This week

It's been a free but technically fairly dead week. When the rain finally stopped I managed to do the worst of the gardening and do a bit of shopping. Doing this highlights what a trivial lot of stuff can be done in an average week in Kingsbury. My cheap (not so...) and nasty Casio resin watchstrap went west after a couple of years, and I thought it would be a chance to get a brighter coloured one. Bad idea. I was told only Casio could do this, but the firm's own service department a mile away refused to look for a coloured strap as it didn't 'fit my watch'.
I have checked online and found at least three. Sadly these buggers are charging double the Casio official price (which is itself double the market price) so now I've got to go back to Casio and specify the one I want and hope they'll play ball.
The woman I babysat for had plenty of time to call me, so I can screw that one up and chuck it in the fire (big deal). The chicken counting proverb shows very well here as throughout my life I've had starts, but very few finishes. Sometimes I have no starts, and a finish can happen on its own with no warning, which is always nice. But I'll never celebrate (like buying a house or having a baby) till the egg is hatched. But I'm aware they exist and don't mind mentioning them if worth it.
There is a new egg, but newly laid and too sensitive for here, just to say it's a lot more exciting than contacting an old customer from Finchley who hardly knew I existed.

And just to say NTL are the cheapest company on earth, who raise their prices by around 50%, and supply no services beyond the bare minimum, in fact I have far less (like teletext and TV games) than I had 9 years ago, and that's basically how they just admitted it is. If I can get the phone rental reduced (they claim there isn't one to force us to keep TV and phone together, but I may get blood out of the stone) I hate to say it, but I'm back to BT. The call charges are ghastly, but I can use other piggy-back firms for them, and consider the extra rental a trade off for the far cheaper monthly fee for internet access than NTL. Though a year ago NTL were the cheapest in the country, as they raised the price I can virtually go anywhere for less now, and get it on broadband, which should be fun.