My life is filled with reading reviewing, writing and of course home educating my son. As a result it's been difficult to get much time to just relax.
That said I don't mind too much, I find I feel better about myself at the end of the day when I known I've worked hard and I am also privledge to be doing things I love, when it comes to work.
It's people like my hubby I feel sorry for, who have to go out and do a job that is hard work and in no way fun, especially when it is outdoors in all kinds of horrible weather.
What free time I have had, I've spend doodling in my bullet journal and planner, or fretting about my sisters upcoming wedding, this weekend. (Congratulations Tasha.)
Some of you may have seen my plea for help regarding whether or not I should try to attend her wedding. Naturally she wants her whole family there on the day. My anxiety disorder makes gatherings, like weddings, impossible for me to attend and so as much as I would like to go, I just don't feel I've got my anxiety under control enough at this point.
I will of course be thinking of her and hope that she has an amazing day, which I'm sure she will. Weddings can be tricky things especially as you are often gathering together a lot of relatives that aren't particularly fond of each other.
I know Tash will have a few like that their tomorrow, but I am sure they will all behave for her sake. You see Tasha is one of the more sensible, well rounded members of our family. She has certainly always been an inspiration to me, because she has always been incredibly determined, ambitious and sure of what she wants in life and has worked really hard to achieve that. Which is why, if anyone deserves a great day on their wedding day, it's her.
My husband is also a very well rounded person. Sometimes he is so quite, not the biggest conversationalist, but insanely smart. He made me a cute mini bowl and plate at the weekend as well as a little case, that I am going to paint when I get the chance. He made them out of wood on his lathe and it amazes me the things he can do on that machine, but he is not just clever with his hand, he's one of those people that never seems to put his foot in his mouth and doesn't really react to people's idiocy. Just rises above it. I wish I had his skills lol.
You may remember me mentioning that Dan accidentally broke my iPad last week. Oh the despair! Thankfully, this highlights another upside to having a handy husband. My iPad is now fixed, (I'm actually using it to type this post,) and like new. Now, Dan fixed it himself, meaning we only had to pay for the parts and not labour. What shocked me, was the discovery, through one of the forums I like to frequent, that others who had broken the LCD screen on their iPads, had either paid a small fortune to get it repaired, or just binned it!
BINNED IT!
I mean, that's a 400 odd quid piece of kit, New. It's not a cheap item to replace. So, why in the hell would you just bin it when it can be fix. Especially, when there are YouTube videos that talk you through it. Okay, so not everyone is confident to have a go at fixing something like an IPad, but surely if your already thinking just bin it and get new, it's gotta be worth a try, getting it fixed.
For a new LCD screen and glass screen, my hubby paid about £50. That came with all the tools you need to do the job, bar your heat source, which can come from something as basic as a hairdryer, which most people have anyway and if not you can always grab one from Argos for as little as £7.99.
(I know because believe it or not we don't have a hair dryer, I've heard bad things about them drying out your hair and slowly wrecking it over time and so I much prefer to towel dry.)
It wasn't an easy job by any means getting the glass screen off was really tough and ours actually shattered in the process, but it was only about £10 pound to replace that. Our final bill would have only been around £40 if it wasn't for that.
At any rate, the point I am trying to make here, is that we seem to have turned into a throw away society. When it used to be a case of if it break fix it, now we don't even try and instead just fork out 400 quid when we could have just paid £50 or maybe a little more if hiring someone to do it for you.
Companies of course don't want you to fix things and often make it quite tough to do so, but that doesn't mean things can't be fixed and YouTube is a great place to find instructional videos teaching you how.
Laptops in particular, tend to be something most people end up replacing a lot, and I actually have a handy tip for you here. I used to go through a laptop every 2 to 3 years. They would just suddenly start over heating, keep shutting down without warning and eventually stop working altogether.
I was lucky to talk to a guy who specialises in fixing laptops, and one who was very honest with me, which to be fair they normally tend not to be, because there job is fixing them and they don't really want to lose their business, but this guy was a friend and also retired, so filled me in.
Every laptop will suck in dust overtime, I think most of us know that, and the more dust, pet hair and junk they suck in the harder the fans have to work to cool your laptop down until eventually, no matter how hard your fans work they just aren't up to the task, it's all just to clogged and the over heating happens.
Now if you don't deal with this problem and just keep using your laptop eventually it will get all burned up and be scrap. Unless someone's willing to put in a new motherboard or something. (Hey! I'm not an expert.)
The companies who make laptops, they want this to happen, because of course they want your business so if you throw your laptop out, maybe you'll come buy another from them, but this doesn't need to happen, you see there are two things you can do to save your laptop.
The first is to clear it of dust regularly. I was recommended to do this every six months, but tend to do it once a year. You can get someone to do this for you for not all that much, as it's simply a case of getting all the dust and crud out. My hubby does this for me and if you have a handy hubby the. Utilise them and save yourself some pennies, because if you can do this yourself, it will cost nothing.
The second thing, that most people don't know is that there is something called heat sync gel or thermal paste, that is applied to your CPU by the manufactorers of laptops when they are built. Now here's the sneaky part. This stuff helps to stop your computer overheating. (you're not gonna get all the technical info here, I'm not a computer whizz, but it is easy to find it you search YouTube, this is just the basics that I was told.) now, manufactures will purposely put this stuff on pretty sparingly, as well as not using very good quality stuff, because they want the computer to have a shorter life span, by all accounts. Overtime this stuff starts drying out and causes overheating if the laptop, but, if when you clean your laptop out you check this gel and find it has dried out, you can actually buy more thermal paste/heat sync gel and clean of the old and apply new, thus extending the life of your laptop for another few years.
Since learning this trick, which my husband has only had to do once so far, where as he's cleaned my laptop out loads, my current laptop has not only outlived all my others by several years, but still runs like it did when new, no problems at all. So yeah, don't fork out a small fortune for a new laptop every few years, get some one to clean it out and re-apply the gel/paste as and when needed. It really is the best laptop tip I've ever had and even if you are hiring someone to do it for you, it's way cheaper than a whole new laptop and a lot less hassle and stress. I hate trying to transfer all my stuff.
Any who, got a little of topic there, but hey hoe, it's my blog and I'll ramble if I want to. :) might as well as there hasn't been a whole lot going on this week. :)
So what about you, how have your weeks been? Is there anything you are looking forward to doing this weekend or perhaps dreading? Let me know in the comments.
That's it from me for now, I haven't got time to take any pictures at the mo and post them up but if I get some time later I might pop back and dot some pictures around of my doodles from my bullet journal. There not great but they brighten it up a bit and make me smile when I look back through my journals at a later date.
Do you keep a bullet journal, or some other record of life? If so what?
I may even include a snap of my dodo pad, where I doodle in pictures to represent the books I've read each week. It's works as a nice visial reminder, especially when I am drawing some of the really cute kid book characters.
Well love and hugs all
And have a great weekend
Joss xx
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