June Is Bustin' Out All Over!

Okay, okay! Another blog post title quiz question. . . Where is this title from? Another musical . . . written by Rogers and Hammerstein. . . It's from their musical 'Carousel.' I actually thought it was from 'Oklahoma!', but after a Goole search, I found out my guess was wrong.

Saturday.7.10 a.m.  Yet another bright and sunny morning. It does seem that June is definitely 'Bustin'' out all over Oldbrook and further afield. Trees in full leaf. Flowers popping up all over the place. Birdies building their nests and fledglings taking their first flight. Goodness knows what else, but things are definitely bustin' out all over!

10.25 a.m. I decided I needed a hand mixer for use with my baking. Something simple, a hand mixer, which would make whisking up cake mix, batter, and other items far quicker and easier. I had a look on the internet, Amazon as a start-off, but so many brands that I haven't heard of, some cheaper than others and some definitely more than I was willing to pay. Then I thought of Argos and the fact I had quite a few Nectar points which I've collected through shopping in Sainsbury's and which I get with having a home contents insurance policy with Sainsbury's Bank. I had a look and then read the reviews of some of those hand mixers, the cheapest not having very good or at least, mixed (sorry about the pun! Just couldn't help it I'm afraid.) one saying it was liable to over-heat, so no good. I expected to pay a bit more, so I found a Kenwood model, a good brand, and supposedly reliable, so I decided on that one and at £22.99 seemingly good value. Multi-speed and you can store it with the whisks disconnected and stand on its flat base. So, it seemed ideal for my kitchen which has limited storage space.

I wanted to pay online and use the Nectar points and buy it through 'Click and Collect,' which I have done with some other items I have bought recently, such as my electric kettle, toaster, and more recently my food processor. It took several attempts to get the website to function and I had to pay 49p with my Debit card as the price of the food mixer was that much more than the number of nectar points would allow. Only possible to use £2.50 worth of points at a time if that makes sense. I eventually got the site to work for me, paid, and then an email to say that I could collect the item after 9 a.m because that was when Argos opened on a Saturday morning.

I needed to go to Lloyd's pharmacy in Sansbury's to collect a ready prescription, Beconase, which my doctor had prescribed when I mentioned the coughing I am experiencing at the moment and discussed during the telephone I had with her on Friday afternoon (I will mention this in the next blog post.) I also needed some shaving gel, because I had reached the end of the current pack and I cannot shave without gel, together with one or two other items. In and out relatively quickly and from there I had intended to drive to Argos, a short trip down Avebury Boulevard, or should have been until I discovered that the road was closed off due to work being done to construct a roundabout and traffic lights on the intersection with Avebury Boulevard and Grafton Street. It took me quite a while to work out a route to Argos, eventually driving further up Child's Way and going 180 degrees round the roundabout on Watling Street and then back towards the city centre and into the turning for Morrisons and through the car parks and park outside Argos. A good 20 minutes wasted in the process and several extra miles are driven somewhat unnecessarily, but I managed to collect the Kenwood hand mixer and return home, having completed the mission. 

later. I had been searching for cardboard bowls. For what purpose? Well, having made those scones I have mentioned in earlier posts, I found what I wanted in Sainsbury's this morning. I am giving them to my neighbours in Dexter House. I am putting the two halves of one scone in each bowl, buttered (actually it's Sainsbury's Olivia spread, but it's about as close to real butter and made of olive oil.) along with a teaspoonful of raspberry jam in an improvised kitchen foil container. I am attempting to be sustainable and environmentally friendly, having my containers fully recyclable wherever possible. My first delivery was to two tenants in the flat below me. I shall continue with further flats as the week progresses.

Now I have the mixer I want to experiment with other recipes. I have done scones before as well as brownies, which I may attempt once again and probably try something slightly more complicated, such as a fruit cake. I've made Victoria sponges, but I will need to buy some new baking tins and I think it's worth buying better quality, made of higher-grade materials because cheap, thin tins rust quickly and don't last as well as better, higher grade tins. It will be worth visiting T.K.Maax or Homesense, which is a subsidiary of T.K.Maax. You can buy some really good quality homeware items in both stores and at great discounts, up to around 60%. Never pay full price on anything if you can get something for a reduced price. 

When Kitchen Gadgets Go Bad

Our toaster is playing up. It's been awkward for some time. You put a piece of bread in it and it takes ages to actually brown the bread sufficiently. You turn up the thing up so it makes a darker colour of the bread, but then it burns. You await the popping of the toast, and it takes what seems an eternity. Sometimes the slices of bread you put in get stuck, which also leads to more incineration. You have to make sure the kitchen door is closed into the hallway, where the smoke detector is (is it a smoke detector? I'm not sure.) If you forget to close the door and you accidentally allow the toaster to burn the bread within it, the alarm goes off with an ear-piercing shriek. I know it's not much use if it's not loud, for example, in the middle of the night, when you are deep in the land of nod, it has to be loud to waken you. But during the day? Alfie will bark. Is it to tell you to sort the gadget out, to stop it shrieking? To stop it, you wave a teatowel or a newspaper under it, to cause a draught which will stop the thing making a noise. Or press the button in the centre of the thing, which is impossible to reach unless you stand on a stool or a chair to reach it. More inconvenience. The toaster will only really work properly if you use slices from a nicely pre-sliced loaf, such as Sunblest. Or Hovis. I prefer the multi-seeded variety. Sliced white is just too processed and mush. If you buy a proper loaf, from a bakers, and then slice it yourself, you have to ensure that the slices are not to thick otherwise they stick in the toaster, leading to more smoke and chaos from the smoke detector thingy in the hall.

We had a microwave oven, which sat on the kitchen work-surface, but it took up a lot of space. It didn't wear very well. It wasn't that old, but it got very rusty inside. I took it to the tidy-tip to be (hopefully) recycled. We didn't use it so much, and to be honest, we don't miss it. The space is more important. If you have a microwave you have to keep it clean. When you get spills it's important to deal with them otherwise it just adds to the decaying process. Also, if you use them to cook meals which have a strong smell, such as curry, this smell tends to linger. You just can't get rid of it. Not pleasant. I think the problem with this particular model was, because it was quite cheap, it wasn't made of very durable materials, hence the fact it rusted quickly, leading to it's demise.

We live in a rented property. There were various electrical items in situ when we moved in, a washing machine, a fridge/freezer and an electric cooker. When it came to replacing the cooker the landlord was reluctant to replace it, but it eventually buy a new one. Unfortunately it didn't last long. The new one wasn't much better. I came down to make tea early one morning and was almost electrocuted by the thing. There were sparks coming out of the electric point where it was wired in. We bought the next one ourselves, when the landlord refused. It didn't wear very well. It rusted badly and the oven gave up so we couldn't cook anything in it. So we bought the latest one through our Very account. It is reasonably good, has a ceramic hob, which the old one had. They are a good deal easier to keep clean than a conventional one as it's a totally flat surface to keep wiped. It does it's job well enough.

The fridge/freezer gave up when it just didn't freeze anymore. We'd been out for the day and came home to find it had defrosted and we lost a lot of food which was in the freezer compartment. We replaced this with one from Very. It has more freezer capacity, an extra drawer than the previous model.

Then we had to replace the washing machine. The old model was a cheap Bush, from Argos. I think I've described in a lot of detail how the landlord got someone he knew, who had absolutely no knowledge about installing washing machines, to fit it in for us. They didn't remove the restraining bolts which held the drum in transit, so when I put it on, when the machine got to 'spin' the machine nearly took off across the kitchen floor. Well, it would, wouldn't it? The drum would have been fixed with those bolts, so no wonder it caused so much damage, not just to the floor, but pulled the pipes out of the wall where it was plumbed in. This caused a lot of water damage, which we had to get repaired. We bought the current washing machine, a Kenwood, which we got from Curry's. A much better machine, which has an economy setting which means you can have a load of laundry done in around 45 minutes. The old machine seemed to take forever to wash a load.

We had an electric kettle which we'd bought in Argos. It went wrong. The lid was opened by pressing a sort of lever, but it stopped functioning, so it made the kettle virtually impossible to use properly. So it became somewhat impossible to use. We took it back and got a replacement, a Russell Hobbs model which has a Brita water filter inside it. You top the kettle up as you would normally, but, because it has a filter in it, the water is purified as it would be in a standard Brita water filter. The kettle has a device on the top which shows how long the filter has been in the kettle (four weeks.). It has a series of four 'bars' which represent the weeks, and when you insert a new filter, you press this device and as the weeks go by, each of the four 'bars' disappears until the last one disappears and you then replace the filer with a new one. The kettle is fine, except it's wearing badly, particularly around the lid. The body of the kettle is made of a plastic substance and it has a blue light within the kettle which shows when the kettle is boiling. This is very useful but really serves no real purpose. It doesn't make the kettle any more efficient. Also, the Maxtra filters are quite expensive and if you forget to replace them, then the filter capability is of no use. I suppose if it does have a purpose it is that it prevents the kettle from furring up with limescale because the water in this area is quite hard and without some sort of treatment things like kettles are soon full of limescale.

We have a coffee machine. One that takes pods. It's a Dolce Gusto. It has worked very well and you can make a range of drinks, mostly coffee. You put a milk pod in first, let the hot water filter through, then a coffee pod, to make latte or cappuccino. The only problem is, the water container is very difficult to clean. It has developed some green algae in it and there's no way you can get a brush in it to clean this gunk off. The plastic tank is just an awkward shape and there seems no way you can clean this out. A poor design fault. A lot of kitchen gadgets seem extremely difficult to clean. I had a food processor. It did it's job well enough, but it was a real fiddle to clean properly. Also, you have the problem with storage. With more and more kitchen appliances, mixers, blenders, processors, coffee makers, where do you store them when they're not in use? Most can obviously be left on the work-surface of your kitchen, but the rest? We have limited space.

My conclusion of all this discussion is that, generally, household appliances are not made to be very robust, and to not have a very long life and need replacing very frequently. Probably we use our kitchen gadgets a fair amount. The microwave wasn't used a great deal, but it soon got extremely rusty which is why it had to be recycled. 

MK Shopping Centre Visit

Carol's mum and dad have been here for a visit today (Wednesday). They came up from Bournemouth and were given a lift from someone from their church, arriving here at about 9.45. We didn't take long to decide where to go for the day, rather than sitting in the house as they have done for the past couple of visits as Carol is feeling far better and thought she needed to get away from the house. It was a choice of going to Stoke Bruerne or the central Milton Keynes Shopping Centre. It was as well we chose the shopping centre because the weather turned out unsettled and cold, although it would have been nice to have visited the canal and museum at Stoke Bruerne and have something to eat in the pub we know there from previous trips.

We drove towards the centre and parked in the multi-storey carpark next to Debenhams and then walked in and down the escalator and stated off in the restaurant which we noticed immediately had been refitted. We had coffee and then made for the ladies department where Carol browsed the clothing and her mum and I bought her some things which will be birthday presents. One problem solved as I wasn't certain what she wanted.

We walked through Midsummer Place and Carol found it quite cold. This is one of the side-effects of the chemotherapy she's currently going through. Then we walked into the main shopping centre which is, thankfully, a good deal warmer.

It seems that Carol has come a really long way since her diagnosis. She has been through a great deal (haven't we both) and at an early stage she wouldn't have been able to walk as far as she did this morning, so it seems things are getting better.

We got as far as W.H. Smith and went in to look at books. They recently moved into a far smaller unit. No doubt because they seem to have cut the amount of stock they have and no longer sell, such as  CDs and DVDs which used to be on the floor upstairs. At one time they used to have a travel agent (well, at least in the Bedford branch) as well as knitting wool and a host of other items which they've stopped selling. We spent some time browsing and Carol found a couple of adult colouring books, which seem to be popular at the moment. Really perfect to keep her occupied whilst having chemotherapy and at home. One is based on 'Vogue' magazine illustrations and another you can barely see the outlines of the illustrations and wouldn't see what the picture was until all the colours are filled in.

We continued on walking on leaving Smith's.

We reached Middleton Hall, the vast open space in front of John Lewis. We were in need of something to eat, as the time was nearing lunch time. So we decided on going to John Lewis's restaurant. We have been in there before, but, unless you knew where it was, you'd be hard-pressed to discover it's whereabouts. It's on the top floor and up several flights of elevators. There don't seem to be any signs from the ground floor as far as I could  see. I suppose you'd have to ask a member of staff or look on one of the department location boards dotted around the store. On arriving in the restaurant we ordered our food. Carol had soup and a roll, I had a sandwich, although I must say they had a rather poor selection and it would appear that they were somewhat short staffed and it seemed to take ages for a member of staff to serve me. All he had to do was put the sandwich I wanted on a plate and hand it too me. Carol's mum and dad had scones and jam. I went back to get a pot of tea although Carol's dad didn't want tea. I was somewhat disappointed that the milk was only available in those horrible little plastic pots with those nasty foil lids which are virtually impossible to peel off in order to get at the milk inside. Also, they made the tea with just one teabag on a piece of string which I dislike intensely. I'm surprised at John Lewis, who have fairly high standards, to use such a method of tea-making.

The restaurant was fairly busy, including a couple a few tables along from us, who had young children, one of which was causing some problems for them, making a lot of noise. I'm also surprised how under-staffed it was for the time of day considering how busy it was. It got busier as we were about to leave.

We went down on the elevator and on the ground floor walked through the kitchen department. We had a brief browse and Carol had a look at the food mixers. She's seen a Kenwood hand mixer on the John Lewis website so knew that this was the one she wanted. At £20 it seemed good value, compared with other models and a reasonable price when comparing such companies as Argos, surprisingly, since John Lewis is generally somewhat more expensive than other stores although you always know you will get good customer service. The Milton Keynes store was refitted a few years ago and as a result they moved departments around. For example, the kitchenware department was on a different floor, as was the restaurant which used to be at the front and overlooking Middleton Hall. The departments had been in their old locations probably since the store opened back in the late 1970s and the store probably hadn't been remodelled since then. Anyway, we decided on purchasing the mixer and then left the store.

We slowly walked back through the shopping centre along the other mall and walked back through Midsummer Place to return to Debenhams and then up the escalator to the carpark and home. We spent some time talking before Carol's parents left for home when their friend from church came back almost precisely at 3 p.m. to drive them home to Bournemouth.

Non-Existent Customer Service at Currys/PCWorld

As I've posted a few days ago, we had problems with our washing machine. Not really a surprise when you come to consider how our beloved landlord had it installed (see earlier post.) We went to Curry's in an attempt to purchase a new one. I do on-line surveys and had redeemed vouchers to the value of £140 which we wanted to put towards a new machine. We had visited Currys/PC World at their Elder Gate branch in Milton Keynes a week or so back because it was going to take at least a week for the vouchers to arrive and to have a look at what they had on offer. This company seems to have a very poor reputation as regards customer care/service. In some respects it's non-existant. They are probably the last company where you can go to find domestic appliances in a warehouse retail environment, although it's easy enough to buy products like this online. We had even gone to their website to have a look, particularly at availability as the current washing machine needs replacing immediately and we need to do some washing fairly rapidly. The old machine won't spin properly, so that, at the end of a wash cycle you are left with a load which is totally sopping wet. All very well when the weather is fine and sunny as it is at the moment, but how do you dry clothes this wet when it's cold and wet outside and have to resort to drying things on radiators and clothes dryers. Not very convenient if those clothes are wringing wet.

We drove over to the Currys/PCWorld branch at Elder Gate. It was around 9.15 a.m. There appeared to be very few customers in the store. We went directly to the washing machine area. We had decided when we visited a week or so ago that we'd have a Hoover model and had intended ordering it there and then, part-paying for it with the vouchers which came in the post yesterday. No staff came towards us as we browsed, as we looked at other washing machines in the display, but the price of the Hoover model suited our budget. The a male assistant appeared, but as soon as we said we were interested in buying a machine he disappeared, saying he'd get another assistant to help with our enquiries. Then a female assistant appeared. When we asked if we could buy this particular Hoover washing machine she said she would have to look at their computer to find out whether one was in stock. It soon turned out that they didn't have one in stock and they weren't expecting another delivery until Friday. It would be another two days after that before we could have it delivered and plumbed in as well as having the old washing machine removed. She made absolutely no effort to offer us an alternative model at a similar price nor did she attempt to find out stock levels. So we left somewhat annoyed. It was at this point that Carol decided we should complain. When we returned home we found Currys/PCWorld's phone number on their website and after around 10 minutes waiting in a queue I spoke to an agent and I told him the problem we had endured in their store in Milton Keynes. He was very apologetic when I explained how our enquiry had been handled. He said he would pass on our complaint to the manager of the store and we would get a response when the complaint had been dealt with. So I await some sort of feedback. We mentioned how we wanted to buy a washing machine and he said any machines which were in stock would be shown online. Carol found a suitable model which appeared to be in stock and available for delivery (something which should have been apparent to the in-store staff, but wasn't.) Carol began to order it through the website but when she came to enter the long line of digits on the vouchers she couldn't get it to work. So we decided to return to the Currys/PCWorld branch, somewhat reluctantly it has to be said since we had put in our complaint. On returning we went to the customer service desk where a lone lady was on duty. She didn't seem to know exactly how to make the transaction on her computer and needed to be shown by the manager of the store. Not exactly helping with our trust in the company. Eventually the transaction was made and we will have the new washing machine, a Kenwood, delivered and installed on Sunday. We were further annoyed when it turned out we would have to pay delivery when it had said it was free on the website but we managed to get it free. We also added extended warranty for the machine in case it breaks down. We have this for our fridge/freezer (the old one broke down and began defrosting when we were out visiting Twycross Zoo, you may recall if you read my earlier blog post.) But I'm afraid this whole incident has put us off buying anything further from this particular company.

When we walk out of the store and into the carpark, there is a lady about to get into her car, parked near us. She is carrying a pile of shoe boxes. It's evident that she's been to Brantano, the shoe store, which is a few units along from Currys/PCWorld. They have a sale on and she tells us she always buys her shoes in Brantanos sale. We discuss our recent trip to the Doc Marten factory shop in Wollaston where we have bought shoes for really low prices. She hasn't heard of this and says she will have to visit. We mention our recent experiences in Currys and she says she never shops there because of their non existent customer care. It seems the store has a really bad reputation. I don't personally blame the staff. I think the company needs to train their staff better. It seems none of them have any idea how to deal with customers. If you have a customer who is eager to buy a product you don't let them walk out of the store until they have bought something. That is surely a bad salesman or woman. If they can't get a sale then they're not doing their job properly. It seems the first assistant had no idea how to keep a customer. If they could't get the product we wanted she should have made some effort to find out and it was more than annoying that we did eventually manage to find what we wanted through their website.