Another interesting day - and a reminder

The reminder first, to the person who hooked my twitter and blog up to his jobs feed: I'm off the clock here. Here's a hint: I don't talk about sacrificial ritual, horror, steam engines, aircraft, writing articles, games or publishing at work - I get paid to do work, not fun. Don't expect me to talk security, network set up, user experience or browser issues on here or twitter - I don't work for free. My Twitter doesn't have my name and isn't linked to my email to avoid this conflict of interest, so congratulations on your detective work: it got you blocked and reported, as did your Facebook spam (By the way, I'm not on it).

I would have been less annoyed, but today has not been good.

The boiler's fixed, despite the cats frantically trying to get into the cupboard or up the loft ladder, or investigate the plumbing equipment. Once they started double teaming me I ended up shutting them outside - quite tricky since one can open doors.

Flat buyer discovered that, while my husband may be the type to let him bring his own plumber into the flat unsupervised to perform a "check" I am not. I am not being awkward for the sake of it: one of the easiest scams in the world is for someone with a tame plumber to get them to hit a couple of valves with a wrench and claim it needs repair. It costs them nothing since either the seller repairs it, or the seller knocks the "repair cost" they quote off the price. If the seller pulls out, the buyer looses nothing. I don't think this was the buyer's intent or we would not be proceeding with the sale, but it's an easy one to fall prey to so I am taking the line that his plumber gets access to the flat once he's bought it, not before.

My suggestion was that the estate agent finds a "neutral" third party and accompany them into the flat to perform the checks, while we split the cost. The buyer's request for one check has already been dropped, so now it hinges on the second.

Wedding aniversary coming up and no ideas whatsoever what to do, since all my efforts have been tied up in resolving the above issues.

And finally preorders for the book are slowly picking up. Every time I wonder if I did the right thing, that simple fact makes it clear I did, as did the fact that my existing article royalties can pay the bills.