10 July, 2007

Into the second week of holidays and all is well. I went down in a shower of shit and small stones last week and felt pretty crap for no real reason that I could ascertain but presumably, being the complex critter that I am, there was a good reason. Feeling better now and a bit more fit to face the World.

Following a few weeks of screwing up I have managed to install my first door handle. A spent days measuring the position and making sure I understood what I was doing (the instructions being written in what I can only assume was martian). I then spent 20 minutes drilling irrepairily into the door. I then spend 30 minutes throwing a wobbly as I realised I had it in the wrong place by 5mm. I then spend 10 minutes calming myself and discovering that the door knob allowed for noobs like me and had about 10mm of forgiveness. These martians are clever folks. After some filling and positioning and chiseling we now have a door handle and no casualties…actually not true. I managed to slice my finger with a craft knife while gently carving out a space for the wee knobby bit that actually catches the door. That hurt but it turns out my blood clots well so all positive. I am teaching Materials Tech to juniors next term…if I was a parent with a young person at Hagley I’d be freaking out.

I also had to make a foray onto the roof to repair a broken tile. I discovered it while opening a cupboard and being drenched by a bucketful of water that had been collecting. I spent a fun Saturday evening in the ceiling space setting up a bucket system and then a hysterical Sunday summoning the courage to get on the roof with one of those spunky little filler gun things to seal the crack. Like a ski field it’s much steeper up there than it looks but I manned through it and got back to terra firma without issue.

I have been working on a redesign for The Managers’ web site these holidays. It’s my first big foray into Drupal and so far so good. I’m liking the ability to create views of different content very quickly and then being able to style them fairly seamlessly. Certainly the ability to add modules quickly has been great and makes experimenting with different approaches nice and easy. Hopefully we get it live soon as I’m pretty stoked with the visual style of it. Might have to cut back on the freebie work soon and start getting in some paid stuff.

Turns out my somewhat snide comment about no tornados was a little prophetic with Taranaki being hit by a bunch of them. I will try and keep my comments to myself in future…though damn, warning signs anyone.

This weekend we are having our exorcism to rid the house of unwanted spirits…the downside of distilling stuff that I’ll never drink…I mean, CandyShots, who the hell will drink that. Begone evil spirit – Lorem ipsum etc etc.