Tuesday, May 8, 2007

Bread and Sky (2 kinds)

John made bread yesterday - he added caraway and poppy seeds, which was REALLY yummy. James and I made a box of American Betty Crocker brownies from the airbase, which went down very well. Here's the aftermath of all that baking:


It was really showery yesterday, and at one point in the late afternoon the sky was really dark and rainy on one side of the house, with the sun shining brightly on the other side.


And I even caught the rainbow:


I'm a sucker for rainbows, and they happen all the time in the UK because the weather changes so fast!

So the OTHER 'sky' in the title is Sky TV. For the Yanks, nobody here has 'cable'...you either have an aerial or you have satellite TV. Sky is essentially the only satellite provider, which is a bit of a bother. We ordered their cheapest, off the grid plan (all we REALLY want is BBC2 and the odd football/tennis match and dog show - and the TV is v. snazzy and we love it - thanks mom and dad!), and when the guy came to hook up the dish, he couldn't. Basically, they're only insured to drill through external walls. And as our TV isn't on an external wall he suggested we move it. We then pointed out that there was a TV point on the wall behind where the TV is. He looked at it and said that we'd have to hire an 'independent' (i.e. not Sky) to install, as he'd need to go into our loft space to hook up the already existing and perfectly functional except that it needs to be connected to a dish satellite plug. BAH. So now Sky are refunding our £ - hopefully - and we have to pay MORE money than we'd originally paid Sky to get the thing hooked up in the loft. So the fancy-pants pre-wiring of the TV that the builders did ends up costing us extra. Go figure. And it's going to be at least another week before they can hook it up.

My mother has a theory that everything that's done in England has to be done at least twice...it's shaping up to be true (although I haven't had the best of luck with Verizon/Cablevision/TimeWarner etc in NYC either...)

Thoughts, moral support, and invitations to come over and watch TV would be appreciated. :)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh it is so frustrating isn't it? We live in an old house... everything is updated and basically new, but whenever we have someone in to do anykind of work (cable etcl) , they always start with... ah...not sure if we can do that...and then after a bit of sweet talking we can finally get them to do what we are paying them to do.

Anonymous said...

Hang in there, Kate. At the end of the day you'll get what you want, the way you want it, it just takes a little longer...

Check out the Daily Show web site tonight for Jon Stewart's take on the QE2 visit to visit GWB. Pretty funny, or sad, depending on your viewpoint.

Love,

Dad.