Sleepypete's Pillow

Ok, ok, so early today I was saying :

“I’ll leave the laptop hard disc swap until Friday so I can do it while the cricket’s on” – with the idea being that I’d be able to work on the laptop without wanting music in the background to listen to. (The music lives on the laptop).

But. The idea of “why the hell wait ?” took over. Lol. Been catching up on more recorded telly tonight, Falling Skies plus the last few A Town Called Eureka. What’s that give ? An opportunity to work on the laptop without wanting music in the background to listen to. (No I did not copy/paste that – lol)

It starts with a little disaster planning. In 2.5 years of owning my laptop, I’d not made the factory restore discs. So in those pop and about an hour later I have 4 dvds full of Acer factory restore gubbins. So if this transfer messes up completely, I’ll be able to reinstall fresh. Or if it doesn’t quite do what I want (there’s potential of the transfer losing recovery stuff that’s in a special partition) then I don’t lose anything.

The software I’ve gone for to do the transfer is called Acronis Backup & Recovery. It costs about $75 … but … there’s a free trial version. That only lasts 15 days but … I’m hoping to only have to do this once. Sold !

Oh and of the backup software I looked at, this was the only one which appeared to do what I wanted (despite blurb on websites), which is to totally transfer the software from one hard disc to another.

One thing it’s doing though is take copious amounts of time.

The transfer is called “clone hard disc” and involves a bit for bit, partition for partition copy of the old drive to the new one which is connected up via USB. It’s doing this by rebooting into a copy only mode. But it’s taking ages … It’s just hit 100% (and I’m rebooting it) so it’s hopefully got a full copy on the new drive.

Let’s see … Next step – swap the hard discs over, after I boot up the laptop to :

Take a little look at the new drive
Assure myself I can go back to the old one

Hmm. The reboot is taking a while … I’ll be ignoring a video from Totalbiscuit (Sleeping Dogs game) while I do the switchover. More later ! I’m hoping to have a fully operational and upgraded laptop by sleep time.

Ok – Update 1 – testing the new drive hooked up to the laptop with the old drive active is curious … Drive Manager can see it but won’t let you interact to it if you’d copied over what’s called “NT Signatures”. Curious !

Time to take a plunge into the gubbins …

Update 2 – back’s off the laptop and the old hard disc is … scorching. I suspect it may have been having more trouble than I thought. Hard discs should not be 70 degrees + (too hot to hold).

Update 3 – One hard disc swap later and I have a Starting Windows screen ! I’m not used to stuff like this working so easily – something’s gonna go wrong 😉

Last update – this one is being tapped in from a laptop that is exactly as it was left when I started the backup (even down to the random desktop wallpaper). Is it quicker ? Let’s see. It’s too early to really tell yet, any comparisons will be buried in potential “I’ve upgraded so it must be better” placebo effect.

Verdict on Acronis – bloody brilliant. If I needed this software more, like if I was making machines for a living and wanting to cut down on software time, it’s perfect. If I was a sysadmin and looking for enterprise grade software, again, brilliant.

Hugely recommended !

My body’s not the only thing that’s struggling to maintain itself at the moment … (Danger – Techie Post !)

Just spent a bit of cash on the laptop. I’ve not installed what I got yet (that’s to come and I’m anticipating HHAASSSSLLEE) but I’m reasonably sure my laptop has a terminal problem.

Symptom :

Occasionally (about once or twice per boot up) the laptop will freeze with no mouse pointer response for about 10-15 seconds (unsure due to Watched Pot time dilation). Music or video keeps playing for a few seconds, which suggests the cpu is still happily sending stuff out of buffers. Everything else freezes. Hard disc light will be on solidly. After the freeze finishes, laptop is all happy.

But … Sunday, it gets scarier. It’s early in the Olympics closing ceremony and I’ve put a Facebook post in decrying the BBC for getting Prince Henry’s name wrong. Email replies come in and I think the laptop shows its own disgust at me by crashing hard and Loud. As in, crashing halfway through the “new email” sound leaving that sound running at Max Volume. Think 12 on the dial.

That one actually needed a full reboot because the laptop didn’t recover.

However … it wasn’t actually that easy. Laptop comes back up sure. But only part of the way. When I start up my laptop, it’ll fire up its Windows 7 gadgets plus I’ll load Firefox, Outlook, Messenger, iTunes, Steam and Digiguide. (Yep – that’s a lot of work for laptop). This time, Firefox and Outlook opened quickly with Firefox being usable. Outlook was not. It took half an hour (literally!) before the laptop was happy again with all applications open.

Translation – bad news. And a GeekyPete remembering back a bit and thinking it might be a good idea to replace the hard disc in this machine.

Hard disc theory – they’re built from discs with magnetic Stuff on which spins at a few thousand rpm. They have a motor to spin up the discs. There’s an arm that reaches across the disc to read the data. It’s literally floating across the disc.

If stuff goes wrong with those motors, it takes more effort than it should to spin up the discs. When that effort is more than the motors can give, the drive breaks. I’ve had that happen before, on my first PC (this is Dark Age stuff, my graphics card has more memory than that PC). It’s totally terminal, there’s no way domestically you can get the data off a drive that’s died that way.

How can you check ?

If you catch it early, when the PC stalls there will be a faint clicking sound as the motors try and spin up. Newer discs are much quieter though. You can use software like PassMark’s Diskcheckup. I’ve just tried that and it’s let me look at the health monitoring information that’s buried in the drive. There’s a few anomalies there, including a few “JEEZ THAT’S SILLY HIGH !!!” scary numbers.

If you see the line :
Raw Read Error Rate – Value 200, Worst 200, Threshold 51
What’s your reaction ?

Mine was OH SHIT MY DRIVE IS NEARLY TOAST. And then you look in the help file and find the High = Happy. (where have I heard that before). Lesson – read the help files and they’ll decipher what you’re looking at.

I think I’m on to something though – Spin Up Time (how good those motors are) is 199 to a threshold of 21.

So – what am I doing about it ?

I’m making a change while it’ll be easy before a hard disc failure makes it huge grief. A like for like cheapest switch would be a 320GB little drive (link is an example) for £48 from Novatech. What I’ve done is spend more cash on something just a tad better.

Windows biggest failing is having to wait for the hard disc. What’s the best way to fight that ? Get a quicker hard disc. It used to be that you’d pay Western Digital silly money for a hard disc that was slightly less slow. But there are now alternatives :

Solid State Device drive – memory discs. My main desktop PC runs off one of these and it’s Fast. Truly fast. But … 60GB of Crucial M4 SSD costs £56 and that’s barely big enough for Windows. And my laptop has to have enough room for applications plus a 32GB iTunes library. So now we’re looking at 128GB at a push (£60 for cheap, £84 for a Crucial M4) and 256GB to be happy (£140+).

Hybrid drive – these are normal discy discs with a tiny Solid State bit to speed them up. This is what I’ve bought – 500GB for £84. Not as fast as an SSD but has the size to keep a laptop happy.

I’ve not taken it out of the bag yet so I’ve not started the changeover – fingers crossed that it’ll be an easy one !

PS At some point I’ll compare the process we have to go through at work for stuff like this and the process we can go through at home. It’ll be a whinge. And I’ll enjoy every character of it 🙂

(addon – I’ve spotted all the hits come in looking for info on Martin Wolfram – I don’t know much, just what I saw on the telly. Will keep looking and add a link if I find anything. Hope he’ll be ok when that shoulder fixes !)

… Please turn off the torch.

That’s from one of the pen & paper role play gamers in a little group that’s been going for years (on hiatus at the moment – ill health).

This Olympics (and this will be the last Olympics post for a while – honest) has been pretty awesome. It’s had everything :

On at a good time, so you don’t have that “stay up longer or go bed at reasonable time ?” timezone competition thing. Beijing was ahead of the UK, so the time zone was quite hostile.

Information – the London2012 website has been outstanding for getting results, updates, scheduling and just generally getting information out there. With the diving, I was occasionally seeing results and updates come through before the commentators and crowd saw them. (That’s partly due to the delay on the feeds).

Coverage – this has been unrivalled. Huge number of channels with great camera work on them all. It heralds the digital age coming again. For Beijing, the multi channel streaming architecture wasn’t as mature and the hardware we have to show it nowhere near as ready. I didn’t but I suspect I could have watched some of the coverage on my phone, like I listen to internet radio on it.

I suspect the coverage may have plateaued there though. I’m not sure it can be taken that much further, apart from maybe Picture In Picture selections like what was promised with TV decades ago.

Stories – There’s been stories all the way. Good ones, Bad ones, Embarassing ones, Heartwarming ones, Inspiring ones.

Good ones – the way it’s all come together, with the conduct of the games being such that it’s allowed the athletes to come to the fore. One thing I can remember from Beijing are the stories about the smog, no such worries about London although the rain made things interesting at times.

Bad ones – the non-trying badminton players and the occasional bad referee. Yep. These stole the headlines but it was dealt with appropriately.

Embarassing ones – remember those Arabian signs ? Oops ! (Paul McCartney counts too)

Heartwarming ones – that clip of Victoria Pendleton showing the heart symbol will be shown for a very long time. As will those of our boys and girls being in tears on the medal podiums.

Inspiring ones – all of the athletes. All of ’em. But especially Martin Wolfram who injured his shoulder badly during the diving and then proceeded to complete the competition with a useless right arm. Did well too.

But – what’s next ?

Back to life, back to reality. I’ll be looking forward to the Paralympics in a couple of weeks, followed by the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia. I’ll give sport watching a rest for a few days (cricket’s on but will ignore until Thursday’s Test Match).

I didn’t get to go along to any events (feeling I missed out) but Olympic spirit was flowing well, even with those who I’d never believe it would catch. What is next ?

Catching up on the telly … Got lots of recorded stuff, lots of recorded films and 7 blu-rays have arrived that I haven’t watched yet. Lots to watch.

Cricket season is done – there’s another game but I’m going to be avoiding that. My back is sound but isn’t fixed yet. I’m being careful because it could go bang again easily if I twist wrong. Nah – my legs aren’t fixed yet.

Actually that’s another thing I’m going to have to change and that’s diet … I’ve done a little more analysing and come to the conclusion that neglecting certain things in my diet is why I’m having problems with legs, lungs and eyes.

Whenever you hit a problem with your body, try and analyse it. Don’t instantly go for the patch it over solution, as the underlying problem will still be there. The creams helped my legs repair some of the damage but it didn’t fix the underlying cause. I think it’s diet – I need to get the greens back in and the orange juice. I used to drink a reasonable amount of that, enough to keep me healthy. I think what’s happened is that my body’s run out of the essential minerals it needs to keep it healthy and I need to make the switch to get them back in.

We’ll see how that goes. Sainsburys tomorrow and I’ll break a habit by visiting the aisle with Green Stuff in it.

But yeah – I’m not repairing as quickly and as efficiently as I used to. Playing cricket one week needed to be followed by a week away in order to recover. There’s a lot of consistency between symptoms observed and things missing (Vitamin C, K and zinc) from my diet. And now I’ve identified that, it’s time to test the conclusion and see if it’s right 🙂

Besides – I’ve got bored of biscuits, munching raw crunchy cabbage will be suitable biscuit replacement :-).

I had a chance to leg it early enough today, using hard earned flexi credit, to head into the middle of Bristol for a wander around.

The eyes were fully open as usual, what did they see ?

Summer outfits are definitely still In. But then again – we’ve switched back to Heat Lamp conditions.

Trouble is, “summer outfit” tends to mean really tight outfits which can look great on some people, on others it tends to bring out all the wrong things … Excess person tends to escape the overly tight outfit in all the wrong places. (I sadly have to watch for that with my t-shirts!) Or … instead of the tight outfit accentuating and emphasising healthy curveyness, it shows where the ribs are sticking out from half starved fashion victims.

I’ve still been using my summer jacket lately, which is a light blue denim one I got in Orlando a few years ago. It’s light, it has huge inside pockets. Good for carrying my various bits around. I don’t trust my wallet in my trouser pockets, there’s too much tendency for it to try and work its way out of there. I haven’t lost my wallet yet, so that theory must be working.

Book sales …

Waterstones are doing a “Buy One Get One Half Price” at the moment (stickered items only – grr). But … with the Michael Cobley books I looked at, the third was in the offer, the first two were not. If I’m going to speculatively buy a new author, I want to start at Book 1 not Book 3. So they stay on the shelf. I think that’s a bit sad myself, it’s a lost opportunity for a shop that will be struggling enough already due to the competition from online sellers.

More book …

Spotted all 3 Hunger Games books in HMV in a set for £6. That’s cheaper for 3 books than we tend to see books sold on their own. Remarkable deal, if you’re thinking of getting the Hunger Games books, that’s the deal you want. I almost went for it myself as I was picking up more Stuff there. But … The Hunger Games was a very well made film. They did a cracking job of it. I may well even buy it when it hits an acceptable price. But … the backstory behind the action was GOPPING. It was awful !!! The entire last kid standing concept was ripped off from Battle Royale and inserted into a Future Earth society that was utterly nonsensical. So if the only good thing about the film was how they translated the action parts to the screen, I consider the books with the backstory to be a waste of time. Although I may actually buy them at some point to make up my mind properly.

You can only really form a true opinion about something if you’re working off relevant facts. If I tell you that Intel cpus are better than AMD, it’s coming from valid objective technical factual information that comes from endless articles. If I tell you that Florence & The Machine are awful noisemakers, that’s my subjective opinion and you should only take it as your’s if you’ve attempted to listen to them without your ears bleeding.

(I’m not a fan and think they’re horrendously overhyped)

People who get in the way

There’s lots of these. They’ll thoughtlessly spread themselves across a whole pavement, blocking the path for everyone. (This goes for people who have meetings on stairs too). The ultra wide mob aren’t so bad if they’re going your way (answer = chill pill) but if they’re approaching, it’s time to get the elbows out.

Yes – I’ve been known to send rude people flying rather than step off pavements into traffic. Didn’t have to go that far today, the rude people decided not to argue … although I did have to stop myself from running over a child that was taking the lead from a rude parent.

I bought stuff !!!!

Yep. Check outside to see if the sky is falling (hazy but sun’s still up). Blu-rays were going 5 for £30 so I picked up Paul, Armageddon, Das Boot, Sunshine and Stealth. Yep. There’s some bad films in there but I enjoyed them. Not so sure about Sunshine, need to make my mind up about that one again. Music wise, I’ve picked up the Ting Tings (Sounds from Nowhereville), Tori Amos (Abnormally Addicted to Sin), Smash Mouth (All Star Smash Hits) and Gabriella Cilmi’s Ten.

Greatest hits albums …

Most bands put these out at some point. Either if their careers are going down the pan, or if the record companies want to exploit the back catalogue. Was surprised to find greatest hits albums by Smash Mouth (music from Shrek) and Voice of the Beehive. The Voice of the Beehive greatest hits was basically a compilation from their first 2 albums, cutting off the really bad tracks. I saw a few more All About Eve collection cd’s while browsing. They must have really upset someone at EMI, there’s been more collection cd’s than actual All About Eve original albums.

Mind you, that could also mean they had a fan in the label who wanted as much of their material out there as possible.

Last bit – I miss my hot chocolate. I used to have a hot chocolate and something munchable when I’d exhausted the potential of wandering around the shops. Trouble is, I started reacting (lactose issues) to the hot chocolate. So I had to switch to something different for the coffee shop visit. I definitely miss the hot chocolate but … I’m a coffee fiend 🙂

And with the mention of munchables … the athletics looks like it’s kicking off and I’ve not had any popcorn for a while …

PS I today spotted the most awesome pair of platform soles I have EVER seen. (Even beating Snow Queen platforms!). They must have been at least 6 inches and were made of rubber with a big hole in the middle. Result – they worked like springs and she went Boing Boing Boing wherever she walked.

It’s not through some long winded sciency process involving sand into silicon and copper and gold into wires …

My money’s on the 680 ohm.

Wonder if any of those have been subject to doping ?

PS Daft picture courtesy of Intel’s Facebook page …

I did pretty well on Monday at work with the withdrawal symptoms …

My actual boss and I are both sport nuts, so we tend to swap latest score info between us and natter on analysis too. She’s got a keen analytical mind that’s very into cricket, so you can probably imagine how in depth we can go on that.

(As a lunchtime conversation of course!)

Anyway – those swapping of Stuff Has Happened, plus the typical First Day Back From Leave hecticness let me avoid thinking too much of Olympics. That didn’t really hit until Tuesday, when I was really missing the Olympic TV combined with watching several streams via the desktop.

What’s been the salvation ? The London2012 Android app is pretty darn good. I can’t remember what the info feeds were like from Beijing in 2008 but for this Olympics, the dissemination of information has been incredible. Top notch. And I don’t think that’s from improvement in technology (cricinfo has been doing ball by ball commentary at a similar level for many years), it’s just been done in a simple, seamless way.

Check it out while it’s there : www.london2012.com

It’s simple, yet efficient and remembers what web pages should be – lean & clean. I wonder if the rise of the smartphone has something to do with that ? Are they making web designers go away from cluttered pages and back to simpler ones ? Not a bad thing. It’s backed up by the Android app, which has up to the minute live score info for all events plus there’s a Voice Of The Games which gives short paragraph updates for events that have just completed.

What they seem to have got cracked now is the process of pulling the information in and distributing it to the web, in near real time.

So some of the sting of that withdrawal has been taken away by Just Enough info being available via the Android app. Plus with the explosion of social media, more and more updates are coming across that way.

I do get another type of withdrawal symptom though from a leave period. I thrive on interaction with other people. I get horribly bored when I’m on my own. Things like games are too predictable, stuff on telly is often a repeat, memory means I’m struggling to keep the music library fresh.

Being around people is completely different. The interactions around an office defy prediction. Especially in larger offices like the floorplates at our work. (The buildings are Big). We keep a good sense of humour going too. Offices that keep a sense of humour get more done, even if that humour is sometimes very dark …

Oh and if someone smiles at me in the office, I know that it’s because of something I’ve done rather than some scripted thing that would happen anyway. Even better if someone chuckles at something I say. Oh and games don’t randomly award you with real cake for no good reason.

Cake is life.

Oh and it’s a huge bonus when the Cake attracts more smiles. We had a visitation from the BM mob from the old team. Talking of interactions that defy prediction – lol 🙂 That mob was always just one half comment away from breaking into something : Silly, Scary, Outrageously Amusing. I only tended to pick up on it halfway through and it tended to be way past my understanding (think caveman!), which is where the scariness comes in.

Oh was I talking about withdrawal symptoms ?

Olympics – I’ll definitely miss the games when they’re over
Cake – diets are evil but cake brings smiles
Old team people – scary ! And awesome to see them come up for the cake

PS I devoured my donut so fast this morning that it appeared to have been inhaled.
PS2 Scary can be wonderful too. Especially when it is that special brand of female scary where you have no clue whatsoever as to what they’re going to be getting up to next.

LOL – so that's it : Multi layer decoys :

1st – draw their eye with big sporting events
2nd – jam their sensors with ridiculous amounts of coverage
3rd – that skycrane

I think the aliens were caught watching the Olympics. A great bit of deceptive timing!

There’s only one news story today …

Ok. There’s another couple for big sporting events but I’ve talked way too much about that last week already !

The Martian Space Defences have been doing pretty well lately. Apart from the two mini rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, they’ve shot down pretty much everything we’ve sent their way over the past few years including our poor homegrown Beagle II.

I think the success this time is through using decoy tactics. This landing was setting down something rather bigger than what they’ve tried before (Team America Science Crew “NASA Lands Car Sized Rover on Martian Surface”), so instead of using parachutes or big bouncy balls the technique this time was :

Aerobrake with a heat shield like usual (friction like in your car brakes is an excellent way of dumping kinetic speed energy)
Slow down more with a parachute
And then come in for a soft landing via skycrane

Before, objects we’ve fired at Mars have looked at parachuting all the way or using big inflatable balls to absorb the energy of the landing. This time, with a skycrane to slow the rover to zero vertical speed, it’s apparently led to a perfect landing. That skycrane also appears to have been the perfect decoy for those Martian Space Defences …

I didn’t get up in time to see the live coverage this morning :-(, I’d got myself caught in Borderlands, where the difficulty in the mission I was attempting ramped up to a ridiculous amount. I succeeded … but at about 1.00 am on the night before first time back at work for a while. Didn’t want to sleep in. Also wanted to be fairly fresh, so doing a 4 hour sleep wasn’t an option.

I’ve been eagerly reading the summaries on The Register today – they’re amusing. They love it that the team has achieved the landing 🙂 But they’re wondering what the Martians think of us landing a nuclear powered, laser armed tank on their soil.

More info from the boys & girls at NASA : http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/index.html

Wanted to include a picture but copyright regs seem to be getting more and more nasty. I’d have loved to borrow one from a website I won’t name (or link) but after reading their terms ? Hell no. I’m not going to dignify them with any mention at all. Even though their Yankee Go Home (they probably nicked it off Reddit) sign was funny.

That’s a good aside to end on actually. Copyright is going nuts. As well as me shying away from borrowing pictures in return for linkbacks, I’ve been seeing people say that their Youtube videos have been threatened with takedowns because they’ve included other people’s trailers (with credit) in their videos. Trailers are adverts. It serves the copyright owner to have the trailer displayed as much as possible. Yet people repeating those trailers are being hit by copyright breach nastiness.

It’s a silly world out there folks when we can’t tell people about good stuff. I don’t think NASA will mind the link above though !

Awesome to see this latest space mission get through its second most dangerous (after launch) phase intact, hopefully there will be some good information coming from it that will increase the weight behind “We Must Go To MARS”. Can’t stay on this planet forever, someone will blow it up sooner or later …

PS There will be no such luck with penetrating the Venus Space Defences – they’ve made their’s incredibly hostile …

It’s going to be weird tomorrow – first day back at work after the week off.

I’ve got so used to keeping an eye on X different channels of Olympics, it’s going to be a wrench to cut myself off from it while at my desk. Or maybe not, I expect I’ll be busy enough to disappear into my tunnel and only come out for updates when I take a break.

Next break will be in a couple of months time when another project milestone approaches. Similar for this one, we’ve just had a massive milestone which this time passed smoother than ever before. The next milestone will be somewhat different, it’ll be for a project just starting instead of a project hitting its deliveries.

That’s a weird feeling too. The past 12 years have all been about Deliver, Deliver, Deliver. Now the deliver phase is finishing, that project is transitioning to its support phase. We’re still buying stuff for it, like you’ll keep buying stuff for your car. Or maybe not normal people buying stuff for their car, more the nutters I see on the CT forums who modify their car into something … strange. However, we’re also learning a hell of a lot at the moment about what we have Delivered, with all those lessons about to get ploughed into the next project.

(I’m having to be deliberately vague about precisely what I work on, although I have left a clue in one or two of the 714 posts published here)

I needed the break – my batteries were getting severely depleted from piling the hours in at work. I’ve not been physically tired (outside of cricket), it’s more a mental tiredness from putting in the Deep Thought to think through the problems we see. It just happened to coincide with week 1 of the Olympics :-).

I’ve not done much over the break, apart from watch an obscene amount of sport 🙂

That laziness was mostly enforced, due to the back injury I picked up in the cricket on the Wednesday before the break. It took until Tuesday until I could move reasonably well again, with me not really being ready for a cricket match I’d have played in on Thursday (if required), if that game hadn’t been rained off.

How am I physically ? The back feels good now 🙂 Slightly stiff but that’s fairly normal. I’m not 20 any more. The thumb I damaged is still … damaged … but that’s ignorable. I can drive and I should be able to write.

My legs – are still not all fixed yet. They’re hugely improved from where they were last year when the skin would break at the slightest excuse and they ulcerated out to a significant portion of both calfs. They basically just wouldn’t scab up to repair themselves. Now, the hair is coming back on my left calf and I suspect they’d be completely healed by now if it weren’t for an obsessive compulsion to scratch …

Must exert more discipline.

The leg problem has had a significant net benefit though. The discipline needed by the “diet” pills (actually antibiotics) convinced me I could alter my eating pattern to something significantly healthier. Before, I’d graze at all times of the day. My metabolism therefore thought it could stay fairly slow, as the energy intake was fairly constant. Shifting to include deliberate fasting periods during the day seems to have kickstarted it into being as hyperactive as I can remember. I think that hyperactivity has let me burn off the fat.

But … while I appreciate having much better definition on my leg muscles now, I think I’d prefer losing a bit of the belly first 😉 I’m down 1.5 stone now on when I started the diet. There’s more to come but – slow & steady so it doesn’t immediately come back on. I’ve maintained the 12.5stone weight over this week, which is a good sign. My energy output hasn’t been high, so it shows that I’ve matched the intake to avoid gaining the weight back.

I have managed to achieve something over this holiday. I coulda done with dealing with the weeds before they become unmanageable again and I seriously need to blitz the other housework. That effectively got put on hold due to my back making it very difficult to move.

What have I done ?

Killed the vacuum ! Or rather the dust bunnies have. Been having issues sleeping, mostly due to slight breathing problems. I’ve been worse with the wheezing but even slight breathing problems freak me out when I’m trying to get to sleep. Or it could be due to not being physically or mentally tired, thanks to the break.

I managed to vacuum half my bedroom tonight, before the vacuum decided it had had enough … Think I’ll be avoiding Hoover next time around.

Right – it’s just about time to watch those Fastest Men On The Planet, so it’s time for me to sign off – g’nite all 🙂