As part of living in such a vibrant and trendy place we get trendy magazines pushed through our letter box on a regular basis, the main once being space, which helps keep the great trendy unwashed up to date with all the goings on in super trendy land, such as the radisson hotel birthday bash, and those lovely penthouse developments that everybody in the dingle is queuing up to move into.

Anyway this month we were all reliably informed of the hip 100, which apparently isn’t the top 100 hip replacements in Liverpool, but is infact a list of ‘Liverpool’s coolest’, you may be shocked to learn as was I that I’m not on the list, but then again ‘hip’ is such an untrendy term, I consider myself to be ‘too legit to quit’.

someone who was on the list however is Stephen Broadbent, now we know Steve, and before I cast any doubts on his trendiness, it should be pointed out that he now lives in Cheshire: anyway, this is his write-up

17. Stephen Broadbent
Art and Soul of the Beetham project…
Head Honcho, naturally, of urban artists Broadbent, whose interpretative, geometric sculpture at Beetham Tower was a joint initiative wit BCA landscape and Smiling Wolf. As well as the celebrated faces of Liverpool, he helped to create the site’s Threshold to the Earth Scheme, celebrating the area’s history and context. e.g. The curved wall with the Morse code inscription ‘permission to come along side’.

All very nice, but this does show this magazines base. The reality is quite a lot of people won’t have seen Steve’s sculpture at the end of the tower, unless you own a car, and come into town that way.

People are much more likely to have seen reconciliation on bold street, which was part of a project to help bring the catholic and protestant areas of Ireland together, and if you approach Liverpool via the M62 (then you won’t get the magazine) you could see, encounter at birchwood, which at the time it was unveiled was the tallest outdoor sculpture in the country, and then if you’re around speak boulevard, you would see coming together which criminally the bank of Scotland (who now own the site it was built on) don’t light up at night.

incase you are wondering the image at the top of this page, is the curved wall with the Morse code on it.

Today is slow, the first trappings of spring are shining across the Liverpool sky, and I’m stuck here in the tower! But all is not lost, tomorrow we are going the zoo! Daisy is probably too young to appreciate it all, but that doesn’t mean were not going to have fun.

Work is plodding along, it has to be said at a frustratingly slow pace at the moment. We are in a maintenance period, which means we are spending a couple of months tiding up, sorting out and generally making stuff which we have being working on much cleaner. It does mean that we are a bit deadline less, and sort of floating between problems. It soon all comes to an end however, and hopefully the code will be better, and our lives that little bit easier, when the next major shift in practice comes along (one is expected any day now. It’s been a while).

It quite strange at the moment, I have loads to say, but in a bizarre twist, I don’t feel that this is the place to say it. There are a number of things going on at the moment, all of which I don’t think it is right to talk about here, so lets talk about solar panels….

our roof is shot, we’ve known this for a while, with the recent high winds we lost a few tiles, and the bathroom light fitting became a water feature, so we did the right thing at got our insurance company to get someone to fix it. We are still the process of getting the quotes for the full job but at least we have a dry ceiling now (although it is completely gone, and needs replacing).

The blokes who came to fix the roof, where shocked to see that we didn’t have any felt under the tiles (The roof is 100 years old, was felt even invented then?), and he also said our timbers are shot, yeah nothing new, but it made us think, if we are going to replace the whole roof anyway, is now the time to get some solar tiles put in while we are about it?, do we get the loft done at the same time, do we spend scary amounts of money on the top of our house?

well at the moment we are just trying to get costs. We’ve come to the conclusion we need to draw up a list of the big jobs in the house with rough costs, so we can then sort the list and pick what to do. So the roof and solar tiles; solar tiles are cool, eventually they should pay for themselves, and we would be doing our bit, and it might even look cool, but how do you go about getting them?

Well you can get a grant from the government that will reduce the cost by upto 50%, and many companies will install the tiles, and some electricity companies will even buy back the electricity you don’t use.

the problem we have at the moment, is getting the costs, I mean do you know what the angle of your roof is? And what is your ridge to eaves length?

the most intresting thing i’ve seen reading up on this, is what happens when you have a power cut:
Our systems for homes are entirely grid connected. If there is a power cut your system is automatically switched off. This is a safety measure designed to stop electricity leaking on to the national grid and to protect individuals who may be working to restore the power supply. Unfortunately there is no product that can be added to your PV system to act as a back up at the present time.

We’ve been quite fortunate with daisy and colds, quite early on the health visitor, told us that you can expect a new baby to get around ten colds in the first year. This week, is the first time we’ve taken daisy to the doctors because of a cold, she did get one very early on but it wasn’t as bad as this one, which has come with all the lovely extras like a ticklely cough, and a runny nose (yuck).

Daisy sleeping in her own room is going really well, even with her cold, she has been a little bit restless the last few nights, but that is almost certainly due to the cold, and not the new room, and now that her cold is getting a bit better, she seams to be settling down a lot better.

Daisy has just woken from her first night in her own room, and it’s after 7am!

OK so she did wake up in the middle of the night and take some settling back down, but we think that has more to do with her having a mild cold than the fact we changed rooms. The last couple of nights proved to us that Daisy and Me weren’t good for each other at night, and we finally got the nursery clear yesterday.

Ruth was naturally a bit apprehensive of the whole thing, but to be honest I’m not sure Daisy noticed. The biggest difference for us is that we can no longer just lye on the bed and put our hand in the cot, so middle of the night settling down is a little harder (although when she doesn’t have a cold it hardly ever happens).

I think overall Daisy got a better nights sleep, because while her noisy huffs and puffs where disturbing me through the baby monitor, my tossing and turning was only disturbing Ruth.

Carlisle, has saved it’s cursing stone

and continuing on the theme of things I would get if only they were available in the shops:

Microsoft have made the Weasly’s clock.