...gehog News...Hedgehog News...Hed...

It's not exactly a sighting, but we've seen plenty of, um, hedgehog evidence scattered about the garden. So it looks like at least one of our nocturnal visitors managed to survive the roads and the winter to visit us again.

More news, as it's made.

Or a few days after.

Insomnia

Insomnia

I must have
accidentally
tripped the switch
that turns
the stillness on.

Thanks to the Late, Great, Robert Calvert for those words of wisdom. Not quite sure what's going on today, but I was woken up at around 2:30am by some annoying scrotes shouting in the street and I've been awake ever since. Finally gave up trying to sleep at 5 and now I'm sitting here thinking "I'm getting up in 45 mins..."

Stairgate SG-2

Finally got round to fitting the second stairgate at the bottom of the stairs. There was something mysterious, presumably of alien origin, behind the plasterboard which made it a bit of an adventure. We never did find out what it was, but it was close enough to the board that none of the myriad plasterboard fixings I have would work and mysterious enough that we didn't just want to drill into it in case it turned out to be a water pipe or electrical conduit. It also seemed to possess some sort of rudimentary chameleonware being invisible to my stud/pipe detector. Eventually we managed to chop a plasterboard fixing short enough and use smaller screws to get it fitted. It seems solid but I suppose time will tell.

I am looking forward to just walking through the bottom one and zooming straight through the top one. Should make life a lot easier after a hard day.

Your Unfriendly Neighbourhood Gremlin

I'm beginning to suspect that we've got an evil creature lurking in the dark corners of the house and coming out at night to sabotage various items around the household. Since the start of the year we've had:

• A hard drive failure on the main PC - had to buy a new disc.
• A RAID controller failure on our NAS - had to buy two new NASes*. Fortunately I did manage to get our data off it.
  
• A leaking roof.
• A CPU or motherboard failure on the main PC - had to buy a new PC (more on that later.)

It's starting to become the most expensive pet we've ever had!

*Two because I realised that even though the NAS runs a RAID array, and thus we are protected against disc failure, we're still not protected against NAS failure, so I have to backup the NAS as well. Obviously the best way to back up a NAS is to use another one.