1986 © P.J.Croft

Crumbs, I’m getting jumpy.

Last night while watching TV I heard a loud crash from the back end of the house. I’ve been a bit nervous about someone jumping the back fence and attacking my back door. It’s only a sliding glass door. This sounded like it.

I didn’t immediately get up, but I realised it was a book shelf in one of the bedrooms had broken away from the wall. There are these shelves that appear to have no supports – they have rods driven into the wall and the shelf slides onto the rods. I’d put a load of books up on one, but it seems they don’t support many books, hence now they’re all over the floor.

Now, at 1145am, I heard another knock on the door – just two quick, polite knocks. It was so clear that I got up and answered the knock. No-one there!

I forgot to mention – there was also a loud crash yesterday afternoon from the patio area. It sounded really bad and I immediately went to investigate. It turned out it came from next door. We’re only 3m or so apart.

PS: Later – I took the shelf down and found it should have easily supported the books, if it had been put up properly. It uses a substantial steel “frame” screwed to the wall with four screws. But whoever put it up drilled the holes in the brickwork too large for the green wall plugs. As soon as any weight was put on it, the plugs pulled out.

This is easily fixed. I just use the next size of wall plug and screw the bracket on again with heavier screws. But there are six of these shelves, four in one bedroom and two in another. I’ll have to check the others now. Bugger.

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I saw the doctor yesterday about Actos, among other things. She wasn’t aware of the severe side effects or the US class action, but she knew about Avandia (another glitazone class drug) and how that was banned in Australia, so was very receptive to me stopping Actos immediately, which I’ve done. No substitute. We’ll see what my next HbA1c is in three months, then decide.

That makes two drugs I’ve had to stop recently. The other was the diuretic Frusemide. Diaorrhea! Yes, listed as one of the side effects. It didn’t show up immediately, but was terrible recently until I realised what was causing it.

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I’ve just bought myself a present to cheer myself up (yes, the first lot of pills were definitely not working, so I’ve gone back to the ones I used to use).

Doing as much driving as I am now, I want to listen to DAB+ radio in the car. But I don’t want to lose AM radio because DAB+ isn’t available everywhere. Up to now, DAB+ car radios were rare, and they usually sacrificed the AM band to make it DAB and FM only. No good to me.

But now I’ve found Kenwood make a DAB+/FM/AM/CD player car stereo. That’s what I want! So I’ve ordered one from Ryda.com, that mob in Sydney who gave me good service for my phone order. $198, a reasonable price I feel. I’ve had to add $30 for the wiring plug assembly and another $9.95 for postage. Fair enough.

Now I hope to be able to get my car’s dashboard back to proper shape. I’ve had a double height unit in there, and it doesn’t fit properly, so the dash is a mess. This should be a lot neater.