eircom, orthopaedic boots and missing Australia

Well the 26th (Australia day) came and went and I had a brief chat with my mate Paddy in Ozz, which made me miss Australia, and the weather kept up its end and has been pretty woeful apart from yesterday when the sun came out and revealed the view which I sat and looked at for a good while. The Irish government are determined to make Ireland the wind farm for Europe which sounds wonderful but in reality is a real mistake. At the moment there is huge uproar about huge pylons that are to be placed through the middle of the country to transfer electricity to the Grid, the network is four times bigger than is needed to support the needs of the country and is being made to export electricity to the UK and France. Along with the network of wires/ pylons they are going to cover the whole country in monstrous wind turbines > 140 meters high. The politicians involved in pushing through plans ASAP without cost benefit analysis have stakes in wind farms set to make them millions.
If they did the homework they would see that other countries like Denmark that exports 70% of their wind power (because they have to, as their network gets overloaded in windy times) export it at a loss, why on earth would England pay high prices for electricity when they can get it for nothing from Scotland? if it is windy here then, almost always, it is windy in Scotland, as it is the same weather patterns that govern the wind.

Anyway I'm going on about bliddy wind farms not just as they want to put up 13 turbines in my view but the more research I do into them the more I hate the things. I can just hear my Mom saying you shouldn't hate anything, and she is quite right too, my Mom is always right. Ok that bit of sucking up done what else is news? Ehh I'm limping around fine style in the boot, it is the same as the one below

 

The wee blue button is to inflate the thing after you do up all the straps. Mine has a 2cm wedge in the heel for the moment probably to keep weight off the tendon so when I walk all the weight seems to be on my heel which gets sore after a while and because of the month off my feet the old legs get weary too but I dare say the muscle will come back quick enough now I'm walking again. When I take the boot off the tendon feels fine and I can move my foot almost as much as the good one, so I am tempted to throw the boot in the bog and go running around it in my kilt whooping but I shan't for another four weeks.

Eircom still haven't looked at my telephone line, nothing new there as this is Ireland, so I am still using a pay as you go dongle for internet access, means no Skype no land line and very slow internet but I shouldn't complain, ohh yes you should the squeaky wheel gets the oil boyo, I wont complain but I will ask for a discount on line rental etc for the time I have no line, that seems only fair.

Scotland play Ireland at rugby this weekend, it is always a big ask coming here and winning but good luck to the boys I might even dorn the kilt and rugby top and go down to the village to watch it, where is my tartan cap and fake red hair?

I can walk I can walk wooopee

Had the ballerina type cast taken off today and was fitted with a boot :) so the wheelchair has gone and I can get around good at last. Being able to put the foot on the ground is great and I have a support bandage on the left knee to help support it. The right leg is about 3 cm longer than the left one so I have a real wobble but that's kewl.

We had another storm last night but no more trees came down thankfully, was torrential rain last night and at times today.

I see in the news that China's Jade Rabbit Moon rover is in trouble after experiencing a "mechanical control abnormality", state media report, we encountered a Galway Woman driver at a traffic lights in the city that was experiencing her own wee "mechanical control abnormality" as she jumped a red light and cut in front of the traffic. I got a lecture about picking on the Irish from my brother in law but I,m going to continue in the same vein and say they must be amongst the worst drivers in the world, road markings here are a waste of paint.

 I can walk wooohoo, in fact I'm going to walk right now.

some pics of the rebuilt wall

I managed to hop up to the gate and Angie pushed me over the cattle grid in the wheelchair and up the road to view progress, was the most fun I have had in weeks. They have rebuilt the wall along the roadside and put a bit of a fence up and done the wall where the trees had knocked it down. The bit where the trees were down will look nice when I finish with landscaping it.

 

Some logs going to Michael's firewood pile, he probably ended up with about 20 tons of wood.

The nearly cleared North side with rebuilt wall.

 

Michael and one of his boys, they are 9 years old and great workers. They were wanting to get off school the other day to come up logging.

 

The roadside with rebuilt wall and new bit of fence.

 

I will need to invest in a wood splitter down the track and am thinking of making a lean to at the shed to store all the wood under.

 

Hospital checkup

Well today was my bi annual heart checkup and ICD scan and it all went well, had to travel the length of the hospital right enough which was a good workout in the wheelchair, I got a hand off a guy at one point when I was going up this long ramp, on foot you would probably have hardly noticed it but in a wheelchair its like Snowdonia.

Next Monday I am back in so they can change my cast to one where the foot is at a more normal angle at the moment its like a ballerina with toes pointing down, sounds funny ehh Rob the ballerina lol well you try wearing the wife's stilettoes with the heel broken off them for 3 weeks solid and get back to me. I have this longing to straighten my foot that comes in waves but hey what can you do.

The roof repairs are finally finished and there are two guys rebuilding the wall that was knocked down by the dozen trees that fell at the North end of the garden, the trees have been chopped into 25ft lengths and towed to the roadside by an excavator no doubt they will be taking them away soon. There is another bit of wall out the front the guys are going to spend a day on too and a bit of fence to go up. Cant wait to get back out there with the chainsaw reving its wee heart out, sawdust flying, dogs scattering and padded bra and high heels oops I,m a lumberjack and I don't care.

Dry sunny day lends itself to roof pointing

The is a guy here today to point the gable end and an excavator coming to pull the trees that have been prepared off the bog to the roadside to be chopped up for firewood. We have put in a claim for repairing the wall the trees fell over as well as the roof and have fingers, eyes, legs and arms crossed that they will pay up or we will not be holidaying in Barbados this year, actually we weren't going to Barbados anyway lol but it sounded nice. I saw on the news some poor guy was killed defending his yacht against robbers in St Lucia hopefully they will catch the killers.

Gus is desperate to get out to go play with the chainsaw as he was allowed out all weekend to do just that but Michael had a few folks with him to help and they were watching the dog, I know myself that if he is with me when I am felling trees I have to keep a really keen eye on him that he doesn't get squashed and it is a pain.

I am going stir crazy stuck inside and really feel for people who have to spend their lives in wheel chairs, I wonder if there is someplace I could volunteer to drive people who have trouble getting out to the shops etc. That will give me something to do researching that.

what a waste of time !!!

Well yesterday Angie took the day off to drive me in to the hospital, I was all set to have an xray or scan to see if the tendon was healing and the appointment was for 0945, got there and waited till 1230 to be seen, which I hate (why give someone an appointment time if you have no intention of meeting it) its just downright rude. Then a student DR looked at my chart and asked me how my heart was, grrrrrrrrrr I explained to him that stress was bad for it but it was actually my ripped tendon I was attending the clinic for. Get this he didn't even look at my foot to see if it was a nice blue colour or anything just went running off to his boss for instructions and came back with the news that I should come back in 2 weeks and have a new cast put on with a different foot angle. What a waste of a day. What a waste of hospital resources What a waste of, well whatever, you get my jist.

Its a wet day here again and the lawn is flooded were a drain is blocked I would love to be down there up to my erse in freezing water unblocking it but it would mean crawling so I guess it can remain flooded. Spending today watching Photoshop tutorials online and learning a lot, the information has the chance of being memorized but I doubt I will remember that never mind the tutorials.

A & E overcrowding

On the news lately the NHS A and E departments are being shown as massively understaffed and overcrowded. I'm no expert in this field but have spent 11 hours recently doing the corridor shuffle on a trolley ( poor nurses that had to push me around) and 6 hours in a bed after I had been treated and passed clear to return home, my experience, I think can be put down to bad time management.

The delay being initially seen by an orthopaedic DR was due to their being in surgery, there were two procedures in the operating theatre that day but instead of checking out what the queue was like  in A & E after the first one, they must have got scrubbed up again for the second one instead. The head nurse in A & E had looked at my injury and properly diagnosed it early in the piece. They decided to keep me in hospital but it was 10 pm before a bed came available.

The next morning a specialist saw me before 9am and a cast put on before 10am and I was passed free to leave after the physio had shown me how to use the crutches, myself and the bloke in the bed opposite didn't vacate the beds until after 3 pm so that was 2 beds that could have been made available 5 hours earlier than they were as the physio didn't appear.

I think the staff in the hospital do a wonderful job but nurses pushing around trollies, like they had to when I was there doesn't make sense, if they had a good manager and better procedures for bed allocation and vacation the whole A & E system would be freed up to work more effectively.

Rant over. The builders are rained off today but have started to reassemble the job, hopefully there are no winds over the weekend as it is Monday before they are back. Angie gets home around lunchtime from the UK and she is off until Tuesday as she is running me into the hospital on Monday I think.