scarylady

Had phonecall from house buyer last night. She's having unexpected difficulty scraping together the 10% deposit (and the evil stamp duty), and has advised that we accept other viewers as she can't guarantee being able to buy.

humph

I've been avoiding posting for a bit because I didn't want to cover and recover the same ground. And now I realise that as a result, I haven't covered any of it. Bum. So here goes:

Since back surgery mid August, I spent the first few weeks alternately lying down and standing up. It's astonishing how few activities there are available that are vertical and non-strenuous. The geese in the Park are consequently so full of bread they can barely stagger up to me for the next instalment. Sitting is a no-no, which has kept me off the PC almost completely. I have a laptop for t'internet and games, but not email. I am now much recovered, and can do most things except sit. Sitting is still bad, and as a result I'm still off work and will be until probably the end of Oct.   The neuro-surgeon reckons that he has fixed the left side by removing some bone and ligament to make space for the nerve.  Apparently the right side requires spinal injections, which he will be prepared to do in December when I've healed a bit more.  So it's not over yet, but hopefully I can see the winning post.

For some time now Jem & I have been considering moving house.  We love our house, but it's not big enough (if you've seen it; don't laugh, it's true!).   Also, having watched our next door neighbours sell theirs, we've realised that it is worth about 70K more than we thought it was.   As a result I spent the best part of a fortnight following surgery trawling estate agent sites on the laptop from a prone position and arranging viewings.  We find that buying a house is incredibly complicated.  Last time we viewed three houses on the same street and picked the best - easy-peasy.  This time they are all big beautiful period houses that tick most, not all, of the wish list.  (Apparently if you want to tick all boxes, you have to spend more than 350K, even in t'North).  They are all totally different from each other, all gorgeous, would all cause us varying degrees of headache and we have no idea how to pick one over the other.  Heartbreakingly, the very best one of all, the one that is the template of housy perfection for us had to be discarded - it was on a main road and having insisted that our second viewing be at rush-hour we just couldn't convince ourselves that we could put up with it.

At the same time we have to get this house ready for sale.  Jem has cleared both the cellars and the backyard and will be gravelling the yard at the weekend, and I'm painting the lower and upper hall in very small stages, about 1 - 2 hours being all I can manage in a day.  It's a big hall  -I 've been at it for nearly 2 weeks and am less than half way through it I think.  The other big job will be stripping and papering the kitchen.

So there you are:  a six week update in one gulp which saves you from reading variations on a theme every few days, and protects me from everyone realising just how much I vacillate over major purchases.  Honestly, I've come back from half a dozen viewings firmly believing that this is The One, and then cooled off overnight.  It's getting embarrassing.  But, in case anyone's interested, these are the two main contenders currently:

http://www.housescape.org.uk/cgi-bin/full.pl?&roe1&&ROE1001477  (lovely house, big rooms, but it needs a full rewire and has a 70 year old coal-fired Aga which is giving me the heebies)

http://www.houseladder.co.uk/SearchEngine/PropertyDetailsForSale.aspx?PId=86973 (gorgeous, gorgeous house, been fully renovated to conservation standards, but has no dining room and absolutely nowhere for guests to park other than the dentist carpark two doors up)

I'll start with a disclaimer: I am not very good at SQL. I don't use it much.

So, can anyone tell me why the following query isn't working?

USE [DATABASE]
GO

SELECT *
FROM [TABLE]
WHERE [DATETIME FIELD] BETWEEN [FIRST DATE] AND [LAST DATE]
GO

SQL accepts and runs the query but brings back zero results even though I know there are records that should fall into the range. I note that the display of the datetime field in Enterprise Manager is dd/mm/yyyy and that in a Query Result Pane it is yyyy-mm-dd. I have tried both of these, but no success. The exact same query runs fine on a numeric field, so my syntax is OK. What am I doing wrong?

For those who know them, I received an email today from Chris & Katie Hill via the House of Tallard yahoo group.

My only real regret about NWO is that, having never played Ars Magica prior to attending, I feel it took me 3 of the 5 games to understand the colour and richness of the different Houses, and to see all the levers and buttons that drive the Hermetic World.

I wish I could go back and play it again with what I now know - not about the plot - but about the Order.

Playing a Harco redcap for Rome and Grand was a revelation. Most Houses take from the Order, a few give and take, and one or two give of themselves wholeheartedly, and Mercere is one of the latter. But they are repaid many times over with the strength of their Family, and Harco have the closest family of all. Despite the hardships of her world I envy Lyssa.

There one major thing about her that I found it hard to play: she is meant to be the Fury of Harco and by god she had good reason to be furious. At Grand Tribunal, where battles are fought with words rather than spells or swords there were 2 or 3 times when she wanted to haul off and punch someone, or haul them up a wall by their throat or in one memorable moment (Cadamon) throw them downstairs, and this is where I came unstuck.

ellistarinforms me that most boys instinctively know who they can roughhouse with, who wears (as Morgan put it) the extreme combat armband. 
I had not the faintest idea who was fair game, or indeed how to initiate such a thing. What I know is what (I think) most girls know; who they can hug, kiss or cry with in the interests of great roleplay. 
How to grapple without having to break the mood by stopping to check? No clues on that one.

So I apologise to the writers if they were hoping to see the Fury of Harco let rip. Because I couldn't find a larp-safe way to let the fury out so I channeled it into positive action instead.

"Don't talk about it. Talk about it, and you'll warn your enemies and let your allies steal your thunder. Talk is cheap and wastes time and lives. Do it. Talk about it afterwards. 'You should not have…' is music to my ears compared to 'should I…'      I have no time for ditherers." Livy Catullus Mercurius

Like several other friends on here, I wrote to my MP, Michael Meacher, regarding this Bill.

The letter I received back is singularly brief:

"Thank you for your letter.

The aim of this Bill is to usher in a number of the wide-scale reforms announced in the Better Regulation Action Plan of May 2005.

Yes, I have been looking into this Bill, and I agree its implications are unprecedented and very worrying."

And that's it, that's all I got. I can't decide whether I've just been agreed with or just been blanked.

So I looked up the Better Regulation Action Plan. Apparently this Plan is designed to move away from "the assumption since the first legislation of Victorian times - that business, unregulated, will invariably act irresponsibly." and towards "the better view .. that businesses want to act responsibly."

Yeah right, sure they do.

I've fallen in the habit of only posting either to communicate something specific, or to capture something that I want to remember.

This is one of the latter.

The weekend just gone was spent in Venice for the wedding of westernind & forbinproject

I gloss over the hideousness of the 8 hour journey of interconnecting flights via Frankfurt, and the surpassing horrendously of the 10 hour re-tracing of these footsteps on Sunday. I merely note that no-one should go via Frankfurt airport, to anywhere, ever. It is a horrible, confusing spread of gates and passport control areas and virtually no shops, and what makes it utterly, totally, ghastly is that every single restaurant and coffee shop, even Starbucks, is a total Smoking Zone.

ellistar & I have been avoiding going to Carnevale for several years now. Naturally I find the idea of having an incentive to make new and beautiful clothes extremely appealing (and have come home with my head full of ideas), but we had baulked because being a tourist magnet didn't appeal very much at all. We all have different ways of getting our ego fed, and this one didn't feel like the one for us. In this I think we were correct. Some people seem to feel that the tourists taking pictures are feeding them. We felt more that the ravening hordes with cameras were feeding upon us, and we didn't like it much. However, I did enjoy it when virtually the entire wedding party were lounging on the steps of Santa Maria della Salute waiting for the bride and groom to arrive for the official photos, and a huge horde of tourists gathered to take pictures. This was pleasurable because of the cameraderie, rather than the cameras.

The wedding itself was lovely. The bride and groom were waiting together outside to greet their guests as they arrived, which was sweetly informal and very nice. I've never seen either of them look happier. Their costumes were ....perfect. This is the only occasion in my adult life when I have admired a piece of dressmaking and had to admit to myself that I genuinely could not have achieved the same result. The civil ceremony was prettier than its English equivalent with many references to a life fully shared in all its aspects, and,although I can't remember the exact words, at the end the registrar said "I hope your lives are as bright(?) and vibrant(?) as they are right now", with a smile that encompassed a room full of people in peacock colours.

The atmosphere in the room lifted more and more as the ceremony progressed, and by the end I had a smile on my face that could not be contained, and could physically and spiritually feel the joy of the occasion as a tangible thing.

Thank you Roz & Simon for inviting me to share this day, and big thanks also to velvet_the_cat & Dan for putting us up for 2 days.

Next I have the scary job of transporting bits of the CovenWork to Brum on Friday ready for the party Saturday night.

Watch until the end of this advert; it's the best bit.

http://www.visit4info.com/details.cfm?adid=23883

ellistar and I spent this weekend at Arthur Findlay Spiritualist College at Stansted Hall doing a course.

( To protect those who are not interested in such matters )

Can any kind friend in the Brum area offer ellistar and I a bed for the night of Anita's birthday party on the 19th November?

Pretty please?