1 a cheque from Petplan. Why is it that insurance cheques never seem to be for as much as you expect? If the bill is for £125 and you pay an excess of £40 surely that should mean the cheque will be for more than £48. I know there will be a reason, and that part of it relates to having to have poor little Floss put to sleep which the insurance doesn't cover. I'm not up to querying it to be honest, because I'm sure it's right after all sorts of other stuff has been taken into account that lurks in the small print and if I do query it I shall only end up feeling ripped off. It's not as though we're now going to insure the next cat in line with Petplan; I've had enough of them and their 'the second class cheque is in the post' ways so when we do get round to insuring the next one it will be with someone else. Probably a ubiquitous supermarket so that we can get loyalty points.
2 my new laptop, on which I am typing this very blog post. We ordered it last weekend and the website almost made my head explode, what with sneaking stuff into my basket and not being very clear, or even clear at all, about how to chuck it out back out again, making you register for 'an account; (I hate that. Why do they bother? It's not as though I'm going to be buying a new computer every week for goodness' sake.) Postage charge to the Northern Isles of course, even though for everyone else it's free unless you want it delivered on a Saturday (and I daresay if I lived south still and wanted a Saturday delivery that would rile me too) And then at the very end a whopping great charge for using a credit card! and an even bigger one for using PayPal. I was able to use my debit card for which there was amazingly enough no surcharge at all, but given that they are web only dealers from whom you can only order over the Internet, nothing helpful like proper customer service and a telephone order number, I think they should be biting the bullet, or at least shaving a tiny amount off their doubtless gargantuan profits and absorbing the pence per transaction that the credit card companies charge them for facilitating their business.
Anyway OH, who used to be very laid back but who shows a distressing tendency to get worked up about stuff these days hassled me constantly for the rest of the week to look up the tracking reference and see where the new machine was. I didn't want to do this, as it meant logging in to 'my account' which meant remembering the password that I had oh so grudgingly set up, but eventually, fed up with his nagging I logged in on Friday. This informed me that my order had reached a 'transportation hub' somewhere in Birmingham just that morning. Cue moans from OH about couriers, unreliability, non-updating of tracking software etc etc. and muttering from self questioning what is wrong with the word depot all of a sudden. None of this prepared us for a knock on the door at 12.30 that day by a courier bearing my new laptop.
It's now set up and working and very nice, although it appears my Zylom games may not play on it which is a shame, and as I haven't been ale to purchase Office yet I'm a trifle limited as to what I can do with it. Sure it will be a great boon once it's all properly loaded with the necessary software though. And it takes up so much less space than the old PC and monitor.
3 Also on Friday a big bag of bright blue wool. The sweater- in -just -over- a -week having turned out so well I decided to take advantage of another wool offer and bought some to make version 2 . I need a lot of new jumpers which is why I don't mind doing the same pattern twice in a month. Especially as it is mindless and needn't distract me from anything I might find worth watching on TV.
4 And an e-mail - oh how prosaic, from UHI Grad School informing me that the Research Sub Committee has approved my application. The writer was awaiting delivery of my ID card after which she would be in touch again.
Now that's good news. It's excellent news for me, and quite good for you as it means I won't be banging on about it any more but I couldn't help feeling a bit - I don't know, a bit something. Would it have hurt to say they were 'pleased to inform me' about registration approval? Could they not have humanised it a bit by adding 'at last' to the bit about my application being approved. And why on earth is my ID card going to wing its way from Aberdeen to Oban before being entrusted to me? Who knows. I sometimes think that actually doing this Ph D will turn out to be a doddle compared with the struggle I have had with TPTB to get it started. Lordy, lordy as they say. Somewhere.
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