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I had an attack of anguished, disgusted insanity this afternoon, and proceeded to sweep all the crap from the floor of the learning room, living room, hallway and bathroom into the kids' room, and then sorted it all out. All of it. I am now sitting on a couch in a clean room in a pretty-much clean house for the first time in some months. The effect on my mood is almost as obvious as the effect on my lungs; sadly, the price of sanity is eternal croakiness. But perhaps now that the rotting apple cores have been cleared out from under the bed and the table in the munchkins' room (note: ewwwwww!) I will be able to breathe a little easier in there.

The BatPup had her first concert today. Her guitar teacher, a lovely chap who I will call Bleeding Thumbs Murphy, got all his and his wife's students together (she teaches fiddle and piano) and they managed to produce quite a creditable show. I asked my daughter, who is after all my daughter, afterward if it had occurred to her to be nervous, and she found the idea quaint but unfamiliar. Yep: my girl.

So now we've got enough money to be going on with, for a while. The mortgage is suitably mollified, the wood shed is full, whatever bills I could find that can be paid in advance are paid, and life will continue exactly as before, only without quite as much nervousness. This is a good thing. Being insanely wealthy would be nice, but I never asked for that (d'oh!). All I ever wanted was Not To Have To Worry About Money, and while this is not a cure for that condition, it's certainly a pretty good inoculation.

We've been having a good run with tradesmen actually showing up lately. The plumber who has experience with wood stoves and water jackets came by a couple of days ago and told us what we needed to know to be able to go ahead and order the wood stove. Then another plumber came by - the one who we saw last week, who doesn't have the experience for the wood stove job - and he fixed the kitchen tap that's been leaking since the Tuesday after the dawn of time. Today I was woken up by one of the fencers, the one recommended by our local hardware shop owner and Speaker To Tradesmen, who came by and listened as my Beloved explained her goal for the new fencing regime hereabouts. And as he was leaving, a local bloke who's been our best source for firewood since we arrived in Tassie came and delivered three tonnes of good wood. And with any luck, the bloke who fixed our gutters on the south side of the house a while back will be over on Tuesday arvo to do the north side, which has been leaking into the foundations beside luckydipdays's bedroom.

'Twas the night before the cheque cleared, and all through the house
Not a gadget was clicking, except for my mouse.
The spreadsheet was opened and updated in detail
In the hopes that our windfall could still stand some... retail!

Ok, ok, I know, it's even worse than the original, but never mind that. I've updated the ubiquitous spreadsheet and allowed for mortgage payments and all manner of other adjustments, and the result is: we can do this. We're actually going to continue to break even for the foreseeable future, which means our windfall (minus a few months buffer in the mortgage) will last us for as long as we need it to. And anything I earn in my rapidly expanding business will go towards helping that balance to grow.

This is a Good Thing.

I forgot to mention that our piggies, Sunday (short for Sunday Roast) and Honey (short for Honey Smoked Bacon) went off to the abattoir yesterday, in a process organised by the gentlewoman farmers of the household and involving a trailer, a bit of temporary walling and remarkably little complaint from the sociopathic porkers themselves. I imagine they complained more last night and this morning when their usual hot meal of pig porridge and leftovers was not forthcoming in their new accommodations, but on the upside their complaints will have ceased swiftly and permanently this afternoon. They'll be back, of course, in not quite the same state they left in. Plastic bags and labels will feature much more highly, for example.

Ghoulish? Moi? Bwahahahahahaha!

So today my Beloved implemented a new plan: Thursdays are now Do Something Thematic And Engaging With The Munchkins Day. Today's theme was monsters, so after a certain amount of shouting and stupidity (mostly from the Boy though the BatPup was also guilty) she got them dressing up, making costumes, reading books and generally having a good homeschooly time. They're both as thick as two short conservatives at times, but eventually they figured out that kicking and screaming against someone who was trying to give them something good was not the optimal plan, and they kind of went with it. With luck they'll be saner next time.

Meanwhile, I finished stage one for Robina Hood, and also got the permissions issue with Hedgehog sorted. I also cleaned my keyboard, so it's much better, though the space bar may need revisiting. Productive work day, made even better by the announcement that I now I have an ABN again, so I can bill people legally! Woot!

Sadly, my lawyer tells me he can't offer unqualified approval for my plan to napalm the offices of Sith Insurance, but if he had been a little less unsupportive of my plan then today would be the day to begin implementation, because we got the settlement cheque! Yes, that's right, only one day later than they said they would, Sith coughed up the dosh. For them, one day late is practically on time. I took the cheque and carefully banked it immediately in our joint account. When it clears -- Saturday morning, they tell me -- I will put some into the mortgage and the rest into our high-interest account, and then proceed to not spend it.

We will fail to not spend it entirely, though. We have three different fencers coming over the next week or so, to examine our house yard and quote on fencing it to make it wallaby-proof and dog-compatible. Also, now that I've got Hedgehog working as a web server, there's no need to replace it, but this site contains many individually-tweakable goodies and I think there might be advantages to getting myself a proper development box. For less than I paid for my last laptop I can probably put together everything I need by way of a desktop box and get working in style. Maybe.

Took a long time to get Kris Kringle's computer upgraded. The big issue was that repairing his Windows directory trashed Internet Explorer completely, and made it impossible to run Windows Update. After trying a few different options, including a manual installation of Service Pack 3 that took ages to run and crashed at one stage during it reboot-and-fiddle-with-everything process, I finally just downloaded the installed for IE8 and ran that. After more upgrading-and-rebooting, that solved the problem. There was an occasional error message that I should have killed but I was running out of time so I left it, since it's pretty harmless (and I can fix it next time I pop round to help with something else, now that I've found that link).

I gave Mary Christmas the bill, which I hope didn't surprise her too much. They're both lovely people and, I think, quite honest, but they're also dirt poor and living in a shack, so I had to grit my teeth a little and refuse to be too sympathetic because that way lies minimum-wage madness. I gave them a computer that was faster, safer and less bug-raddled than it had been a day before, and that was worth something, so I just have to hope they pay it and don't hurt themselves in the process...


Tonight, I've been setting up Hedgehog to begin the task of hosting my websites. It's already faster than NearlyFreeSpeech.net, and it doesn't seem too tricky. I'm having some issues with permissions, as usual, because I never really did grok Unix file permissions in all their crufty glory, but I'm sure I'll get there eventually...

Now, I really need to clean this fckingkeyboard, because the letter "U" and the spacebar seem to only operation when they feel like it...

I have a new customer, who I am tempted to call by the nickname The Black Bikini but that running gag is now over 15 years old so she'd probably prefer that I retire it. Perhaps I shall go with name puns and call her Robina Hood instead. She's got a couple of websites for me to do, and now that I'm reasonably comfortable with my toolset and resources I'm able to give her a fairly sold quote up front. That works out well, and encourages me to get the stuff done efficiently since I don't want to be working too hard for too little dosh.

I picked up Kris Kringle's PC today and ran the XP installation over it. Oddly, it didn't scrape the whole disk, but instead very neatly repaired the Windows installation without appearing to damage anything else, so that's a win. The poor old thing sounds like a jet-equipped Taj Mahal trying to take off against a headwind of custard at the moment, but I'm chugging through updates and installations and it all seems to be behaving, so I think it will be ready tomorrow.

Tomorrow is also significant as the day that, in theory, my lawyer will be receiving a check for a commissioner-approved pittance, being the settlement between me and Sith Insurance on behalf of Pascal's Wageslaves Pty Ltd (remember them? Fuckers). I'll believe it when I've spent it. But at least things are looking up.

Got sent some information that needed to be posted somewhere, and Oh. My. Gods. It was several pages of text, with frequent semi-random bold text and underlining and redness and www.hyperlinks.every.two/lines/all/over.the#place and it made my brain ache. I thought briefly I was going to have to redo the lot of it, but others have posted the basic details in the appropriate places so I'm going to ignore it and hope it goes away. Oddly, people are reporting confusion over what's happening and when and where, and somehow that doesn't surprise me. I'd summarise for clarity, but I don't know if I can.

Meanwhile, Mother Mayhem was having Issues with her email, so I did some digging and came up with a smoking gun, evidence that her new hosting company had switched off something that should be switched on. I sent that to her, she passed it on to them, and viola! A stringed instrument! voila! It was fixed! So I got to do my first actual and official invoice, and I am officially in business. What fun!

Finished some work for Mr Death yesterday, just a bit of upgrading of some stuff I did for him a while back to make it work on the new server. It was failing because a minor and probably unnecessary function call that worked on the old system was blocked by the improved security on the new one. Tested it, it worked, he was happy. One down.

Today I finished a project for another client -- who, to keep with the supervillainesque theme, I shall call Mother Mayhem. This was very similar: a site that used to work and then stopped when it moved to new hosting. In this case, it was caused by something stupid: a function called date_diff, defined in the script's source code, that clashed with a built-in function of the same name introduced in the newest version of PHP. Instead of giving an informative error message in the logs, it just crashed. Once I had my Emacs environment back up and running properly, I was able to creep through the code until I found the bit that was messing up. I renamed the function, made sure the new name was properly referenced, and everything worked. I've let Mother Mayhem know, but I haven't heard back yet.

Tonight, I finished the site for The Alchemist. This was just some Wordpress, more editor than programmer, but it had some interesting features. I must say I'm very impressed with how WP has progressed since the early days. The media library stuff is particularly stable. So I've let him know that it's all done.

Tomorrow I have some unpaid work to do, mainly Ynys Fawr website stuff. The event calendar is out of date, and I need to fix that ASAP.


Meanwhile, the monkeys were pretty sane while their Daddy was off being a professional geek again. There was a certain amount of shouting this morning, but they got their heads together. They're still picking up on our heightened stress levels -- financial aggravation will do that; I presume insurance companies have kickback deals going with divorce lawyers -- so I hope that will improve this week. I've said that before, but at least this time someone moderately trustworthy has promised. Of course, Sith Insurance have never met a deadline or kept a promise in all the time I've dealt with them, but it's out of their hands now and over to their lawyers, so maybe it won't be too bad.

I tried doing a bit of programming for some of my various on-the-boil jobs today, but my Beloved has this utterly unreasonable expectation that I should occasionally show up and do some parenting unless I do some ridiculously impossible thing like mention that I have work to do or something before I disappear for hours on end. So you see the absurd conditions I have to live with. Ahem. So I didn't get a huge amount done, though I did go over and visit Kris Kringle and his wife Mary Christmas to help them with a computer problem. Sadly, that one is going to require a reinstall of Windoze, although that's a good thing to aim for approximately every three or four years so they're four or five years overdue.

The sudden rush of small jobs means I need to start scheduling some work time each day. I'm going to aim for four hours a day, as a good compromise between greed and RSI. That'll get my current jobs finished and give me a chance to set up some other ones.