Houndless
Posted: Thu 7 May, 2009 Filed under: Animals, Domestic, Driving, Travel Leave a comment »This week, the house is remarkably quiet – primarily because Hound is down at her kennels/respite care place. It’s made sense, because of the work we did over the weekend, and the ongoing painting etc. that Herself’s been doing – but it still means the house is strangely quiet.
Of course it’s also lovely – it’s meant uninterrupted sleep at night, for example – and I’m sure that our neighbours are finding it equally odd/pleasant without Hound, and without inane/insane barking whenever we’re out in the garden, or going up to see the chickens, for example.
Psycho Cat is surprisingly unhappy about it too – he’s already attacked both of us for no good reason. He definitely misses Hound when she’s not around, much as he’d never admit it. (if the fuzzy bastard could talk, anyway) And when you take into account that he hates change too, it’s not surprising that he’s being a little grumpy fucker.
Of course, normality will resume on Saturday evening, once I’ve driven down to Wokingham, collected Hound, and driven back. (Another six hours on the road, and a 300ish mile round trip)
But for now, well, I’m just going to enjoy the peace for the next few days.
Mileage (Part Two)
Posted: Sat 2 May, 2009 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Driving, Reviews(ish), Sweary, Travel Leave a comment »So, yesterday – all told it involved 310 miles, 8 hours of driving, and one exceptionally knackered Lyle.
The drive down to Wokingham from home was OK, not too painful (even on the M25, which was slow but not abysmal) and I did it in 2.5 hours all told. Drop off Hound at her place of residence for the next week, have some lunch, and it’s half three. So I decide I’ll head over to Greenwich and the O2.
It’s at that point that I realise I haven’t got the normal sat-nav in the car. I had it the day before for the drive to Welwyn Garden City, then Herself used it in the evening, and I’d forgotten to make sure I got it back. Oh bollocks.
So instead I had to trust the POS sat-nav thing on my phone – a heap of crap called Wayfinder. And Jesus H Christ on a warped pine crutch, it really is a piece of shit. First of all it took no less than fifteen minutes to find where the fuck it was – although that may be a fault of the phone’s GPS rather than Wayfinder. However, the fact that it was consistently 400 ft out was entirely the fault of Wayfinder, and meant that it had a nasty habit of saying “Oh, you wanted to turn left back there“. Now I’m sure that’s fine out in the arse of beyond where 400 ft doesn’t mean a thing – but in central London, 400 ft is the equivalent of about six roads.
Wayfinder also wanted me to go some deeply surreal routes. My original idea had been to go southbound (anticlockwise) round the M25 from the M4, get to the junction for (probably) the A2, and belt straight up to Greenwich – probably the longer and (in theory) quicker route. Only (as usual for the M25 on a Friday) it was jammed solid for about six junctions. Fuck that, thinketh I. (And bear in mind here, Wayfinder was trying to tell me to go northbound on the M25 instead)
So – straight along the M4, into the city, through. Only that was buggered too. (And Wayfinder kept planning on taking me back north of the river for some fuckforsaken reason)
So – round the infamous South Circular Road. I know a bit of it, but not all of it, so I might have to rely on satnav a bit. And there laid my biggest mistake of all. Because Wayfinder didn’t want me to take the simple South Circular (A205) route round to the A2. It wanted to take me the tourist way (and also possibly to get up to the M40 and go through from there). Every fucking time. And be 400 ft out in its estimations. All the fucking way round.
Eventually I gave up on it, once it tried taking me through Elephant and Castle.
From there, and pretty epically lost – I knew very roughly where I was, where I needed to be, and roughly the roads I needed to take – I finally found myself, got back on the road I wanted, and once I’d done that it was a 30 minute run through to the O2 itself. I should have been able to do the route in 90 minutes, give or take – maybe 2 hours in shitty rush-hour traffic.
Instead, because of the cuntbrick piece of shit satnav software, it took me three and a half bollocking hours to do fifty miles. Yeah, go on and laugh, fuckers.
By contrast, the drive home was two hours door-to-door, and belted past. We got home at 1:15.
I’ll write more about the Pink concert itself later or tomorrow – but for now let’s just say it was fan-bloody-tastic. Well impressed all round.
Clutching
Posted: Thu 16 April, 2009 Filed under: Domestic, Driving, Travel Leave a comment »Another in my list of “interesting” occurrences this morning…
Driving along, coming up to a roundabout just off the dual-carriageway, and I’m planning to turn right so I’m in the outside lane. I put the clutch in as I come to a stop, and can’t change gear. Come to that, I can’t find the clutch pedal either.
Yep – no clutch. The car’s (fortunately) in neutral, but won’t select a new gear at all. In short, it’s fucked. On the outside lane of a (very fast) sliproad.
In short, it quickly involved calling the police – on 999 no less, not something I make a habit of! – followed by the breakdown people, and then my local garage to let them know the car was going to be coming in on a flatbed recovery truck.
Amazingly, in the half-hour it took to get sorted, no-one ran into the back of the car. Not for want of trying – there were at least four bell-ends who came right up to the back of it, ignoring the flashing hazard lights (and the – perhaps slightly more subtle – bloke stood on the verge by the car) and two even honked their horns before realising I wasn’t going anywhere.
I don’t yet know what the damage is, either. It’s at the garage, and I’ve got a courtesy car for the time being. But quite what’s wrong with it isn’t yet clear. Apparently it’s not just a clutch cable – it might be something hydraulic-y, or something called a master cylinder – which certainly doesn’t sound cheap…
Ah well, we’ll see.
Changing Plans
Posted: Fri 20 March, 2009 Filed under: Domestic, Getting Organised, House Work, Travel 3 Comments »In the last week, we’ve had the following stuff at the house…
- Last Friday – water leak under the sink (fixed that evening) – kitchen water completely off
- Weekend – doing all the floor tiles
- Monday – another (different) water leak under the sink – water turned completely off
- Tuesday – water leak fixed
- Wednesday – Power cut off, due to EDF doing work on power supply in village
- Wednesday – No gas going to brand new gas cooker. Nothing at all – both bottles are full, no kinks in the pipe, nothing blocked. Auto-shutoff on the cooker seems to be OK. But there’s no gas.
- Thursday – still no gas to cooker
- Friday – ditto
There’s an engineer visit booked for tomorrow to check the cooker.
So all told, over this week my sense of humour has utterly failed, which is never a good sign.
As a result, and with plenty of other outstanding jobs to do, we’ve taken the decision to move our break from next week to [some other time] (although we’re as yet undecided to when) and we’ll spend the week at home instead, sorting out some of the outstanding stuff, and taking time out that way instead.
Luckily the people at Scottish Country Cottages have been lovely, and allowed us to change the booking at very short notice – we explained the situation, and they’ve been very understanding.
In the current situation I can’t deny, I’m actually happier to not be going – I wasn’t massively looking forward to the drive, and I think we’d both be focussing on what was happening at home, plus what we could be doing at home instead of being up in Scotland. That happened two years ago, and was the final point for us coming home early from Devon.
So we’re at home instead of in Scotland. There’s still pre-written posts to come during the week, but I’ll be adding in random stuff too. Probably.
Hub Caps
Posted: Fri 27 February, 2009 Filed under: Driving, Travel, Weirdness 2 Comments »In the last month, I’ve somehow managed to lose all four hubcaps from my car. I know one went when I had the blowout, and another one disappeared soon after.
But I’ve lost the other two in the last three days. I haven’t hit anything, gone into any significant pot-holes, haven’t heard or noticed anything of them coming off. There’s no sign of them along my route to work. They’ve just disappeared.
Fortunately, when I had the blowout I’d ordered a couple of replacements from QuickHubs, and ended up getting a set of four as that cost me the same as two individual hubcaps. So in this case it’s fortuitous, as I now need all four – I’d have been mightily narked if I’d paid for two, and now needed two more, as that would have doubled what I’d paid.
At least now all four will match.
And I’ll be attaching them with plastic cable-ties as well, so they should stay put this time round…
Writing Plans
Posted: Wed 28 January, 2009 Filed under: Five Year Plan (now Ten), Resolutions, Travel, Writing 1 Comment »As I’ve written before, one of my plans for this year is to get some more writing done. I’m working on it, and there’s still a lot of the year to go, so we’ll see how things work out.
However, I’ve also been thinking about getting some impetus towards year-end, where I can both learn a bit more about my preferred writing areas, and (hopefully) get some feedback on ideas that I’ll have written – or at the bare minimum, have outlined and started – by that time.
In that light, and because I’ve known about them for years, I’ve signed up for a course through the Arvon Foundation, which I’m already really looking forward to.
It’s a cost of nearly £600 for the week, but that includes all food, board etc., but I think it’ll be an interesting departure, and something cool to do. Who knows, if it works out well, I might even go on more of them in 2010…