In amongst the hospital visits and work of the last few weeks, my washing machine broke, followed swiftly by the heating in my conservatory.

Now, that might not sound like a big deal, but I work from home two days a week (more often when mum was in hospital) and due to the neighbours inability to do anything quietly, the conservatory is the only place I can actually concentrate as their noise doesn’t (quite) travel this far.  I have a fan heater thingy, but the only thing it’s really effective at is costing me a lot of money to run.  The thing that broke was a tube attached to the wall which is low cost and really quite impressive as far as heating goes. As a result of the tube curling up its tubular toes, for the last week I’ve been starting work in a room my thermometer has informed me was 3 degrees centigrade (37 degree if you do the other). Even with the fan heater on, by the end of the day the temperature has only hit 13 degrees at the most.  I’ve resorted to multiple layers and fingerless gloves.

But today, the new tube heater finally arrived and I put aside 10 minutes to mount it in the brackets of the old one and prepared to take off a layer or two, or three.  Possibly four.  (It’s cold.  I am part toad).  So at the time I’d allotted, I opened the box to discover that some genius had felt it necessary to include the plug as an optional feature.  It was there, but it wasn’t attached.  I’m ashamed to say that I have never attached a plug to anything in my life and my first thought was ‘I’ll have to take it up to Dad tomorrow for him to put it together’.  Then I decided I am a grown up, I could do this and what could possibly go wrong?  Then I stopped thinking that last thought as it’s me and it was very likely that I’d blow all the fuses in the house or start a small fire.

But do you know what?  I did it!  I got out the screwdrivers, did a bit of frowning and a bit of swearing when I thought the wire-y bits were too short and couldn’t get the screws into that plastic whatsit inside, but suddenly it all came together.  AND I got it into the brackets AND it’s actually doing heating things now.  I couldn’t be more proud if I tried.  It’s the little things :o) Sadly, I don’t think my skills go as far as the washing machine, but if the engineer calls in sick again on Monday, I might just set aside 10 minutes for a quick tinker.  I could be on a roll here…. :o)

EDIT: Three minutes after posting this, every house in my road lost their power.  Now I’m sure it was just a coincidence and we would have had a power cut anyway, but maybe I spoke too soon…

The tube. Not exciting, I agree, but at least you can picture things properly now…