Ireland day 0146. Monday 21 February 2022- Repairs

Ireland day 0146. Monday 21 February 2022- Repairs
Today’s summary Spent most of the morning cleaning and tidying in advance of the arrival of our visitors tomorrow, then trying to fix all the things that serially broke during the day.   Walk down the coast in the evening
Today’s weather Mostly dry and quite bright, especially in the morning, but a few drops of rain in the evening.   Light wind.   About 8C
Today’s overview location
(the red cross in a circle shows where Val and I are at the moment)
Close-up location
(Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected):
Evening Robswall and shops
Commentary

We have visitors coming to stay for a few days this week, and they arrive tomorrow morning.   So obviously, in anticipation of their arrival, today the toilet broke, the tumble dryer packed up, and I almost managed to set fire to the kitchen.   But I did see some nice flowers, so I have put a photograph of them in the banner image at the top of the blog, just in case you need cheering up after reading about today’s somewhat erratic series of events.

Things started to come off the rails as soon as I got up.   This just reinforced in my mind the notion that getting up early in the mornings is generally not a good thing.   But nevertheless, I was up bright and early (well neither of those things but you get the idea) and enthusiastically decided to make some porridge to fire us up for the day.  Unfortunately, “fire” is rather too literal a description of what happened.   Because unknown to me, my treasured Supervalu card had stuck itself to the bottom of the porridge pan so when I put it on the hob, it started to melt.

I didn’t really take much notice of the peculiar smell – my cooking often involves odd aromas – until Val rather panic stricken observed that she thought something was on fire.  At that point I finally twigged that something was not right and managed to remove the porridge pan from the hob before the molten card welded it there permanently.   It just left a charred smouldering deposit of bubbling plastic which I later had to remove with a chisel.   (The porridge was OK you will be relieved to know – I finished it off in the microwave).

Poor Val was having a rather hard time of it in the panic department this morning because shortly after the porridge crisis had been averted, she rather shakily observed that “I think something is wrong with the toilet”.   The symptom was that gallons of water were flushing continuously through the system – seemingly bypassing the flushing mechanism and going straight from the mains water supply into the toilet itself.   I was at a bit of a loss to know what to do about it so, clutching at straws a bit, I poked the flush button a few times and wiggled it around – but nothing seemed to interrupt the flow.

Given that this was a bit of a crisis, I decided to investigate further and to pull the flush panel off the bathroom wall.  (Don’t you just hate these built in bathroom appliances by the way?   I think they should be avoided at all costs).   Even with the panel removed I could barely see the tank inside but by poking and prodding a few things I managed to stop the flow of the mains into the tank.   I couldn’t stop the water flowing straight out of the tank into the toilet, though.

Eventually I found I could permanently stop the inflow by shoving a tube of toothpaste into the valve mechanism but gave up on trying to resolve the actual flush system itself.  So there then followed three phone calls and four text messages to the property management company, who eventually agreed to send an engineer to look at it.   After waiting in patiently for five hours, he eventually turned up, couldn’t fix it, and said we would just have to wait for someone else to come tomorrow.   Sigh.  A bit of a wasted day.  But luckily we have another toilet we can use, so we won’t have to ask our guests to use the garden.

But the day wasn’t done with us yet.   We needed to wash sheets, towels and some clothes before tomorrow, so everything duly went into the washing machine – which has an integrated dryer thing.   Unfortunately the integrated dryer thing failed to do its integrated drying and everything came out wringing wet.   Try and I  might, I simply couldn’t make the wretched machine do anything other than spin around half-heartedly a few times, then simply give up and stop.   So now our evening is being spent in what appears to be a Chinese laundry, with wet clothes, sheets and towels draped over radiators, racks and seats while the condensation streams down the windows like an indoor Niagara – all in a desperate attempt to get everything dry before the morning.

At that point I decided to stop trying to do anything that involved electricity or mechanical devices, so went shopping.   Once that particular joy was despatched, Val agreed to accompany me on an evening walk around the harbour – probably actually more because she wanted to escape the steamy conditions in the living room, than because she valued my irascible company tonight.   Anyway, we’re back now and I have cheered up a bit.   So I can at last start properly looking forward to our first ever guests’ arrival, while I keep my fingers firmly crossed that nothing else goes wrong before they get here.   Please keep us  in your thoughts and prayers this evening.

 

(The next few days’ blogs will be shorter than usual as I am hoping to spend the evenings with our friends rather than typing into a computer!)

 

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)

Burnt offering.   This is what happens when you put a store loyalty card on the hob underneath your pan when you are making porridge for breakfast Left hung out to dry.   This is what happens when your tumble dryer breaks down
Busted flush.   This is what happens when your flush is – well – busted Escaped at last.   Malahide town centre by night
Down on the promenade by the beach this evening.   The tide was well out This ghostly looking ruined ship was actually just a children’s’ playground but I thought the backlighting from the adjoining sports club made it look rather dramatic
This ghostly looking ruined ship is, on the other hand, a ghostly looking ruined ship.   It had been floating around un-moored and like an unguided missile in the harbour since Dudley struck last week, to the evident concern of the owners of the smart boats in the marina.   It looks like someone has managed to drag it to shore – or it beached itself – before it could do any actual damage.   Nobody seems to know who it belongs to.   Would suit keen a DIY enthusiast perhaps.
Interactive map

(Elevations corrected at  GPS Visualizer: Assign DEM elevation data to coordinates )

Total distance: 10276 m
Max elevation: 50 m
Min elevation: 1 m
Total climbing: 148 m
Total descent: -151 m
Total time: 02:19:47
Download file: Evening Shopping and Robswall corrected.gpx

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