Cut off from the world

Frustrations seem to add up, once they get started!

Since I've moved into my new house - six weeks ago - I've been trying (very hard!) to get a phone line installed, and the internet set up. I am a patient person, and understand that these things "take time" and am happy to wait whilst cogs whirl away behind the scenes with telecommunication companies.

So - to sum up,  so far  - I have rung one telecom company (a colour!) who said they couldn't set up the internet for me, as they couldn't take over the line so I had to contact another telecom company who I could rent the line from, on a monthly basis, and when I had done that, the other company would take it over...

I did that, and had to wait 10 working days for that to be set up.

Then, when it SHOULD have been set up, there was a problem on the line, and I had to wait for an engineer to come out, to sort it out. This took six days. It seemed to work at that point.....

Then, I rang the new telecomunications company (not the first one, as I want fibre optic internet, as its the only way to get a decent internet connection at this address). They took my details and told me that it would be another ten days (on top of the original ten days wait) to set it up.

The date was arranged. For yesterday.

I waited in for the five hours alloted for the internet engineer to arrive. He didn't come. I rang the company to find out WHY he hadn't come, when they had sent the equipment he was to install two days beforehand. This took a whole HOUR on the fucking phone, and three people, to tell me that the order had been cancelled. Oh, Really? WHO BY????!!!!! (not by me, and not by the telephone company!). How can it be that a third party can cancel my internet connection? I don't get this!!!!

To set it up again, will take, wait for it, SEVENTEEN more fucking days!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And, they're looking into it. Too bloody right, they are!!!!

And, just to add to the frustrations of the saga. The phone only works to ring OUT, and will only ring ONCE on incoming calls so if I don't answer in one frantic lunge on the first ring, it gets cut off! So, no one can leave a message on the answer phone.

And just whilst I'm having a whinge on this subject, the mobile signal is intermittent at the house, so I have to be on the upper floors to make and receive calls - not on the ground floor at all. So, when I rang the telecom company today to report the fault on the line, I had to explain ALL of the above first, so that they understood my problems. Her response was for me to take a screwdriver, remove the cover on the phone socket and check if the various phones within the house work there. Ok, but in doing it, the whole part of the phone socket came away in various pieces, and part of it is now buckled. (and I am a practical person who is used to using screwdrivers!)  So, now an engineer has to come out to check what the problem is - and if the fault is within the house, then I've got to pay £129 for it to be rectified!!!! Including, mending the broken phone socket - BUT IT ONLY GOT BROKEN BECAUSE I DID WHAT YOU TOLD ME TO DO !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Fucking frustation!!!!!!!!!!!

(Count to ten. Count again.)

So, to sum up:

After six weeks of being in the house, I have half a mobile signal, a broken phone that rings out, and only in on one ring for anyone ringing me, no internet, various bits of equipment that don't work, and a huge feeling of being cut off from the world!!!! I can only use the internet at other peoples houses......

There's a lot to be said for carrier pigeons.........................

Re-connecting

I'm still waiting patiently for my internet to be set up at the new house, so am having to blog where I can, on other computers. Not an ideal situation, but one I can work around, until I'm set up. At least I've got a landline now, althought that was a farce in the background to set that up! Having spent 26 minutes on the phone last week trying to get through to someone (well, three "someones" actually!) to be told that my details were wrong, and they wouldn't speak to me unless I gave them my reference number (which I hadn't got on me, as I wasn't at home, and hadn't expected to speak to them on that day, else I'd have taken the reference number with me!). Only to be told, when I'd given them my name, address, date of birth and new phone number, that the details I had given them were wrong. "No they're not". "Yes, you've got the birth date wrong".  Sigh. "No I haven't". "Well, its not what we've got written down here". "Well you've got it wrong, not me". "Well, you can't give us the date written down here, so we won't speak to you". "BUT, YOU'VE GOT IT WRONG, NOT ME!!!! Like you got my title wrong, my address incomplete, and now my date of birth you've got wrong, too!!!!" "Well. we still won't speak to you....." I put the phone down in complete and utter frustrated anger. Idiots!!!!!!!!!!!

So,the next day, when the phone engineer arrived on the doorstep to set up the landline, he was a very welcome sight! I told him about the conversation I'd had with the service provider and he said he couldn't understand why it takes ten working days for anything to happen regarding changing lines, putting lines in, putting the internet in, or setting up the internet, and his summing up of it was "admin!" - so due to even more "admin" I'm having to wait another fortnight for internet connection...............

But, all of that waiting for phone lines being installed was over shadowed by a conversation I had yesterday with a painter and decorator. He was doing some decorating work at a house I was visiting, where my artwork was hanging on the wall. He knew that I had painted it, and he raved over it - the colours, the light, the subject matter. I thanked him, and had a big cheesy grin on my face as we talked, and I got more and more animated as I descibed other artwork I'd done - of portraits of  much beloved and much missed people for grieving families, soulful pets, special scenes, erotic art (to which he responded, "If any man tells you he's not interested in erotic art, he's lying!" which brought a bigger grin to my face!), the fantasy fannies, abstracts, surreal art, camouflage art with hidden messages, and erotic landscapes. His eyes widened with every description, and he said he'd look at my website with great interest. And as I got all fired up with the telling of what I'd achieved, I realised how much I've missed it this last year, whilst I've been sorting out my life, and finding somewhere new to live, and setting up my new house and studio. I can't wait to fire my passions up again, and find new artworks to paint, new commissions to enliven peoples lives with, new galleries to hang my work, new places to sell my pictures.

And more people to tell, about what I do, and what I can do for them.

Blogging's difficult when you haven't got a computer, let alone internet access!

Well, the title says it all, really. And I'm still not sure when I shall be getting my internet access, or even my landline at the new address. Why are these things difficult? The people who lived in the house before me had a landline, and internet access. But it doesn't just "sit" there waiting to be picked up, as far as I can tell...... Perhaps I was being overly optimistic, or maybe naive, in the belief that I would just ring up someone on my mobile and they would attach my debit card to their phoneline (or however else they get you to pay, blood sweat and tears?) and - as if by magic - the phone would work. But no, it's not that simple (it never is!). I have had to ring up the new provider, who tells me that they can't find the line (well, it was there last week, where has it gone since then?!) so I have to ring up the Post Office to get a line set up by them, so then the new provider can take it off them. Which certainly begs the question, in my mind, as to why they couldn't have done that themselves in the first place! But, they can't. So, there's a ten working day delay whilst they do all of this (bearing in mind that the line was there for thre previous people only a few days before all of this!). And added to this will be the new telephone provider having to wave their magic telephone wands to enable them to do their telecommunacative stuff (so I'm not getting my hopes up regarding all of that happening at breakneck speed in nanoseconds after I ring them up!).

There's a lot to be said for carrier pigeons................

Anyway, in the meantime, there are still a multitude of jobs to be done in setting up the house. Somewhere to paint pictures, would be nice! And an office to work from (even if it does have a big gap where the computer should be until I can move it there). So, to that end, I've been hunting for furniture. And found some, quite amazingly! But, the multitude of boxes that are currently residing in the office-to-be will have to be moved to the hall, and then all moved back in again after the furniture has been set up....... so that'll keep me busy for a while!

But, it was great to go to the art workshop last Saturday and see all my arty friends again after the summer break. Good to catch up with their news, and to see their faces again, and to join them in the great creative outpourings that make up for these days!

I've missed it.

And loved getting back into the swing of it again. It was about inks and being creative with them - and the tutor certainly made sure we were kept busy all day with it. We did three paintings in the six hours we were there - all with different ways of working with inks - the first was painting with Quink ink - which has some strange chemical properties that means when its painted onto wet watercolour paper, where it is deep black it stays deep black, but where it is painted thinly, it dries golden yellow, to great effect if you can plan what you want to paint with it, and how you want it to turn out....we did a black yacht silhouetted on a lake, with forebidding black clouds above which really looked great with the yellow effect adding to the atmosphere of the clouds and thundery sky.

The second painting was done drawing black ink pen onto watercolour paper, this image of a French courtyard garden, with many pretty flowers and a variety of shapes and textures of foliage. After drawing the image out, we painted the colours with watercolours - a pretty way of painting, and very effective for the subject matter.

But the third picture we did was my favourite - it was done by drawing out an image of a stone cottage (and for us each to decide whether it was creamy Cotswold stone, bleak Scottish stone, whitewashed Welsh stone, or mellow Mediteranean stone) and then we used a mix of watercolours, acrylic inks, heavy black Indian ink, using various effects that incorporated candle wax (to make a wax resist pattern), or using straws to blow the paint and ink around, splattering, tilting the paper to move the paint around, using different implements to make marks, or even as a last resort, to just paint with a brush - whatever came to mind was fine, and added to the overall effect.

Which makes me wonder about the conversation I had earlier with my friend across the seas, who went to an artshow at the weekend, and sent me some photos of his visit - all nice to see, very familiar, and certainly interesting. But, the most surprising image that stuck most in my mind, was the one of the pastel painting being completed by a woman. She was copying a photo of a man on a bike in a street scene – but for me the surprising thing was that she hadn’t done any under-painting – which is so familiar for me to see, particularly with pastels. She was just painting the colour on the white paper and working down the length of the paper starting at the top. That’s really odd! Because the white paper looks so stark next to the colour that your eyes “read” it differently, so its normal for an artist to do an underpainting of colour (which may be muted tones of the top colour, or a contrasting colour to give the top colour some zizz through colour mixing on the paper). Very strange! She wasn’t “painting” the picture from the photo – she was COPYING it. And doing it in an amateurish way – as you could see by the straight line of diagonal leaves on the edge of the tree to the left of the painting. How odd!

And how different from the day I spent at the weekend, being encouraged to be so creative, that anything was acceptable. So long as it was arty!  And inky!

Yep, black fingers again.....