...And Relax

It's been another fun-packed action-packed weekend. No, it really has, I kid you not.

Thursday night I joined the committee for one of the groups Alison plays in. Exactly what my role will be has yet to be seen, but I've taken on the overhaul (and long-term maintenance) of the group's website, as well as suggesting other things to help the group.

I started Good Friday with two tasks that I wanted to accomplish. The first of these was the replacement of the immersion heater in our hot water tank. We'd been without hot water for about a week and a half. That in itself isn't a major problem since we have an electric shower, but it's annoying when you want to have a bath and have to use the shower to fill it. The second task was to build (or make a start on building) the top bit of the AV unit.

Needless to say, the first task was more of a task than first appeared, and as it happened by the end of Good Friday I'd gained two immersion heater spanners (the first one I bought turned out to be crap) but still had yet to undo the old kaput immersion heater even a fraction. A further worry was that as I removed the cylinder jacket from the tank in order to better see what I was doing, it became apparent that the heater had been replaced before, and that the tank had buckled a fair bit around the heater fitting when they'd fought to get it out that time. There was therefore quite a danger of cracking the tank if too much force was applied without the heater coming undone.

So when we headed off on the Saturday to begin our Easter Tour 2004, I was a bit put out at the general state of play.

Our first stop was London, there to spend the night with Alison's sister and her bloke. We'd tentatively planned to go and see the theatre version of When Harry Met Sally, but eventually decided that we couldn't be arsed, even with the promise of Alyson Hannigan faking an orgasm live on stage for our viewing pleasure.

However, we did go around a lot of the London shops, particularly in the Soho area. I gained a few comics that I'd missed out on, and a visit to a game shop (for board game type games, not xbox type games) lead to Alison and I buying the game Alhambra as an Easter present to ourselves. It's a similar kind of semi-strategic game to Carcassonne, but here the object is to build a better Alhambra Palace to that created by your opponents. Turned out to be quite fun, which is something you can never be sure of from looking at the box.

And we went into Soho's Fopp. You'll (hopefully) remember me mentioning Fopp in the previous entry, and talking of the Fopp challenge. This time, everyone failed. I bought the DVD of the full series of Reeves and Mortimer's remake of Randall and Hopkirk (deceased). Actually, maybe Alison succeeded in the challenge, because I can't remember what she bought, so maybe she didn't buy anything.

And we saw Elijah Wood in Fopp. Elijah. Wood. Just wandering around, browsing through the CDs. To answer some of the questions that friends and relatives have thrown at us when we've told them, in case you were thinking of asking the same things: No, he didn't have pointed ears. Yes, he is short, but not Hobbit-short. Maybe 5'3" or 5'4". No, we didn't say "Hey! Frodo!" or any such nonsense. No, I didn't see what music he was buying. I did almost go up to him to complement him on his performance in LotR, but I didn't have the bottle.

Sunday we went on to the next stop on our tour, March. March is a small town out in the fens, kinda near to Peterborough and Huntingdon. The reason for this stop was that we were going to a 50th Wedding Anniversary do for Alison's Great Aunt and Uncle. Naturally we were also conveying Sister + Bloke also.

It was a cool day, although for me it was strange as I knew next to no one there. That being said it wasn't much different for Alison and her sister. I was able to talk to their Great Uncle for a bit about the Second World War in order to further my research for Night of the Despots but sadly this didn't happen until right at the end of the day, and hence we ran out of time just as the conversation got interesting.

Yesterday we saw some Roman re-enactments at Flag Fen (a Bronze Age archeological site) before heading home. Alison's parents joined us at our place so that Alison's Dad could give us a hand with the immersion heater. Since he used to be a plumber he's the one we always going running to whenever plumbing issues arise. He has all the tools and stuff. It was while we were trying to get the heater unscrewed with one of his grown-up wrenches that we cracked the top of the tank.

Yes, water went everywhere.

Happily, however, water did not go severely everywhere. It did leak through to downstairs in places, but that's not a major worry as long as it can dry out ok, which in this case will be what happens (I'm not sure it's thoroughly dry just yet - I'd like to think so but I'm not an expert on these things). We got the tank drained, and are now planning to replace it tomorrow. I'm looking really looking forward to that, I can tell you.