The big news to report is that my dad’s younger brother, uncle Dean, is currently in intensive care. Please all keep your fingers crossed for some positive news on his progress. Dean had a routine operation booked in over December to have some nasal polyps removed. Unfortunately for him, this was booked in at Kettering hospital, one of the worst-performing and most-sued hospitals in the country. And it was also, don’t forget, 2016. Sure enough, the surgeon managed to utterly botch the operation. Dean was left with a badly damaged sinus tube and a hole in his meninges (the brain’s protective membranes). Leeking fluid caused his brain to swell, making him confused and forgetful.
The cretins at Kettering didn’t even realise at first what they’d done so he was discharged as normal, but was soon rushed back in again when it became clear something was very wrong. And as all this happened over the Christmas period, he ended up having to wait several days before the surgeon was back so they could fix the damage. In the interim, the hole they punctured in his brain’s membrane meant that he was extremely susceptible to infection and was basically told to avoid going out or seeing anyone. They did let him out for Christmas day itself but that evening he was back in the ward again, waiting for a date. In the end, they performed the operation on the 3rd, and everything seemed to have gone well – until today, when he experienced some sort of seizure. He is currently sedated while they try and work out what’s going on. I hope there’ll be some good news to share about this soon, and that he doesn’t need any more surgery, be it at Kettering or anywhere else.
Right, on with the roundup. First off, our NYE was great fun. We spent it around Odile & Ulysse’s which is about a 10 min drive away. We had a drink at Manu & Mathilde’s first and then all went on together to their place. Along with us were two other couples, including the guys who own the wooden holiday chalets just down the road from us. The champagne and vodka flowed, the food was all very tasty and the numerous kids in attendance were unobtrusive which all made for a very pleasant night. I felt palpable relief when the clock struck midnight and signalled the end of the Cursed Year. We ended up staying till around 3.30 and then had our customary cleanser upon getting home. We’d drunk steadily but not excessively throughout the evening, so actually escaped hangovers the next day, though we still took it easy.
The 2nd of Jan was our first official back-to-work day, and both of us currently have enough things to keep us busy. I have a new site to build, another to redesign, a third to translate, and a whole host of unfinished ones from last year that will hopefully see the light of day soon. For Matt, he’s finally finished his urgent project so is in theory back on to his big main project. Unfortunately though, he had a bit of a distraction to deal with.
One of our existing clients make pewter jewellery, and they have an online shop they sell it from. It uses Paypal for the checkout and up until recently, it’s all worked very smoothly. They contacted us a few days back as they’d noticed a discrepancy about the email address that PayPal was using. It transpired that unfortunately, their site had been hacked. By changing the stored email address, the hackers were able to divert paypal payments intended for our clients’ account to their own. Worst of all is that they actually did this back in June of last year (yes, that’s right: another score for the cursed year) so a full 6 months’ worth of orders were affected.
This is obviously a serious issue: it was us that designed, built and host their website, so if anyone is responsible for its security, it’s us. On the other hand, the clients are wholly responsible for not noticing sooner that no money was coming in to their account. If they had, we could have acted immediately.
Anyway, the upshot was that their website was compromised. We had no way of knowing how they’d gotten access to the site, so no part of it could be trusted. The only option was to start over and rebuild it all from scratch. We did try to persuade them to let us build them a new one (their current one uses a platform that is not easy to work with and is less secure than the system we wanted to use) but they said they wanted their old one rebuilding. Matt agreed to do this free of charge, and was two days into this nightmare of a job when he discovered a message in the site’s admin area, dating back to June 2016. This message warned of a vulnerability to the paypal module that could allow the site to be hacked, and recommended what action to take to avoid this. This meant that we knew how the hackers had gotten in, and that it wasn’t via a vulnerability in the site itself. It also meant that Matt had therefore just wasted two full days unecessarily rebuilding it – but at least he does not now have to continue to do so.
In other news this week, Matt’s back is still on the mend, but is still not quite right. He had an MRI on the 4th which confirmed it was indeed a herniated disc, but does not require surgery. He has an appointment with a specialist in a month. We also had a meeting with a consumer advice bureau in Nontron this week. This was to see if we could get a refund for our water filter which, we can confirm, simply does not work. Both the kettle and the cats’ water fountain are getting clogged up with limescale again. Unfortunately, it sounds like we are stuck with the thing and so are out a grand. We will of course be letting anyone who will listen know exactly what we think of the company that sold it to us.
On to the weekend, which was a busy one. The increasingly hard-to-track-down Lee & Richard made plans to come to ours on Saturday, and Jenny invited us over for dinner – also on Saturday. Luckily, she was able to push it back a day, so we managed to do both. Along with L&R we also invited Carl – the plumber who recently fixed our sink and who, as it turns out, is a mutual friend of theirs. Richard is still veggie (in fact, and to Lee’s disgust, he’s considering going vegan) so we had a meat-free meal of antipasto and lasagne followed by cherry chocolate cake. After the meal, we sat up chatting and then broke out the Nintendo Wii for some drunken gaming. Typically for us, it was a big night – it was 6am when we finally went to bed. We spent the next day recovering as best we could and then headed to Jenny’s for a meal. Along with us were our friends Benoit and Virginie, and Sam, a nice chap who helps Jenny out at the stables. After a round of margaritas, we sat down to a delicious meal of soup, mushroom torte and a rougail saucisses for the main. Dessert was a lemon meringue pie, made by Sam.
Right, this is really long so I shall stop here. I shall end by noting that yesterday would have been David Bowie’s 70th birthday. And tomorrow marks the anniversary of his death, the first and worst victim of the cursed year. As Matt said at the end of his last entry, good riddance, 2016.