One Foot in Front of the Other

3rd April 2020 3rd April 2020 by Sleeper in , , No Comment

How did I come to this, where every song I sing
Is nothing but a list of pain and suffering?

We never will forget, and no, we will not forgive!
We’ve fought hard not to die, yet we don’t know how to live-
How do we change our world to what we want it to be?
How do we move beyond all of this misery?

Thursday

Ouch. Maybe staying up till midnight talking nonsense isn’t such a good idea after all. Woke at 5am with a headache. Eventually dragged myself out of bed at 7, got the kids up, dressed and breakfasted, then went back to bed for half an hour before I started work at 9, by which time I felt mostly human again. Settled in for a sprint planning session that lasted far longer than it had any right to. I’ll be glad when this project’s over and I can get back to my normally-scheduled work routine.

More cold cuts for lunch, this time in bagels; we’re running out of bread. Lunch was cut short a little as my boss needed an urgent catch up before I headed into an interview at 1pm. We’ve had a run of disastrous candidates; today’s was thankfully an exception, but I don’t know if they have what we’re looking for. Emailed our recruitment team to set him up with the next stage; that will tell me pretty quickly whether he’s any good. For once I had an afternoon free of meetings; I was able to get some work done almost uninterrupted!

Had a long, useful talk after the kids were in bed, about what we can do in the short to medium term about childcare arrangements. While right now we’re not paying anything (or at least, a nominal amount) to the nursery, it’s a struggle to fit full time work in and keep the kids from killing each other. We’ve got something of a plan; hopefully it’ll work out well enough.

Friday

Woke at 7 from a nightmare involving trying to contact my mum who’d been admitted to a hospital which bore an uncanny resemblance to Bristol Temple Meads railway station, with added shades of Altered Carbon; people at the reception desks kept tapping at their computers and then talking about sleeve death. I’ve been trying to stay away from current events news too much, to keep the kids’ mental health up as much as anything else, but it’s still obviously getting to me.

Went straight in to an early morning call with my boss to discuss a sudden, unexpected, incoming political bunfight; gave him the data he needs to push back hard. Found myself dragged into a meeting as a result, but managed to give all the details required quickly enough, in contrary to some of the other endless meetings I’ve been in.

Braved the supermarket over lunchtime; wasn’t too horrendous, and at least in the rapidly-moving queue outside everyone was maintaining a reasonable separation. Had a brief chat with the guy marshalling the queue who took advantage of the fact he was outdoors to sneak a crafty roll-up; he’d bee there since 7am and was just getting to the point (at 1 in the afternoon) that he could take a break. Sterling work there; he was in decent spirits despite what must be an enormously boring job. Inside, at least in some aisles, the social distancing wasn’t so great, but armed with the scan-and-pay app I managed to stay away from majority of people and get almost everything I wanted, the exceptions being flour and frozen vegetables, of which they had precisely none. I could at least get pizza dough mix so the plan for home made pizza isn’t out of the window.

Back to work on my return, mostly head down apart from one Zoom call to say goodbye to P, my now ex-boss, and an apologetic one from the new boss asking me to keep an eye on Slack over the weekend due to a badly organised performance test run happening.

Spent some lovely time with Sleeper Jr., talking about major events in recent-ish history; concentrating on the good we’ve been talking about the Apollo missions and the Berlin Wall coming down. We watched some footage from both on YouTube. It’s been nice to actually educate him on things he doesn’t know about, and which aren’t computer programming or maths related for a change. Tomorrow, we’ll maybe get to do some gardening!

Splendid

2nd April 2020 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in , No Comment

Woke up this morning feeling super!
Where’s the butler?
Pass me the butter!
My muffins are freshly baked;
Wake up and I stretch and shake.

My life? Well yes, it’s great –
Like I live on a slice of special cake!

Tuesday

Up at 7. As usual, one child was raring to go while the other needed dragging out of bed to get breakfast. Today was my day for working with interruptions so settled myself down at the kitchen table. In contrast with the last few times, I somehow managed to help out with English schoolwork at the same time as writing CloudFormation, making lunch, handing out felt tip pens and debugging python. Vanished off upstairs for an hour at 12 to run an interview but otherwise stuck to the kitchen for the most part.

Lunch was cold cut doorstep sandwiches made with the legendary bread-borne-of-beer. I really liked them but the bread’s dense and it was probably a bit of a struggle for the kids given the combination of thickness and density.

At one point the there was Minecraft-themed yoga in the living room. I had no idea such a thing existed, but, hey, whatever keeps my meetings free of interruptions…

There hasn’t been so much bickering today either. At one point the seven-year-old was playing Minecraft on Switch, and I gave the four-year-old Sonic Mania to play on the big screen to keep her quiet. She seems to have fallen in love with Knuckles the Echidna; most likely because he’s pink. There was a lot of dying on the first baddie and almost as much “Daddy, I’m stuck!” but she had fun.

Seems like today was a calm-before-the-storm kind of day; there are ominous clouds on the horizon in terms of juggling-all-kinds-of-outstanding-projects. A baptism of fire for my newly enlarged empire, ahem, team. I’m too settled. Surely something is going to upset our cosy new routine soon?

Wednesday

Think I’m starting to adjust. Woke up again at gone 7, made a start on work. The usual nonsense over breakfast, then mostly hid upstairs trying to get some work done, which seemed like a lost cause. Not because of the kids, but because of the number of meetings in my calendar. A grumble on a private Slack about the fact that we were supposed to be meeting for beers tonight turned into arrangements for virtual beers, which was good. as was the presentation I delivered talking about the infrastructure scheduling work we’ve been doing.

Found the time during my lunch break to prep the ingredients for a paella, which turned out awesome at dinner time. I should cook those more often. Managed to shepherd the kids into bed at a sensible hour then settled down in front of FaceTime. Was really great talking to everyone, a welcome antidote to the outside world. Eventually crawled off to bed, a few drinks down, at midnight.

GMF

30th March 2020 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in , No Comment

I am the greatest m*****f*****
That you’re ever gonna meet.
From the top of my head
Down to the tips of the toes on my feet.
So go ahead and love me while it’s still a crime-
And don’t forget you could be laughing
Sixty five percent more of the time.

Sunday

Does waking up at 7 instead of 6 because the clocks have gone forward count as sleeping in? Didn’t think so. Got up, had a leisurely breakfast and spent some quality time with the kids while J went out for a run.

Even though we had a delivery yesterday, we’re already running out of bread, thanks to the less than understandable “one loaf per delivery” restriction Ocado had on. There was enough for lunch but not for sandwiches over the next few days.

Checked my work Slack; seems like the bug that was raised on Friday finally has some details I can look in to; sadly it seems to have been caused by some really odd behaviour to do with quote escaping from Azure DevOps worker agents. Spend a little time working around it, then replied back to say it’s properly fixed (and that the other supposed problems also mentioned are behaviour according to design).

Attempted to make bread. I should have had more than enough flour and yeast, but I could only find one sachet of the latter, rather than the 100g can I could have sworn was still half full. Left it to rise for a couple of hours and nothing happened; in a fit of desperation I cropped a couple of (sanitised) dessert spoons of krausen from the beer fermenter and kneaded that in. Hopefully I might have something approaching bread now, and I haven’t just ruined both a loaf of bread and 5 gallons of beer at the same time.

Monday

Woken by the alarm. That’s a novelty I haven’t missed. Caught up on work while waiting for the kids to wake up. Looked at the bread dough I left last night; miraculously, it had risen overnight. Put it to one side for baking later, before a family breakfast and the commute back upstairs.

A busy and disappointing morning; the project delivery was pulled at the last minute due to a serious flaw in a vendor system that only appeared when they tried to scale up the cluster to take production traffic. Spent the day writing some lambda code to automate dashboard updating, along with various interminable meetings. Found time, somehow, to put the bread in the oven. It’s delightful; the beer yeast has given it just the slightest hint of something that you don’t usually find in normal white bread. Maybe I should start a sourdough-style starter with my yeast cake when I’m done.

The rest of the day passed far more quickly than it had any right to; meetings with bickering development teams, status update meetings, putting together a slide deck on where we are project-wise. Threw together a stir fry for dinner, lots of fresh vegetables are just what I feel like I need right now.

Light as the Breeze

29th March 2020 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in , No Comment

So I knelt there at the delta,
At the alpha and the omega,
At the cradle of the river and the seas.
And like a blessing come from heaven
For something like a second
I was healed and my heart was at ease.

Friday

Still haven’t got the hang of this sleeping in late thing. Up early, working a little before the kids disturbed me too much. So much for my meeting-light Fridays; I sit down at the kitchen table with them at about 9am and didn’t have a chance to take my headset off until gone 12, by which time one child was getting frustrated with his home learning, stuck trying to work out how to get his chromebook to do what he wants, and the other had long since run out of colouring.

The state of the house is getting to me; it’s a tip. I’ve resolved to try to give it a good tidy this weekend but we’ll see how well that works out. For the afternoon I attempt last-minute bug fixes for the big switch over at the weekend, not helped by vagueness of bug reports and complaints that something doesn’t work being greeted with silence when I ask for more details. Eventually we get the green light, and on Sunday night our hard work will be live. I’ll have to be online at 7am to take the second shift of handling any fallout, but that’s a small thing. This is a project that 6 weeks ago, when I joined, was predicted to fail and fail hard. Had a brief interlude for a “pub quiz” with colleagues around 4pm; was a bit of fun, and manage to get dinner on the table for a reasonable time. Kids in bed, had plenty of time to kick back and watch the finale of Star Trek: Picard and drink beer. My supplies are running low. The Kölsch in the fermenter will need a bit of lagering time before it’s ready to drink. Hopefully my monthly Northern Monk delivery will be here soon; even with that I might have to start drinking beer from the supermarket soon. Bah.

Saturday

Awoke only slightly less early, after a restless night. I was expecting after the staying-up-late-to-make-beer shenanigans that I might get a better night’s rest; no such luck. Ocado order arrives with a bunch of substitutions, one of which I have to send back as it’s unsuitable due to ingredients. The most annoying part was the substitution of things for smaller sizes; can’t make dinner for four with only ingredients for two. On the other hand, it’s not a massive problem. Next week I’ll have to actually go out grocery shopping, our next delivery isn’t until two weeks’ time (and we only got that due to having priority over non-Smart Pass customers).

Went out for a bike ride. The roads were mostly quiet, and I didn’t see anyone taking liberties with the speed limit like I’ve heard of happening. Most people seemed to be being sensible and following the guidance, apart from one group of six adults who obviously weren’t all from the same household and had taken it upon themselves to go for a meander in a tight-knit group. Top idiot-of-the-day points, however, go to the runner who got way too close while I was going through a staggered gate on the Wandle Trail and yelled at me to get out of his way.

“Dad, when can we have picnic in the park?” Social distancing rules mean we can’t, so we had a picnic in the garden. If was cold, but also fun. Nice to have these little moments of not a care in the world. Had flashbacks to eating sandwiches under a tree in the pouring rain outside York Castle Museum last year, that had the same “We’re going to have fun regardless” vibe.

Took the kids out for a short walk around the block later in the afternoon, to count rainbows in the windows. Technically that’s twice for exercise in one day but walking (or indeed, cycling) with them isn’t exercise for me, and they needed to get out of the house if only for ten minutes, plus I hadn’t managed to get out at all since Sunday. Fisherman’s pie for dinner, then got them ready for bed at some semblance of a sensible hour. Had our usual family episode of Doctor Who – this week it was Vincent and The Doctor, in which an invisible threat is killing people. Sounded a little familiar.

Kids in bed, I collapsed on the sofa in front of Altered Carbon. Hopefully we’ll get more tidying done tomorrow.

Nothing Compares 2 U

26th March 2020 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in , No Comment

It’s been so lonely without you here;
Like a bird without a song.
Nothing can stop these lonely tears from falling
Tell me baby, where did I go wrong?

Wednesday

Woke up early. Again. This seems to be becoming a habit. One child still snoring, I took the other one downstairs very, very quietly and found cartoons on Disney+ to watch. Tried the new version of Duck Tales, but it’s just lacking… something… compared to the original. Soul, maybe? It’s computer animated rather than hand drawn. We stuck with the late 80s/ early 90s nostalgia ‘toons, at least until the rest of the household emerged at gone 8am, by which point I’d also been horribly organised and put the pork for dinner in the sous vide..

Getting into a routine now; breakfast, head upstairs for meetings, followed by work, followed by more meetings, then lunch, which for a change wasn’t wolfed down in 5 minutes flat.

Back to the office, interviewed one of the candidates from last week for the second time – they’ll be getting an offer from us – and then spent an hour demonstrating to our (supposedly technical) end users how to use the tools I’ve been building for them. That was like pulling teeth. Demonstration was fine, then asked “Any questions?” Silence. Followed by, just after I start to move on. “Actually, what about <X>?”. The “Any further questions?”, silence, and last-minute interruption sequence goes on for more than half an hour.

Cooking dinner at a time that suits both our working hours and the kids’ bedtime is becoming a bit of a chore; people pinging me about work at mealtimes is also unhelpful (to be fair, 1. they’re overseas and 2. I’d usually still be at the office at that time under normal circumstances).

Eventually collapsed onto the sofa at 9pm, way too late to make beer, and watched the final episodes of Parks and Recreation, a series that we were way, way too late coming to.

Thursday

Slept in. No, wait, the other thing. Woke before 6 again. Not much notable about the day other than the boss promises we’ll be done with this project (at least in terms of delivery) by 4pm tomorrow so we can all have a clear weekend. Yeah, right, I’ll believe that when I see it.

Again, managed a leisurely-ish lunch! Just one ping on Slack, which I accidentally ignored because my phone and laptop were both upstairs. Wasn’t massively important anyway, just a question about something I already had in hand. The afternoon was free of interviews for a change (though only because the candidate cancelled on us), so I had a little more time to check in on my team and find out where they’re up to with their work. Good to see some progress on stuff that will turn out to be more important than we’d first envisaged!

Once again, a late dinner, though not as bad as yesterday. Got the brew kit out finally and started to heat the water to strike point around 8pm, setting up by the back door. Was simply in awe of the number of people who stood out on the street (ourselves included) to applaud the NHS efforts, complete with fireworks up the road. I’m usually something of a cynic when it comes to these things; perhaps I should be slightly less so in future. Had a brief chat with our next door neighbours before we went back inside; they’re helping out a local greengrocer they know get produce to those who can’t get out themselves. I’m slightly envious; between the children and the job, I don’t have even the tiniest bit of energy left over to go into helping those less fortunate. I suppose I’m already doing two jobs at once (or at least one and a half) what with the kids.

I haven’t left the house in five days, except for the odd ten minutes in the garden. Tomorrow I need to make time to get out on the bike, one way or another.

There is an Everlasting Song

25th March 2020 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in , , No Comment

There is an everlasting song on my lips;
I got up early so I don’t let that song slip,
And mighty is the voice I’m singing with –
It beats out all the dread.
Defeats the hours of darkness.

Monday

Sunday night I went to bed at 8:30, and slept through to 6am, felt much better for it. Dragged myself out of bed and did a little light email / slack while I waited for the kids to dress. J got an hour’s solid work in before breakfast, then I settled into a day of meetings, and general hell. Things breaking, AWS suspending all c5.large EC2 spot instances in their Dublin datacentres due to demand for on-demand ones (and yes, I know, that shouldn’t be an issue; I wasn’t the one who configured the affected system in the first place).

Managed to snatch 5 minutes to wolf down a roast lamb sandwich, rather than the leisurely time at the table with the kids I’d imagined, then back into the madness. Yet another candidate to interview, this one not so good, a meeting about CI/CD pipelines that I had absolutely zero need to have been in, another meeting cancelled 5 minutes after it was supposed to start.

Next meeting: team catch up, which at least has good news. D, who’s been down as interim Head of Systems, has been given the job on a permanent basis. We have a quick private catch up afterwards and set some time aside for later in the week to discuss what we want to do next.

Dinner with the kids was at least enjoyable, as was putting up the rainbow pictures they’ve drawn for the windows. Funnily enough I’ve been feeling a lot better about things today; let’s see how well I manage tomorrow when it’s my turn to be the work/child juggler.

Tuesday

Woke up, started working at 6:30 to try to get some time in before juggling kids and the office kicked in. Made a decent amount of progress, then sat down to breakfast with J and the kids. That was nice.

Settled at the kitchen table, one child on his Chromebook doing his schoolwork, the other doing colouring during my morning calls. Helped a little with the schoolwork, which was good, and had some really lovely pictures from the other. Prepared lunch while they were both doing “PE with Joe” later in the morning, then wolfed down a toasted sandwich during yet another call before a final stage interview between 12:30 and 2:30. J was upstairs, on her work-without-distraction day.

Got a little bit of time to spend with them properly later in the afternoon while cooking bolognese sauce for tea, which was nice, but I wish there was more to be done. While we were eating got a Slack ping from my boss asking could I jump on a call to demo some work to the stakeholders. Didn’t get to replying until an hour later, by which time the meeting had long ended; that’s the way it’s got to be right now. I can’t sacrifice all the time I get with the kids regardless of the importance of this deadline. It’s not who I am.

Both kids are generally unsettled right now; after putting them both to bed and talking to J in the living room, a knock on the door was followed by a tearful Sleeper Jr. “You didn’t give me a cuddle goodnight!”. Took him back upstairs and got into bed with him, eventually getting to the gist which was that being home is nice but he’s missing having other kids to play with. Eventually get him to cheer up by getting the remote control for the toy tank he’s built from a construction kit working; he chased me around the room with it, laughing.

Downstairs, J was worrying that we aren’t giving the kids enough quality time. She’s probably right but I don’t have a good answer for that. We talk through some of the things we can maybe do to help. . She heads off to bed while I start cleaning my beer making kit. Tomorrow, there shall be wort!

Napoleon Complex

22nd March 2020 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in , No Comment

Who pulls the strings?
Who makes the deals?
Stands five foot three in Cuban heels?
Who gets all the girls, then wakes up again?
Who will rule the world?
Who will make them scream his name?

Saturday

Awoke again at stupid o’clock. Took delivery of the week’s groceries, mostly intact. Up to now Ocado seem to have got off lightly with regards to stock problems. Maybe because there’s no instant gratification? When we put the order in, we had no idea the kids would be at home. There’s plenty to eat, it just might not be to their tastes. Oh well.

Headed out to the garden centre at 9am, aiming to arrive, and more importantly, leave, before it got even remotely busy. The car park was half full even then, though it seems like most of the traffic was for their attached farm shop; I stayed well clear. Picked up a few fruit and vegetable seeds plus some pots and hot-footed out of there before it got crazy.

Checked in on the bug fix I’d applied to an overnight backup job at work; despite being apparently part of yesterday’s release, it hadn’t gone live. Digging revealed that the person who did a full release yesterday didn’t do an actual full release, just pushed changes to the components he wanted fixed. Pushed it out properly.

Chatted with the next door neighbours while mowing the lawn; they’re well and don’t see themselves as being at particularly high risk, despite being retired. They have everything they need at the moment, and seemed keener on making sure we’re in the same situation. Got a phone call from both bosses on different phones at once; can I override the environment scheduler and spin up some development environments? Easy enough.

Afternoon: requisitioned a desk from one of the kids’ rooms to set up a work area for J in our bedroom. Fed them spicier-than-expected enchiladas, and introduced them to the glass of milk as a cure for spicy food burning your mouth.

Sunday

Woken at 4am by Sleeper Jr. knocking on our bedroom door; he’d had a nightmare. After an extended hug, he went back to his own bed and I dozed until about 6am. Check Ocado’s website and do the next week’s worth of shopping. Noted that they’ve sneakily put limits in place; can’t add two different loaves of bread to the order at once. Got up properly around 8am, and the kids presented J with the gifts and cards they bought two weeks ago when I took them shopping. So much has happened since then, it seems more like years ago.

Took the kids on a bike ride in the afternoon; minimal traffic on the roads but the park we’d usually cycle through is still fairly busy. The extended family enjoying a mothers’ day picnic in The Grove earned a few choice words from me under my breath. There’s still too much of the attitude that it doesn’t matter, that it’s just flu. It isn’t. Mostly everyone else we encountered was behaving the same as us; trying to get a bit of exercise and keeping fit while keeping their distance.

Cooked dinner on my return; a leg of lamb which will hopefully fill more than a few sandwiches as well over the course of the week. Called Mum while we were waiting for it to cook; we still have one child who doesn’t really want to talk to her. She confirmed what I’ve been hearing from social media and the news; hundreds of people have descended on the coast in a display of absolute mass stupidity.

I’m exhausted. Hopefully I’ll get a full night’s sleep tonight.

Ukulele Anthem

20th March 2020 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in , No Comment

Quit the bitching on your blog,
And stop pretending art is hard!
Just limit yourself to three chords,
And do not practice daily!
You’ll minimize some stranger’s sadness
With a piece of wood and plastic.
Holy f*ck it’s so fantastic, playing ukulele!

Today’s blog entry courtesy of my colleague Rob who gave his daughter a ukulele for her birthday yesterday. Anyway…

Thursday

Woke early (5am) after struggling to get to sleep. J had it even worse, not getting to sleep until 1, worrying about how we’re going to manage to try to work from home with kids around and pay the childcare bills for the youngest, whose nursery needs to keep charging.

Dropped the kids off at nursery and with the childminder; mention that if she’s available we might need her services for different hours for the foreseeable future, though we don’t know exactly when yet; we’re trying to work out . Her daughter’s just had her A-Levels cancelled. Back home, picked up the bike and went for a ride. Can’t say I’ve noticed the streets being much quieter as yet. Get home feeling not a huge amount better for the exercise. My Fitbit failed to sync with the phone so there’s no GPS track. Annoying, but pretty much the definition of a first world problem.

Headed to my desk and pinged my boss (who’s leaving in two weeks) and his interim replacement, D, on Slack letting them know that I don’t know what’s going to happen to my work pattern. I get back a response that looks like it’s been copied and pasted from a “what to say to employees who express concern about work patterns” guide somewhere. Hopped onto a video call with him and take the piss at his ability to write corporate boilerplate, and agree that for on some days I’ll be working on a best-effort basis. This is uncharted territory for us all.

Popped out around 10:30 to get some bread from the Co-Op. They have almost nothing at all. Fortunately a bread delivery arrives while I’m there. I buy a loaf and some eggs and head back. They’re queueing out of the door at the butcher’s shop – never seen that before except at Christmas. Headed back home, got my head down and do some work, including interviewing a frankly fantastic candidate for the opening on my team.

The kids come home about 6pm; Sleeper Jr. has been issued with a skipping rope to help with doing PE at home, along with logins for remote teaching resources. The school are going to continue to set work every day, so there’s that.

We call my mum on FaceTime, to see how she’s doing and reiterate both my brothers’ insistence that she stays away from people as much as possible. By the time we get the kids into bed it’s gone 8pm, much later than usual.

The last journey home

Friday

Dropped the youngest off at nursery; there was a really odd air of melancholy there. Many of the kids won’t see each other again; they’ll be off to school in September, all over the place, and who knows when the nursery will re-open? Drop t’other one off at breakfast club; they’re not expecting so many people today, and only have one of their two rooms open. One of the other parents mentions the list of Key Workers is a lot longer than they expected; sure enough IT infrastructure for Telecommunications Companies is there; I don’t think keeping the front door of the website open counts; my boss later suggests it could be argued that way – if we can’t deliver on our current project, we can’t accept payments, and we’ll be out of business fairly quickly. Don’t really see it that way myself. Anyway, as it happens it seems like there are fewer places available than there is demand at the school. There are people who need the availability more than us.

Working day was quiet, heads-down, get stuff done. After a few meetings (including the now-daily 4:30pm “blow off steam” Slack call), headed out to pick up from the nursery.

“We’ll still be doing the graduation, at some point,” said K, the manager. That’d usually take place in July; who knows what’s going to happen by then. She looked like she’s been crying, or at least trying very hard not to. She was definitely trying to be cheerful for the kids, who had an impromptu party and a disco this afternoon, complete with crisps! and party rings!

Back home, jumped on a Zoom call to discuss strategy for the next few days; work is in a crunch period. I lighten the mood a little bit by having Sleeper Jr. on the call. He’s asked if he can help out with the Oracle issues and responds with a bemused smile. He’s not doing so well emotionally; it’s been a massive change pretty much overnight.

“Can we call Grandma?” came the question. Of course we can, I replied, Grandma always loves talking to you. One child over effervescent, and the other barely speaking, we managed the call and put the kids to bed. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Hat Full of Sunshine

18th March 2020 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in , No Comment

Life is a laugh when you’ve got the joke;
Get yourself together, get on with the show.
Onwards we go, onto new adventures-
The best ones I’ve known I can barely remember!

COVID-19 diary – WFH day 3 of whatever.

Monday

Worked from home; so far so unusual, other than I usually choose to WFH later in the week. Suspecting isolation was only a matter of time, dig my bike out of the garage and clean it up. Need some way of getting minimum exercise over the next few weeks. And not running. I hate running.

Also ordered ingredients for about 160 pints of beer. Who knows when or even if they’ll turn up (edit: Thursday, apparently) but if I’m going to be stuck at home I might as well work on increasing my stock levels. Besides, the small businesses like the brewing suppliers I use need all the support they can get.

At 10pm an email comes in saying all staff who could must stay away from the office and WFH, and that anyone who couldn’t needed approval from top-level management to come in.

Tuesday

Get up, drop kids off at nursery and school. Changed into my cycling kit and headed out on an 8-mile bike ride before work. Helped clear my head a bit; will try to do that as often as possible.

First day of everyone WFH and things don’t go horribly badly; a few teething issues around access for some people to resources due to AWS security group constraints no-one had even thought of, let alone expected to be a problem. Video calls are horrible; too many people using consumer-grade internet connections at once with high contention ratios. I’m getting used to talking to fuzzy clouds of pixels.

Emails come in from Sleeper Jr’s school; as of now all extra-curricular clubs are cancelled, along with all school trips and the school disco that was going to take place on Thursday. It’s closely followed by an email saying that all Scout meetings are suspended indefinitely. Later on the news reaches me that my brother and his wife are now self-isolating after he’s come down with a cough. Stay healthy, both!

Emails also from some of the small companies I’ve invested in through crowdfunding. They make for very sober reading. One expects a drop in orders of 80% as a result of the combination of social distancing and supermarkets prioritising essential staples. Ouch. Wouldn’t be surprised if all of those small investments (all centred around the hospitality industry) are wiped out. My pension pot and a larger shareholding in my previous employer have taken a massive battering already, the latter having lost 60% of its value since I got the shares last summer, almost all of that in the last couple of weeks.

Wednesday

We’re running low on Weetabix. We’ve not been excessively stockpiling, but it seems like we’re the only ones. There’s a queue on the Ocado website of 2 hours just to make a change to a basket. As I’m walking Sleeper Jr. to school, another email; the kids’ swimming classes are cancelled indefinitely too. Yet another small business who are going to struggle; they’re taught by couple of swimming instructors who hire a local school pool at weekends.

As the day goes on we think of more things that we need to add to the shopping. There’s a queue of 15,000 people waiting to get into the Ocado website, 2 hours long, and I keep getting to the front while I’m working only to lose my spot because I didn’t notice quickly enough. Frustrating. Even more frustrating is when the queue is replaced with a “We’re closing the site until Saturday” message.

5pm: Notice is given that schools are going to close. That’s going to burn through the savings pretty quickly if we have to pay for childcare we can’t use and take time off to look after the little darlings. Hopefully we both have understanding bosses.

Work is blending into life too much. Admittedly there’s a massive deadline at the end of this week but I really, really hope I can maintain a better separation than I have so far; I can’t resist the temptation to poke the code i’m working on and get it that little bit more functional. I rather suspect from next week onwards all the days will be like this.

Tune in in a few days more to see if I’ve gone postal yet…

Continental Breakfast

8th January 2018 2nd April 2020 by Sleeper in 1 Comment

I cherish my intercontinental friendships
We talk it over continental breakfast
In a hotel in East Bumble-wherever
Somewhere on the sphere, around here

Happy new year!

If I ever make noises about voluntarily moving house again, please stop me. As long-time readers will know, we moved into a new home in September 2010. As time has gone on, we’ve outgrown the place; while it was fine for a first house our family has grown and it was starting to feel a little bit cramped. So in January we decided to sell up and move to somewhere a little bigger. This is a rough timeline of how things went:

January

Spend the weekends fixing up a few little niggles with the house (repainting, plastering, etc).

February

Engage a number of local estate agents to evaluate the place for a sale. I have an idea of price in mind, having checked out the local market.

Estate Agent 1: Quotes about 7% over what I’m expecting for the house. Also quotes the lowest agency fee.

Estate Agent 2: Quotes about 3% less than I’m expecting. Offers me a fee that’s bang on what I’d expected to pay

Estate Agent 3 (Who sold us the house in the first place): Quotes about what I’d expected, but with a much higher fee.

After some deliberation, we go with the second agent, Paul Graham Estate Agents, but set an initial price of what Estate Agent 3 had suggested, on the basis that we’ll drop it if we get no interest after 4 weeks.

March

House is launched onto the market, with about 10 viewings in the first weekend. We go out and view a half-dozen houses in the local area that fit our budget. One of them stands out as being somewhere we want to call home, and we intend to make an offer on it as soon as possible. Unfortunately none of the initially interested viewers want to buy our place. We drop the price to what was suggested originally. Immediately Estate Agent 3 gets on our case suggesting our chosen agent isn’t getting people through the door. Nope, that’s not the case, it’s more that the house isn’t easy to sell, in part because it’s set back from the street and people want houses with driveways at the front, and in part because it needs redecoration (really hard with young children around).

May

After watching it for months, the house we fell in love with sells. And the day after? At last, an offer, after more than 30 viewings on the house, and for slightly more than we’d have accepted as our bottom price! Unfortunately our buyers haven’t sold their flat yet so we don’t have a complete chain, but the estate agents don’t think it’ll take long to sell. We start looking at houses again and settle for a different one. We’re split between two of similar ages, one of which is newly refurbished, and the other which isn’t, but is also significantly cheaper. While we’re deliberating, the cheaper one sells. So that’s our decision made. I chase to find if the chain is complete yet and it is, so we put in an offer which is accepted. Hooray, we’ll be moved soon!

June

The lawyers take over. We appoint a solicitor with a local, but large South-East England firm of solicitors, MW Solicitors. Our sellers appoint a different local firm. Our buyers appoint an online conveyancing company who seem to be very cheap. A deadline of 15th September is set for completion by our sellers who want to get their daughter into a specific school in September 2018.

July

All the searches and surveys come back to my satisfaction, so I transfer the balance of the 10% purchase price to our solicitor ready to get exchange going. There have been no further enquiries from our buyers’ solicitors, so she thinks they’ll be ready to complete soon too. Time to get quotes from removal companies. I’m most impressed by Arnold & Self, so when the time comes they’ll get my business.

August

Our buyers aren’t ready to complete after all – their solicitors have been sitting on paperwork for months! We reply to their enquiries same-day and, at the end of the month, find out that everyone else in the chain is ready to move, and so long as there are no more delays from slow solicitors, we’ll be exchanging soon.

September

Bad news. Terrible news. The buyer at the bottom of the chain drops out, placing the entire chain in jeopardy. We’re pretty distraught, as are our sellers who are now in danger of missing the deadline for school applications. We agree to give it a week to find a new buyer, and one is found in only three days. We still need to wait for all the legal work to be done again, but the new buyer is aware of the tight time frames (mortgage offers expiring and school places vanishing) and agrees to work to it.

November

At last, everyone is ready to exchange! Except that they aren’t. There’s a missing deed of covenant for the ex-local authority flat at the bottom of the chain, and because it’s been paid for by cheque (hello once more, useless online conveyancing firm), it can’t be released until the cheque clears. After a fraught few days in which I threaten to turn up to the council’s office with the money in cash, just to get things moving, I’m relieved to find out that fortunately this won’t be necessary and we’re finally ready to exchange everywhere.

Exchange Day

It’s a fairly long chain, so we need everyone in it to agree exchange quickly to get it done by close of business. Unfortunately, there’s a snag. Everyone agrees to exchange on a deposit of 10%. Then at the last minute, we find out the buyer at the bottom can only transfer 5%, the remainder of their purchase money being mortgage funded, will we agree to that instead? Er, yes, we suppose so. But getting everyone to agree by close of business is impossible, so…

Exchange Day, take 2

This time we’re done and dusted and exchange takes place by lunchtime. We’re finally, really moving house, in only eight days. About bloody time! I call the removals company and, miraculously, they have availability for us to move on the following Friday. We call in to see the soon-to-be-ex owners of our new home to take some measurements, then go out curtain shopping. Cut to…

December: Completion Day

The house is all packed up, in a combination of a Transit van, a Luton and a great big removals truck. Half the furniture was taken away the day before, ready to be delivered in the afternoon once we have keys. After a brief look around our home, we head to the estate agent and hand over the keys, then go to Dotty’s Teahouse for lunch.

Our solicitor phones to let me know our sale has completed. “So I’m technically homeless right now?” I joke with her, and she agrees, yes, I’m homeless, and I’ll have to live in my car for the next twenty minutes or so.

An hour later: We still haven’t completed on our purchase. After wandering around the area for a while, we drop into the estate agent on the off-chance they’ve heard something. They haven’t, and neither have the sellers’ solicitors, even though ours are clear they’ve sent the money, so they can’t release the keys to us.

Two hours later: Still no sign of the purchase money. This is getting pretty worrying now. Our solicitor’s accounts department is on the phone with their bank trying to find out where my money is. Suddenly the jokes about being homeless really aren’t funny. Eventually the money re-appears, back with our solicitor at around 4:15, but it’s way too late to transfer it again the same day. We genuinely have no home to go to. We’re told to find a hotel, and that our expenses will be covered. Still not ideal, but at least we’re not on the hook for the rest of the chain’s costs. I head to the house and tell the removal men to go home, taking my possessions with them. We’ll have another go at moving in on Monday…

Completion Day, take 2

A weekend in a hotel and finding things to do with the kids aside, it could have been worse. I drop Sleeper Jr. off at school and explain to his head teacher that he’s not had a restful few days due to the issues we’ve had moving house. On the way back to the hotel, I get confirmation that the money has been sent, again, and an hour later, there are a set of keys in my hand. A few hours after that, the first truckload of furniture has arrived, so we can start moving in.

The next day the rest of the furniture arrives. We’re finally well and truly moved in, living in Boxworld. Later, I find out that we completed on the last possible day for our sellers to get their daughter into the school they’d wanted. I’m very glad I didn’t know that ahead of time, it could only have added to the stress.

Until, of course, on the Sunday evening, a loud noise alerts me to something terrifying in the house, and we have to get everyone out as quickly as possible. But that’s another story, about the kindness of strangers…