DIY on a public holiday is something akin to a Great British tradition. Unfortunately, my DIY skills can best be summed up as being able to move heavy stuff about and do a bit of light destruction.
Fortunately, Deb is great at that sort of thing. As a result, I seem to have spent rather a lot of time lately playing Igor to her mad scientist visionary genius.
On an unusually sunny Bank Holiday Monday recently, The Lady of the House sent me packing out into the back garden with instructions to “tidy it up a bit”.
There followed an afternoon of intensive Chemical Warefare on the weeds ( the one thing I do seem to have a talent for growing) followed by judicious application of mower and strimmer.
Needless to say, the end result resembled less the restoration of verdant sward that she was secretly hoping for and more an example of slash-and-burn agriculture.
Fortunately, the next Bank Holiday isn’t until the end of May.
This gives me some time to continue in my attempts to persuade my better half to move into the 21st century garden-wise.
My argument is that, most people will only ever see our back garden on Google Maps. Provided it looks OK from the satellite view then that’s really what matters.
So, all we need to do is concrete the lawn over then paint the light and dark green stripes in.
This way, rather than constantly cutting the grass, we just need to repaint it once a year or so.
I’ve even offered to paint in some flowerbeds.
Ironically, this argument appears to have fallen on stony ground.
On top of this, the Oracle database has also required me to do a bit of DIY lately. This takes the form of trying to search the text in a column defined as LONG.
You may be wondering what on earth I’m doing with a LONG column. After all, Oracle introduced the CLOB way back in 8i, before the turn of the century. Surely no-one uses LONGs any more ?
Well, almost no-one…except Oracle. Continue reading
