An Eventful Summer

In my last blog post I announced that we were getting connected to superfast broadband on 17 August.  Naively, perhaps, I thought that was true, as that is what our new provider had promised.  However, on getting back from a glorious week in Wales, I found that the router had not arrived, and that prompted me to ring the ISP - and sure enough, someone had forgotten to do something or other, and we were not, in fact, scheduled to be connected that day after all. They were terribly apologetic, but the soonest they could re-schedule for was 3 September. Clearly, that is a much worse time for me; I had chosen mid-August as the quietest time for the business: inSeptember, things start to get busy again.

And sure enough, the engineer turned up on the 3rd, did something at the box in the village, plugged in the new router, and told us the internet should be live in half an hour - but officially he was only meant to promise it by the end of the day.

By the end of the day, it still wasn't live: and given we don't get 3G here, I was effectively isolated from email, Skype and all the other online tools of my trade.  Cue angry phone call first thing this morning. And guess what, someone had forgotten to do something, a switch was thrown and we were online.

So an unpromising start with the new ISP - but I have to admit the internet is a lot faster now, so maybe it's worth it.

Not our car, but represents how I feel about it...

Other events over the summer include the timing belt on the car snapping long before it should have done, and trashing the engine - so a negotiation with Nissan about their meeting the cost of that. They wanted to local Nissan dealer to have a look inside, but unfortunately, the dealership managed to drop the car off the back of their truck and write it  off (along with two other vehicles on their forecourt). Fortunately nobody was hurt. So a further negotiation about that, as their insurers wanted to value the car as having no engine, whereas I felt that was unreasonable. And of course we had to find a replacement car.

On top of which, Mike managed both to lose his wallet and fail his driving test (by an very unlucky major...), so has had to re-book just as he is leaving for University; Clare got a new job and is moving out to live in Manchester, and needed to buy a car for that (with parental help, of course); and so on... Also, we were asked to have a Spanish student to stay, as she is working on her English. She was a delightful guest, and gave us the excuse to do a lot of walking, castle-visiting, boating and so on.

I'm also continuing to work on my ILM Coaching programme, which although I started somewhat grudgingly, is (of course) proving very worth while.

Nonetheless, my restful break and the time set aside to finish the book all felt somewhat eroded. However, I have managed to keep calm in the midst of these slings and arrows of outrageous fortune (aka first world problems) and  I am still determined to finish the book this year and get it published asap - and am doing the final editing at present, while I await the graphics I have commissioned...