When it rains it pours, sometimes it rains in California... yes it really does...

Monday morning MrGrumpy had to head back home in the morning as LittleMissNaughty had called him because she heard a loud bang and then the power went out. Turned out it was not just their house, a transformer had blown up and the majority of the complex was off. LittleMissNaughty needed to go out to her voluntary work and with the garage door being electric they had to work out how the manual override worked. "It must be quite simple" MrGrumpy thought, as he dangled from the pull cord attempting to open the door. It turns out the door is actually quite heavy to open, easy to shut but heavy to open.
The power was back on by lunch, but there was continued work ongoing until late into the night.

So to MrGrumpy's surprise the TV weather predicted it would rain yesterday and today, low and behold it rained. MrGrumpy can cope with a little bit of grim weather, after all the past 40+ years of living in the UK he has become accustomed to it.
This morning after his wet drive to work (a little late due to the iPod touch alarm output being redirected to a nonexistent bluetooth device) he got another message from LittleMissNaughty, there was another loud bang and the power had gone again... So much for the fix they did...
Lucky LittleMissNaughty does go volunteering today as MrGrumpy expects she would not easily be able to open the garage door manually.

MrGrumpy's and DIY

We all know how much MrGrumpy likes to complain about DIY, he currently hopes that doing more of it will improve his results and abilities.
One of MrGrumpy's problems (yes he has many, but this is just one of them), is that he wants to minimise his spending on doing DIY, this is normally a false economy, either he has to do it twice or needs to buy something else to complete the job. It is not always him just being "tight", sometimes he is limited by time / storage space and skill (lack of). His background in programming does help him resolve these issues, but quite often is is after something has already gone wrong.
Currently this list of DIY project he has is increasing by the day, two bathrooms, a kitchen, lounge, furniture (bedside tables, headboard, bed frame), renew decking.

As if he needed another hobby...

Well MrGrumpy has taken on a new hobby / project / DIY, even after posting recently that he does not have enough time for his existing ones...
This one is driven in part by wanting to get some furniture to replace the not so stylish "Pickfords cardboard" bedside tables.
If your interested then you can follow his disasters progress on http://minionmade.blogspot.com (there is a link on the side of the blog)

Time wasted thanks to technology and idiots...

Just to really cheer MrGrumpy up, on Sunday LittleMissNaughty and MrGumpy decided to tidy up the garage, so off to the DIY store to buy some shelving. For a change they went to somewhere other than HomeDepot, they went to OSH (orchard supply hardware) as LittleMissNaughty had a $5 voucher and it was a "No Sales Tax" weekend.
It was all fine to start with, they ambled around finding what they needed (and some extras like plants and a solar lit bird feeder), now onto the checkouts. There is always quite a queue, but  it seems worse than normal, once they got to the front they were informed that the "System Was Down" and Credit/Debit cards were not really working... MrGrumpy thought "That information would have been useful before we wasted the last hour in here"... They did try checking out, first till, not a chance, card reader seemed to be stuck in a diagnostic mode. Next till, they just rang up some of the items, as credit card transactions below $50 may work, so why did they try do $55? You can guess the outcome, no link, no authentication... By this time MrGrumpy's patience was wearing pretty thin, so when asked if he wanted to try again or come back tomorrow, he decided to leave...and let them put his goods back.

Too Many things too little time...

MrGrumpy has a bit of a dilemma, he has too many things that he would like to do as hobbies and too little spare time to do them. OK this is not a world ending problem to have, most of his spare time is eaten away just keeping the technology in the house running smoothly.
Now that LittleMissNaughty is doing more of her Cardmaking, that is requiring MrGrumpy to provide additional technical input, so you could almost class that as one of his hobbies.
Next up is Photography, well that has been neglected quite a bit in the last few months, it has not helped that MrGrumpy was feeling under the weather and could not find the motivation to go out and about with the camera.
The list of things he would like to be spending time on goes on, but with limited time and money he will have to juggle both as well as he can, maybe he should write and app to decide for him... (oops that would be another time taking hobby)...

MrGrumpy plans to go square for a while

Firstly as promised, here is the picture of the latest elephant acquired by LittleMissNaughty.

And on the note of images, MrGrumpy has decided that the classic 4x3 landscape and portrait decision is one he no longer wants to make when taking photos. So his plan is to change to square format for a while. OK it's pretty simple on the "iFoam" to change to square but on his Nikon he will have to "guesstimate" when framing the shots.