Lagging Behind

hol-i-day

A day free from work that one may spend at leisure

Or, alternatively, a day for taking the baby to the doctor for more inoculations, and spending the afternoon scrabbling around on rubble beneath the house.

Poker this month has been barely in the black so far. I've been playing pretty badly, but kept my head above water with one big hand.

Flopped two pair from SB on a straightening board, checked, saw someone else bet lightly and pick up a shoal of callers, decided they were drawing to the straight or just to see a cheap card, so check-raised the max, putting my short stack all-in, and found FIVE callers.

Turn made the straight, but river made my full house. A quintuple through. Thank you very much.

I'm just not 'in the zone' this week, so it's good to still be ahead.

Today was a family day. Doctors in the morning with baby and wife. I suspect Mrs Div suffers more than the baby as the needle goes in.

The baby has handled them so well. A quick cry and ten minutes later she is asleep in the car seat.

The afternoon was DIY time. This weeks task - pipe lagging.

The UK Met Office is forecasting a high likelihood of a 'one in fifty' winter. This is a winter where the prevailing wind comes down from Siberia, instead of west off the Atlantic. So, it could get pretty chilly.

Scotland's record low temperature? -27 Celsius!

Unfortunate then that the previous owners of our house had not seen fit to insulate the myriad pipes beneath the house.

As the Div residence is built into a hillside, the under-floor space moves from a Hobbit friendly clearance at the front, accessible through an Alice in Wonderland style door, to about two feet at the back.

So, I spent the afternoon progressing from crouching, to crawling, to wriggling on my back across rubble and the discarded refuse of long departed builders, squeezing foam sleeves around copper pipes.

The good news is, I used all 24 metres of foam sleeve I had purchased. The bad news is, the job is only half done.

The other half will need the old fashioned wind around lagging, as the plumbers past seem to have revelled in fixing pipes in the most awkward locations, and teasing the piping into all sorts of unusual, and decidedly non straight, shapes. One junction was positively spaghetti like.

Oh well, gives me something to 'look forward to' for the weekend. Which will hopefully also see us with a working boiler again.

Broken on Monday; earliest ETA for heating engineer - Friday.

Next chancer who asks me for money on Argyll Street, I'm handing them a leaflet for the technical college.