Tonight is the start of the University of Warwick beer festival, run by the Real Ale Society. As well as beers, there is also a decent selection of fruit wines and ciders, but disappointingly only one perry. Having been to several of these festivals recently, it's starting to get difficult to find beers which we haven't had before, but with around 100 beers on offer we should be able to find something.

We received a couple of emails today just dripping with corporate-bollocks-speak. The first one informing us of repair work going on outside the building and telling us to Please diarise this event.

No I don't think I will. I'm not going to do a thing until you use proper English and not stupid made up words in an attempt to sound clever.

The second email informed us of repair work going on inside the building out of office hours. Apparently it will be BAU during the working day. There was no explanation of what "BAU" meant. I think it stands for "Bullshit As Usual".

I was surprised to read about the local council getting a 3-star rating in the latest council 'league tables'. Whenever I've personally had to deal with them, they tend to come across as a fairly inefficient bureaucracy. There are some things which they probably do well (whoever runs the redevelopment in the city centre seems to be doing an ok job) but there are other aspects which they are less good at.

They miscalculated our council tax last year which led to us overpaying by an admittedly small amount. We're still waiting for the refund they promised. The roads/highways department is also piss-poor. Some of the residential streets are in shocking condition with huge pot-holes and broken or rough surfaces.

The new house is slowly taking shape. This morning we moved the washing machine over from the old house. It was much heavier than we remembered, even after following the instructions to drain the water from it. This afternoon we finally moved our TV. We've been without a telly since saturday but at least we've been too busy to miss it.

Last night was our first night spent in the new house. I suppose that means we've officially moved in now. There's still a lot of work which needs doing though. Two of the three bedrooms are finished but that still leaves the bathroom and hallway to be done and the 3rd bedroom is waiting for a final coat of paint and the carpet.

Downstairs is still needing plastering after the damp proof treatment but thankfully someone's coming to do that this week. I've hired a van to move some of the larger furniture which won't fit into the car. We've already moved the sofas - we need to move desks, shelves and the washing machine later.

This was an unusual film to open on Valentines Day, but I suppose it offered a bit more choice for people who didn't want to sit through some dreary rom-com. Simon Pegg is joined by his usual lardy side-kick Nick Frost, and a who's who of British acting (including Timothy Dalton, Bill Nighy, Steve Coogan, Bill Bailey, Jim Broadbent, Edward Woodward, Anne Reid, Billie Whitelaw).

At two hours, it was longer than the average comedy but managed to keep going without running out of steam. Very funny pretty much from start to finish. I lost count of the number of film references and spoof sequences, but a lot of them were quite subtle and were worked into the film quite well.

It might have been a mistake to watch this film in our cold non-centrally heated house, especially the 2nd half where the entire northern hemisphere is frozen over.

We had to bring our small fan heater downstairs so we got a gentle waft of warm air blowing over us during the film. Warmth shouldn't be a luxury in modern england but that's how it feels in our current house.

Back to the film - it's quite surprising that it actually got made when you realise that Fox was one of the production companies behind it. Global warming denier Dubya friendly Fox (although he's now changed his tune slightly since).

I took last week off work so I could work on the house. We're still decorating upstairs but at least the front bedroom is finished now. The middle bedroom has paint on 3 of the walls. The 4th wall will be ready to paint soon, when the plaster is dry. We had to re-plaster part of the wall behind the radiator because the plaster was all dry and crumbly.

Downstairs is a complete mess. We got someone to come in to treat the damp in the front and middle rooms. As a result they are a complete mess at the moment. The carpets have been ripped up and the plaster taken off the bottom metre or so of the wall. We're waiting for them to come back and re-plaster soon.

Despite the house having central heating (a huge improvement on our rented house), we can't actually use it at the moment because half of the radiators have been removed. The ones downstairs for the damp proof course, the ones upstairs for decorating or plastering reasons.

I seem to have spent most of the week up a ladder, stripping wallpaper, painting or filling holes or cracks in the plaster. My shoulders and neck are aching a bit as a result.

Gel the Hamster died this morning. She'd been looking very old and during the last few days she'd been very weak and unable to walk properly, crawling everywhere. She was about 18 months old.

The other night we bought a steam stripper to help us get all the wood chip wallpaper off the walls. The stuff is on every wall and ceiling, except the kitchen and bathroom. Tonight, we started stripping the wallpaper from the back bedroom. There was paint on top of wallpaper on top of paint so we needed to score the paper first to let the steam get in.

Some areas were very stubborn and needed lots of steaming to get them off. Other bits would peel off very easily. Unfortunately this included a lot of the ceiling paper, so I expect we'll have to re-paper that too.

I was a little worried that the wallpaper was what was holding the wall together, it seemed to be stronger than the plaster. There were some areas where the paper would come off, bringing a lot of powdery plaster with it. These walls will definitely need some remedial work before we can paint over them.