without the part number you're sunk.  In the meantime the drip is wasteful, but too regular to work as water torture.