Zone Doubt, a.k.a. 'Surreal Я Us'...

Joules, trusted by... dozens... to make a drama out of your crisis...

Other sites:

:: JAT :: WaveWrights :: Publications ::

I live to write. It's not wise to get in my way.

... I'd write my autobiography, but no-one would believe it....


If you come across any words you don't recognise in this blog, take a look at the Taylorspeke Glossary in the left-hand infopane, you'll usually find a definition there.


The Poppy Tales

(Transformers fanfiction!)

Transformers mini-comics here.




Adventures in Orchids

Apparently I am now collecting them...

There's room for one - or maybe two, at a pinch - more on that bedroom windowsill (the only one in the house that's ideal for them). Let's see what I find. Well, that didn't last long...


EO - Everlasting orchid. Phalaenopsis. I've had this orchid since 2007 and it just keeps flowering...







AO - Alien face orchid. Phalaenopsis . Bought 2018 - lovely little flowers, all different patterns!





RO - Rescued orchid photo to come when it flowers. Phalaenopsis. Rescued from a bin up the road in 2019. Classic!






TO - Tiny orchid. Phalaenopsis. Bought at Tesco 21.8.20. It just begged to come home with me. How could I say no?





CO - Crimson orchid. Cambria. Another Tesco find. This one may be going to live in Ken's room once we've redecorated and put up the new shelving; it prefers a cooler, less sunny windowsill. If so, I'll need to find another cambrian to keep it company.






GO - Golden orchid. Phalaenopsis. Saw this one when I bought CO and left it behind - then immediately regretted it as soon as I got home. Never seen one like it before. Ken, bless him, went back over to Tesco in the rain and bought it for me...





DO - Dendrobium Orchid. Smells of wisteria, so beautiful...











RO2 - Rescued orchid no 2. Phalaenopsis. This is the one I rescued from the wall along the road middle of 2021.








PO. Pink orchid. Phalaenopsis. This is the one I bought at Cabury Garden Centre on special, late 2021. It's much happier here!










TWO. Teeny weeny orchid, Phalaenopsis. Rescued from Tesco end 2021 (I think).




















My IMDb ep summaries

(completed)
Arthur of the Britons
Sky
Star Maidens
The Starlost
Space Rangers
The Sentinel (part: seasons 2 and 3)
Swamp Thing (part: season 3)
Gravedale High
Transformers: Armada
Transformers: Energon
Transformers: Cybertron (part)
Misfits of Science (four eps)
Zoo Gang
Zodiac
Jupiter Moon
Transformers: Beast Wars (part: seasons 2 and 3)
Transformers: Beast Machines (part)
Vampire Princess Miyu
Starhyke
Nathan Barley
No Heroics
Undermind (3 eps)
Will Shakespeare (Tim Curry version)
Nightwalker
12 Kingdoms
Trigun (ep 8)
Rayearth
Hyperdrive (season 2 ep 3)
The Café

For later:

Missing Earthian ep
Missing Haibane Renme eps


Silver birch at Eastwood 

Farm

"Autumnal - nothing to do with leaves. It is to do with a certain brownness at the edges of the day... Brown is creeping up on us, take my word for it... Russets and tangerine shades of old gold flushing the very outside edge of the senses... deep shining ochres, burnt umber and parchments of baked earth - reflecting on itself and through itself, filtering the light. At such times, perhaps, coincidentally, the leaves might fall, somewhere..."

(Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead Act 2: Tom Stoppard)

Autumn...

I love this time of year. I love the colours, the sharp slant of sunlight on the trees, mosaics of acid-yellow and harts- blood, velvet and darkness and a haze of mist-grey over the hills. I love its immanence, its mellowness, the tang of frost just around the corner of the year...

Watching the little birds in the goat-willow in my garden, I realised something more.

I love this land with a fierce, possessive love, deep-rooted in two thousand years of history. From the frosted beaches and cloud-brushing peaks of the north to the wind-haunted meanderings of the rivers of the east, from the sensuous rolling patchworked hills of the south to the demanding dark moors of the west, this land seeps into bone and blood and synapse, mother of motley nobility, culture, individual freedoms. It can be known. It can be understood. It can be felt deep inside.

I love its effortless eccentricities, its vigour and vibrancy, its flawed perfections, its silent strength and tenacious resilience, its hard-won tolerances and intense and variable beauty, the profound energy in its sacred mythical landscape.

Home and more-than-home, the forces that shape and protect and bind, in me, as I am in the land. Love returning love in the stillness for those who'll only take the time to listen...

(Joules, Autumn 2004)


All photographs taken by Joules unless otherwise specified. All photographs © Joules A Taylor or other specified individual.


In Memoriam

17.03.09 - Argent

25.07.08 - Raptor

18.12.07 - Quyn

02.12.06 - Ryme


Currently enjoying:
Muse
Transformers - IDW, Prime, Animated, Rescue Bots, Earthspark.

Currently reading:
Cixin Liu - newest favourite author.
Ben Miller. wow. Just, wow...


Currently working on:
Haadri
Dystopic novel starring Devon from Dystopia

Currently chuffed with:
My garden

Currently miffed at:
Effing BND (you know who I mean)
Nestlé, TFG Tinyhands Fart, Toadface Farage

Currently maintaining:
Wavewrights, on and off...
BCHS
BCW


Blog Pics
I've gathered some of my pages of photos together: the page of links is here. I'll be adding more as time goes by!




Evil Squid
A Little Glossary of Taylorspeke
(in no particular order)

plit popints - n. Typo for 'plot points' typed on a keyboard with more than half the characters worn off...

[PING] (alt [ping]) - n. A brainwave. The text equivalent of a lightbulb going on blindingly over someone's head. Usually mine. And usually at the most inconvenient of times. [sigh]

TPTB - The Powers That Be.

wulmet - n. A person of little or no talent who somehow inveigles himself into a position where he is in power over other, far more talented people and uses his position to downplay them in order to try to make himself feel superior.

biteable - referring to an anatomical part vb, tasty.

Flatterfed - vb. 27.02.08: my typo for flattered, but since it's so cutely apt I thought it would fit nicely here. Lutra defined it as "the lovely warm feeling of satisfaction resulting from enthusiastic reviews..." (which I've been getting for my MB fics).

Composted - vb, 'compos mentis', mentally capable of working. Contrast with uncomposted or non- composted, not 'compos mentis', not capable of working, hungover...

Cumbles - n, cucumbers.

Kewp - how Ken says 'thank you'. We rather like Lutra's 'nanx', too...

Musekick - noun, music, without which I cannot work.

'feinne - noun, caffeine, essential for correct mental functioning, especially first thing in the morning. I prefer mine in the form of SodaStream Diet Coke. And on that subject...

Skoosh - verb, noun. To skoosh - to add CO2 to a sodastream bottle filled with water to make it fizzy, prior to adding Diet Coke syrup (or just drinking as sparkling water). A skoosh - a bottle of water that has been skooshed. Skooshy - something that has been skooshed, water, or that whipped cream that comes in tins you have to shake then upend and press the nozzle...

Shoogle - verb. To shake gently, for example, of roast potatoes in a roasting tin to ensure they're covered with oil. I have vague memories of this being a real Scottish colloquialism...

Stegasaurus - n, spider of the genus tegenaria. Why? No idea. I just find it easier, that's all...
Edit 08.09.07: Lutra thinks that Brian is a good name for a mini-stegasaurus. From now on, any 'Brian's in the posts may be assumed to be a tegenaria. Except where otherwise specified.

Viterals - noun, vitamins + minerals. Also a pun on victuals.

Splish - verb. A combination of slosh and splash.

Parrots - noun, paracetemol (from the old joke "Why are there no aspirin tablets in the jungle? Because the parrots eat 'em all...")

Maggles - noun, magpies. As opposed to non-magical people.

Flamewings - noun. Swifts. So called because the first time we became aware of them was an early summer evening when they were flying high, the light from the setting sun seemingly turning their wings to flames. Lovely little birds. We always know summer's arrived when we hear their high-pitched squeeing.

Murfs - noun, moths.

Peasant cut - noun, roughly cut up into big chunks, e.g. vegetables chopped in a hurry for a hearty stew or soup. By extension, anything prepared in a hurry - haircut, material, even a first draft of a story...

Giraffe - noun, a carafe (of wine, coffee or water, for example).

Shrumps - noun, mushrooms.

Splings - noun, Kai's spelling homework: by extension, any spelling.

Tyops - noun, typos. var toyps, typso, psyto, psoyt, etc. Usual result of a dose of the fingerials (see next entry).

Fingerials - (pr. fin GEEE ree yalls) noun, fingers that will not type what you want them to.

Haddock - noun, time, of which I never have enough. (Origin of this term here.)

Sleep - noun? vb? a.k.a. sheeeeeeeeep.... I used to know what this word meant...


The Updates Blog

The place to stay notified of WaveWrights' Fiction updates: Zone, Darkside, DarkRealm, Matrix, Vault, Safehouse 13...




my computer gremlin Butch. click the pic to see the larger image

Butch, my computer gremlin. Click the pic for larger version, and read his adventures here...

Butch by the talented 

Sylverthorne

A gift for me! Butch by the very talented Sylverthorne. Click pic for larger image.

Joules' 

Haddock

This is MY haddock. It was caught exclusively for me by Talon. No, you can't have any. I need all the haddock I can get!!



A'lestrel by Valkyrie.

A'lestrel - a gift for me from Valkyrie...



Albino Alsatian Benten (c) MEBird 

2004

Another gorgeous Valkyrie gift for me - Benten the Albino Alsatian! Click thumbnail for larger image.

Radittsu, an oekaki for my birthday 04 

by 

Onna

Oekai by Bakayaro Onna - Radittsu at his sexiest...



The Zone Plant from
The Zone 

blog 

plant

OrganicHTML (which alas no longer seems to exist...)
[::..My Regular Reads..::]
:: Astronomical Pic of the Day [>]
:: What is Space... [>]
:: Dark Roasted Blend [>]
:: BLDG [>]
:: Watchismo Times [>]
[::..Fun Places..::]
::HubbleSite
Stunning...
::PALEOMAP Project
Absolutely fascinating.
:: Skymap
Check out the night sky where you are!
[::..Useful Sites..::]
:: GreenNet
First stop for environmental matters
:: The Forest of Avon
Our local community forest and places to visit
:: The Guardian
Online Guardian Newspaper.
:: Symbols
Exactly what it says
:: World Timeserver
For checking the current time around this world
:: Universal Currency Converter
Actually it's just a terran-global currency converter, not universal, but it's still useful...

So what is it with the haddock? Am I some kind of fish freak?

I'll leave that to others to decide.

The tale (or tail if you prefer) harks back to October 2000, when my GoodTwin and I, ably assisted by Sue, ran the first UK Professionals convention...
It's common knowledge that I never have enough time, and I was determined not to bewail the fact that weekend: hence I promised not to use the 'T' word...
Of course, that didn't really work (if nothing else I had to let the trainees know what times things were supposed to be happening!) so we decided a substitute word would be employed instead. There were several suggestions. Banana came very close to being chosen. However, I eventually decided that 'haddock' fitted the bill nicely. Ever since, haddock=time. Hence the title of my forthcoming autobiography,
My Half-Life in the Haddock Space Continuum....


Normally I wouldn't, but these were just irresistible...

How could I resist?

Just too adorable...

and to complete the rainbow...

These Too-Kawaii Kitties
were adopted from
Ghost's Anime Page (which appears to have disappeared, alas...)

[::..Anime/Manga..::]
Useful sites:

BBTS -
Fabulous anime figures

Anime Lyrics
A huge selection... evil popups

Anime still needed to complete series' I'm collecting... Many thanks to everyone who has helped me acquire the collection!
Ai no Kusabi

Owned:
   DVD
   Dj: June Special
   CD: Ambivalence

Cyber City Oedo 808

Owned:
   DVD
   All 3 eps on Video, dubbed
   Dj: Cyberage 1-3
   Illustrated Book 2 (Benten's) in Japanese

From Eroica with Love

Owned:
   Manga Vols 1, 9, 11

Mirage of Blaze

Owned:
   DVD Vol 1 (eps 1-4)

R.G. Veda

Owned:
   English Manga: Vol 1
   Japanese Manga: Vol 1-7 complete
   Tarot Pack
   R.G.Veda video

Twelve Kingdoms

Owned:
   Anime Vol 1-12: complete

Under the Glass Moon

Owned:
   Manga Vol 1, 2
Vol 3 needed

Vampire Hunter D - Bloodlust

Owned:
   DVD

   Vampire Hunter D Book 1



New Vampire Miyu

Owned:
   (Studio Ironcat) Manga Vols 1 -5 (complete)


Yami no Matsuei

Owned:
   Viz Manga: English translation, Vols 1 - 11 (complete: I believe vol 12 is only available online)
   Japanese 3-DVD set
   Central Park Media: Descendants of Darkness Vol. 1, English/Japanese subbed.
   Sketchbook


[::..Joules SP fied..::]


... this is Terra? How the hell'd I end up here...?

(Thanks, Lutra, for the quote!)

[::..archive..::]
07/01/2002 - 07/31/2002
08/01/2002 - 08/31/2002
09/01/2002 - 09/30/2002
10/01/2002 - 10/31/2002
11/01/2002 - 11/30/2002
12/01/2002 - 12/31/2002
01/01/2003 - 01/31/2003
02/01/2003 - 02/28/2003
03/01/2003 - 03/31/2003
04/01/2003 - 04/30/2003
05/01/2003 - 05/31/2003
06/01/2003 - 06/30/2003
07/01/2003 - 07/31/2003
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12/01/2003 - 12/31/2003
01/01/2004 - 01/31/2004
02/01/2004 - 02/29/2004
03/01/2004 - 03/31/2004
04/01/2004 - 04/30/2004
05/01/2004 - 05/31/2004
06/01/2004 - 06/30/2004
07/01/2004 - 07/31/2004
08/01/2004 - 08/31/2004
09/01/2004 - 09/30/2004
10/01/2004 - 10/31/2004
11/01/2004 - 11/30/2004
12/01/2004 - 12/31/2004
01/01/2005 - 01/31/2005
02/01/2005 - 02/28/2005
03/01/2005 - 03/31/2005
04/01/2005 - 04/30/2005
05/01/2005 - 05/31/2005
06/01/2005 - 06/30/2005
07/01/2005 - 07/31/2005
08/01/2005 - 08/31/2005
09/01/2005 - 09/30/2005
10/01/2005 - 10/31/2005
11/01/2005 - 11/30/2005
12/01/2005 - 12/31/2005
01/01/2006 - 01/31/2006
02/01/2006 - 02/28/2006
03/01/2006 - 03/31/2006
04/01/2006 - 04/30/2006
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06/01/2006 - 06/30/2006
07/01/2006 - 07/31/2006
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10/01/2006 - 10/31/2006
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02/01/2007 - 02/28/2007
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01/01/2019 - 31/01/2019
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01/12/2020 - 31/12/2020
01/01/2021 - 31/01/2021
01/02/2021 - 28/02/2021
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01/01/2022 - 31/01/2022
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01/10/2022 - 31/10/2022
01/11/2021 - 31/11/2021
01/12/2022 - 31/12/2022
01/01/2023 - 31/01/2023
01/02/2023 - 28/02/2023
01/03/2023 - 31/03/2023
01/04/2023 - 30/04/2023
01/08/2023 - 31/08/2023
01/11/2023 - 31/11/2023

Friday, November 15, 2019

Oh, this is getting silly. Can someone please donate me some spare time?

Let's try to catch up.

I had a rather nasty cold for part of the last month - had to miss swimming two weeks in a row. However, Wendy came up to visit, which was great fun and left me feeling much better. [GLOMPS] Wendy...

The best news of the past month has been the results of Kai's last BMT clinic: his ferritin is now down to 220.5, and he doesn't need any more venesections! Apparently the normal range is between 30 and 400, so he's firmly in the middle. Of course we're all delighted with that. He can also reduce his clinic appts from every six months to once a year.

My case against Fixit has now been served and they have a CCJ against them. I've been sent a whole load of stuff I have to read and respond to for the next step - will get that organised next Monday. Then decide if I'm going to post their photograph and details all over the cowboy builders and community groups Facebook pages I've joined...

Samhain fell during the half term holidays this year, so I decided to do a proper Trick or Treaters thing for the neighbourhood kids.

So... hung purple spider and eyeball light chains and a dancing ghost in the lounge window (I tried taking photos but they didn't come out very well: maybe next year...) - and decorated Derpy..


The skeleton (Wilson) is just a cardboard one from Tesco, but it looked great in the dimmer evening and with the streetlight opposite lighting him up! The kids loved him, their adult carers were in hysterics (I got asked if he had his licence: I pointed out that's what the L plates are for!) And the screams when they spotted the skull in the back must have annoyed BND no end! We must have had at least 75 kids visit (I had bought 13 bags of mini-bars and sweets and very nearly ran out!), and all in all it was a great success.

Going to do the same next year, but will try to get another skeleton to sit in the passenger seat as Wilson's partner. Have already picked up a giant spider with 10 ft long legs to hang up in the porch...

Generally speaking we're all carnivores here, but Ken asked to start having egg mayonnaise, and cheese - preferably vegan cheese if possible - in his lunch time sammijs. This, along with Saturday Morning Kitchen now focussing on vegetarian meals part of the time, and the recent push for reducing plastic, started me exploring options. After all, we've eaten organically wherever possible for nearly 40 years, and we recycle everything we can - even more now our local Tesco is collecting additional stuff:


It's always full with bags piled up around and behind it. I take ours over once or twice a week.

Found a vegetarian cookbook in Babbacombe while we were there, and the Teco magazine had a recipe for Carl's All Change Casserole, which looked eminently doable. Tweaked a little - Sains sweet potato and butternut squash pack adds more flavour (and saves chopping the veg, because I'm lazy) - and using Cauldron Foods absolutely delicious Lincolnshire vegan sossijs, it's become a family favourite and I make it once a week. Wonderfully tasty and filling for winter dinners. The book had a nice recipe for a baked cauliflower and potato dish - layered cooked cauliflower, cherry tomatoes and cooked cubed potatoes with a rich cheese sauce (half and half organic Leicester and Cheddar is tastiest) baked in the oven for 30 mins or so: I've found it's even better with a layer of Vivera bacon bits under the tomatoes. Vivera's pulled pork, by the way, is tastier than the real thing, as are their chicken goujons, and their mince, though not as good as meat for cottage pie, works very well in chilli sans carne. Yes, OK, it's substituting rather than a radical dietary change, but it's a most excellent start.

Trying the book's vegetable hotpot tomorrow. Saturdays tend to be my cooking experiment days...

My orchids are doing splendidly. Original now has another little flower spike coming off the larger spike, -


and the alien-face orchid is fine (and may have it's own secondary spike coming off the main one - not quite big enough to be sure yet)

Rescued orchid very healthy but not producing flowers yet. Will give it time...

The saga of the SSLs...

Eventually decided to cut through the crap and just move everything to Fasthost - including joulestaylor.com, which is now jatarchive in wavewrights, so until I find a way around the original URL links for all the old photographs, they won't be showing on the blog pages. You may notice that the broken padlock symbol has vanished from the bar at the top of the screen. I've manually changed the link for all the entries on this page, but trying to see if there's a quicker and less labour intensive way of doing it for the rest of the 6K posts on this blog...

Not sure if I've mentioned it before, but the (xtian) Brislington Oasis Academy - opened 2015 - has persistently and continually given out [name]@brislington.org as their email address, and of course all emails to this address (which is the Brislington Virtual Museum and has been mine since 2001) come to me. I've been complaining about this to them for the last nearly five years, to absolutely no avail: my inbox is still being spammed by emails for staff and students at the Academy. So I emailed the Academy last week, saying if I got one more erroneous email I would complain to the DoE. Which I did (about 6 staff members applying for learning application courses, which I promptly unsubscribed) so I made out an online complaint at the gov.uk portal.

Yesterday I got a reply from DoE - addressed to a complete stranger, with their complaint, but sent to my email address. Ironic or what? I forwarded the email on to the correct person and sent a complaint to DoE. Last night I got a reply from DoE, addressed to me with the correct details. And then this morning I got three more emails from DoE, with my details and my email address but addressed to another complete stranger... When I say nothing's ever easy 'round 'ere I'm not joking.

The upshot was I haven't followed all the steps outlined in DoE's complaint procedure guide so they've closed the case and won't take it any further - so I've started from scratch, and sent a detailed complaint to the Academy Principal, advising him that if I haven't had a reply by next Thurs I will take the complaint to the Governors - and if they can't help I will get back to DoE. Not only does this show the incompetence of the Academy staff and admin, and amount to cyber harassment (I'd had hundreds of these bloody emails with everything from highly confidential info about students - no I didn't read it - to Pinterest applications), but they're also serious data breaches. Will let you all know what happens.

Bloody hell, I'm becoming the neighbourhood expert in legal hassles!

So - media...

We finally watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. It's a good film, if a little dated now. I bought Men in Black: International, which is great fun. Perfect for a rainy Saturday afternoon! Daft and very funny.

And we bought Good Omens... Actually rang up Tesco to check they had it on the 21st Oct and then Kai went over to pick it up.

It's WONDERFUL. Wow. Just wow. Sticks beautifully to the book while bringing it subtly up to date. Loved it, all of us. Going to rewatch it soon to pick up all the bits we missed first time around (there are plenty as the whole thing is absolutely saturated with little details and Easter Eggs). Sheen and Tennant are simply perfect in the roles. I can't praise it enough. It's superb.

And being on a Tennant kick (pretty much permanently in my case) I picked up Broadchurch series 1 in a charity shop. For 49p. We watched it in thee evenings and I immediately ordered season 2 and 3 (started season 2 yesterday). Another fabulous drama, real breathless edge of seat stuff. Although it had a curious effect on us. We have Doctor Who (Tennant and Foster), Torchwood (Eve Myles - Gwen), Hot Fuzz (Olivia Colman), Legends of Tomorrow (Rik Hunter - Arthur Darvill, also Rory in Dr Who), Agent Carter/Iron Man/Avengers (James D'Arcy - Jarvis/Vision), Birds of a Feather (Pauline Quirke), The Cafe/Fleabag (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), and Casualty (Adjoa Andoh) all thrown in together - and that's just the ones I immediately recognised. It's like a who's who of great UK dramatic talent!

Very well worth watching - certainly series 1. Not far enough into series 2 yet to say if it's as good.

On a less amusing note, I don't know how many others watch Strictly Come Dancing, but I was annoyed the week before last when Mike Bushell won the dance off over Emma Weymouth. It was blindingly obvious she was the better dancer, but the judges ruled for Mike. That was bad enough - but the following evening Craig bloody Revel Horwood was on the One show. He sat on the sofa, smug, self-satisfied and arrogant, and dismissed the entire UK viewing public as stupid and ignorant. I was so angry I emailed the BBC to complain (heh, seems all I'm doing at the moment is making complaints!) and simply couldn't bear to watch the following week, as the sight of him just raises my BP. This Saturday it's the Blackpool episode. We may continue watching Broadchurch instead.

OK, apart from the usual busyness that's about it. I'm getting ready for Yule, and it's all coming together very nicely!

Hopefully I can post the next update before November...[headdesk] I mean Yule. Need sheeeeep.

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2 Comments:

Blogger GoodTwin said...

Wonderful news about Kai - tell him to keep it up!
The car looks fab - how to get yourself known the neighbourhood, eh? :)

I've had a cold as well - started small and hung on for nearly 3 weeks, which I could have done without. No haddock to spare over here - we're headfirst in panto rehearsals (oh yes, we are!) and set building.

It's extraordinary about the emails - but not surprising. The old company had the .co.uk domain years before it because sensible to get the .com etc. and when an American company bought up the .com and established a London office, it wasn't long before we started to get emails for them. I tried a few times to get them sorted, but no one was interested so I gave up and just deleted them. Not my problem :) Then in the last year or so, we started to get order confirmations and invoices which should have gone to a restaurant somewhere in London - whose email wasn't even close to ours, so I have no idea how they could get it so wrong.

4:16 pm  
Blogger Joules *Dances with Haddock* Taylor said...

Symps for your cold - they're so miserable. Hope you feel better now.

The Principal didn't even bother to acknowledge my email, let alone reply, so I've now prepared a letter to go to the Chair of the Academy Council (apparently that's what they have instead of a Board of Governors...) Will report back here how it all goes. I am NOT giving up on this - I've had hundreds and hundreds of the bloody things and I am so pissed off with it all.
Oh - had an apology from DoE thanking me for forwarding the email to the right person and asking me to just delete the original (already had). They say they're investigating so it doesn't happen again, so that's good.
And THEN my Tesco order last week had a bottle of vodka with the security top still on it, so it had to go back as there's no way we can take those off (though Kai did offer to take a hacksaw to it!) and a loaf that was at it's 'best before' date. Had to email complain about that too. Got a phone call a couple of hours later from their customer service very apologetic, refunded the vodka and loaf and added £5 evoucher for my next shop as compensation, so that worked OK. She said 'use by' and 'best before' dates are very important for deliveries and she'd be referring it to the store for them to have words with the packers. Sometimes complaining works. Much rather not have to though...

10:35 pm  





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