David Gillon

Saturday was a bit of a dead loss. It started before I even got out of bed, when I picked up my Kindle to check the time and found it wasn't charging - the cord has been fraying so the problem was fairly obvious. So I googled replacement cords, but left ordering one until later - we'll get back to that.

I was supposed to be going  to kaberett 's housewarming, and was really looking forward to meeting several people face to face - and of course Kaberett, who I haven't physically seen in too long. I was up bright and early and came downstairs to have breakfast on a bright autumnal day,.that was 9AM. By 11AM it was grey, wet and miserable, and I had a splitting headache, which was very clearly pressure related. I suspect I've got a mild sinus infection, but the headache was anything but mild. It eased off slightly after a hot bath, but a trip into centrral London and out the other side looked like a bad idea, particularly when I was spending half my time with a hand clasped over my eye, which really wouldn't work with pushing the chair.  It flared up again in the afternoon, and I was finding noise of any kind irritating, so that was a good, if annoying decision.

So I spent the afternoon playing games on my laptop with the sound turned off. About 4PM I decided I'd better order that cable for the Kindle, and promptly found that I had no internet service. Switching the router on and off didn't fix it, and of course without internet I couldn't check if it was a wider internet outage, or just down to me. When I noticed that my wifi wasn't one of the ones listed as available by the laptop, I realised that it was probably router specific. I only had the Virgin guy out of Wednesday to fix my landline, now I was going to have to get him out for the router.

Today has been better. No headache, and I found a cord that would fit the Kindle and charge it (another would fit, but was too loose to reliably charge it). I did a little bit of finishing up on re-roofing the shed, then decided to finish off reorganizing the bedrooms - relocating the computer desk to the larger back bedroom, so it isn't tucked into the niche in the front bedroom with no room to roll the chair back, and moving the chest of drawers from the back bedroom in exchange. Which turns out to work even better than expected as the niche will hold not just the drawers, but the spare wheelchair with room to spare. Plus the whole arrangement is much more wheelchair accessible for days when I'm not up to walking. The one thing that remains to be done is running an ethernet cable from the front bedroom to back as that's where the cable comes into the house - there's already a phone cable running in the opposite direction, so I know that's doable. (And it's not as if I have a working desktop at the minute, so the delay isn't critical).

Then I sat down to ring Virgin about the router, but thought I'd better check everything over once more, and whoops. When I unplugged the Virgin router to cycle the power I also unplugged the older Linksys router I use as a signal booster - the laptop will hold signal with it much better than with the Virgin Netgear one.  Turns out I'd plugged the chargers back into the wrong routers. The Linksys powerbrick was running very hot, and once I'd plugged the Netgear powerbrick into the Virgin router its wifi signal popped up again - though it did take several minutes, and it was wifi that could talk to the net. Looks like the Linksys powerbrick had enough power to power-up the Virgin router, but not quite enough power to run wifi or talk to the net. Glad I found that one before calling out the engineer!

So now I've got the net back I  can order the replacement Kindle power cords, the ethernet cabling I need, and start seriously looking at what I want to order as a replacement desktop. Plus catch up on a couple of days of social media. Fingers crossed nothing else goes wrong!