1 May 2010 (Saturday) - Off on Holiday

In a novel break with tradition, ‘er indoors ^TM didn’t drive us to Weymouth. As I had a new car to get used to, I thought I’d drive for a change. And as I’ve said before, apart from a sixth gear, it’s virtually identical to my old car. So I hope my loyal readership will forgive my surprise when I got out of the car at the Fleet services and was amazed to find I was driving a blue car, and not the silver which I’d got used to.

Fleet services were entertaining, featuring contingents of SuperTeds and Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. I can only imagine there was a fancy dress contest somewhere along the M3. As we drove through the rain we listened to an annoying rattling in the car, which we eventually traced to the passenger side sun shade. I shall thump that later. We knew we weren’t in Kent any more – as we got closer to Weymouth we saw something that we’d not seen in Kent. They had “Vote Labour” signs. And lots of them too.

We eventually got to our home for the week – Auntie’s caravan in Littlesea Holiday Park, and having unpacked we set off for shopping. Assorted scoff, and just a few bottles of beer to wash down our steak dinner.

And then we watched a film – 2012. I say “watched a film” - I watched the film. Everyone else fell asleep.

Normal Service will be Resumed....

At the risk of disappointing my fifty-plus loyal readers who tune in daily to this drivel, I’m afraid there won’t be any blog updates for a week. I’m off to the seaside.

And at the risk of disappointing any burglars who might be tuning in, the house won’t be empty – the fruit of my loins are still in residence.

So there you are – I’ll see you all in a week. In the meantime, don’t forget to vote (I *still* haven’t decided who to vote for), behave yourselves, and don’t talk to strangers.

See you all soon –x-

30 April 2010 (Friday) - New Car, Astro Club

Last Saturday night I went into work for a couple of hours. Which (in the end) worked to my advantage. I took two hours out of work today to collect my new car. I had some qualms about saying goodbye to the old car, but the new one is virtually identical in everything but for the colour and one extra gear. Back to work via Tesco’s for doughnuts to celebrate.

After work was somewhat rushed. Tonight’s astro club meeting was an outing to Cranbrook to meet up with CADSAS (Cranbrook and District Science & Astronomy Society). Four of us set off hopefully, only to find one other person sitting in a car park hoping he was at the right place. Having found him, five of us then sat in a car park and hoped we were in the right place. After a while our numbers grew to double figures, and we found the people from CADSAS who led us to where we were supposed to be. It was at this point that we heard a car hooter, and saw some of our members driving toward us in their car. And behind them was a veritable convoy of a dozen or so cars full of club members. All of whom had found each other, but not found where we were supposed to meet.

Having said that, I feel I should point out to my loyal readers that history is written by those who take the time to write it. There is a conflicting school of thought that maintained we’d parked in the wrong place….

Eventually over thirty of us met up with the Cranbrook people. We went specifically to see their huge telescope. And it was quite a whopper, although still in the throes of being rebuilt. Fortunately some of our number are quite clued up with thing telescopic, and some helpful suggestions were made. I was part of a small number of people congratulated for coming up with the idea of springs. Perhaps I should say that I didn’t have any conception of what possible use springs would be in the telescope. I merely overheard it being said, and so I just repeated the word “springs” like a stuck record, and people seemed to think I knew what I was talking about.

To be honest I don’t really know anything about telescopes, and (not being rude) I have no real interest in them. I am after all very much an armchair astronomer. But having said that, I can appreciate the passion that some have for telescopes, and a really good evening was had tonight. I got to chat with friends I only meet once a month at the astro club. But there were a lot of faces I didn’t recognise. I need to get to know more of the membership.

And then home. I really should do my packing for next week’s holiday……

29 April 2010 (Thursday) - This and That

When not on an 11.30am start I always get to work far too early. There are all sorts of reasons for this. Avoiding the rush hour traffic is one, getting a parking space within fifteen minutes walk of the hospital is another, as is getting a few minutes peace and quiet to read a book before the day starts. And being in at work early has the advantage that should the person rostered to be in early not turn up for whatever reason, I am there already, can step into the breach, and so can go home early. Which is what happened today.

We had an interesting and intellectual discussion at work on the subject of who is the lamest super-hero. Despite the utter rubbish-ness of Elastic-Man, the Green Hornet and all of the X-Men, the title of lamest super-hero went to Matter Eater Lad – a particularly useless hero whose sole super talent is to eat everything and anything. One can only hope that Matter Eater Lad has solved the problem of chronic flatulence.

I then phoned the garage – which took some doing. All is well with my new car, but it occurred to me that with the switchover of TV and radio broadcasting to digital format in two years time, perhaps I should be considering a digital car radio. The garage said not to worry – they have had no direction from Renault about digital radios whatsoever. Further research on the internet would seem to show I needn’t worry. I’ve got until 2020 to get a digital radio in my car. Hopefully that will be several new cars down the line.

And then home – I mucked out the pond filter. It didn’t actually need doing. Or that is, it hadn’t started leaking yet. Every other time I’ve cleaned it out this year was because it was leaking, so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to be pro-active. Hurt – no. Smell of fish poo – yes. But you can’t have everything.

And then I had a look in my letter rack. The leccie company had sent me a letter. I get my leccie and gas from them, and because I get both, I get a discount. Or that is I used to get a discount. They have a new system, and my details differ between the two accounts. Unless I phoned them immediately to tell them to make the accounts have the same details they were going to discontinue my discount.

So I phoned them, and asked them if they thought (as I did) that their writing to me to tell me to tell them to correct their own error was a bit dumb. The chap on the phone was helpful (being able to speak English helped, and was a novel development for a call centre), and he said that whilst their new system is good and has cost millions of pounds, apparently they cannot change my details on their system without my permission. Even if they’ve typed them in wrongly themselves.

All’s well now, but I resent wasting my precious time on drivel like this. Which is odd – it’s taken me twice as long to type up what happened, and I don’t mind that at all…

28 April 2010 (Wednesday) -Arky-ologee Club

Let’s hope my PC lasts long enough for this blog entry to reach cyber-space. On booting I had some message which dribbled about an unregistered anti-virus being installed. So I employed my standard I.T. fix #1 – I rebooted, which seemed to work. But we shall see.

Being the last Wednesday of the month, we set off to Lenham to the arky-ologee club. More often than not the meetings are dull, but tonight’s speaker promised to be good. Her previous talks had been on the saucier exploits of King William IV and Admiral Nelson.

Tonight she lived up to expectations, digging the dirt on the seedier aspects of the lives of the six uncles of Queen Victoria. With two of them being kings (George IV and William IV) and four of them being dukes (of York, Cumberland, Sussex and Cambridge) they were (with one dull exception) a lively lot. Between them they were involved in several illegal marriages, had several mistresses, fathered at least fifty-six illegitimate children and ran up debts of millions of pounds (each). The speaker read from letters and eye witness accounts written at the time, and brought to life a subject which thirty years ago my history teacher had killed stone dead.

Following her talk we had a celebrity guest. Or so I first thought. My mistake – the poor lady who told us of her excavations bore an unfortunate resemblance to “Tiddler” from “The Riddlers”. She waxed ecstatically about some medieval duck pond she was digging out, which was apparently remarkable because it was built on the wreckage of an earlier medieval duck pond. I suppose there are those who get over-excited at the thought of double decker medieval duck ponds, but I must admit I am not one of them…

27 April 2010 (Tuesday) - An Afternoon Off

Some days I feel like I am running round like a headless chicken at work. Other days we seem to have more staff than sense. Today, with seemingly double the staff we had last week, I thought I’d take the opportunity to use up some of my lieu time and I took the afternoon off.

I came home to find my camera case had arrived. I do like buying stuff on eBay. Although it can sometimes be a bit of a gamble, just lately everything I’ve ordered off eBay (except one item delayed by Icelandic volcanoes) has arrived within a couple of days. It’s a good camera case – it’s very pink.

“My Boy ^TM ” was clumping round the house whilst bellowing into his phone. He was planning to take a bird to the seaside. I did tell him that there were plenty of seagulls there already, but he wasn’t having any of it.

Totally by chance, the bank phoned – would I like to borrow a squillion pounds? By one of life’s many co-incidences, one squillion pounds is exactly the amount of money I need to borrow to pay for my new car. So I told the bank I would like a loan, which completely flummoxed the poor girl. She was obviously so used to being told to get knotted that she simply wasn’t expecting anyone to say yes. She then passed me onto someone who claimed her name was Kelly. If her name was really Kelly, then from now on I should be known as Rashid. “Kelly” started her standard spiel. I stopped her and asked her my most important question - how soon I could get my hands on the money? That flummoxed her. She said it depended on where the money was coming from. I might have it in savings, in bonds, on deposit. I asked her what she was talking about, and she admitted she didn’t know. She then put me on to somebody who spoke both scripted and impromptu English and I asked my questions.

She gave me her figures, and I trotted round to the garage to see how much money I could save on the car loan. Despite my being a valued customer entitled to the premium rate loan reserved for the bank’s most valued customers, it was still no cheaper than going with the deal that Renault had already offered, so I shook hands with the salesman, and spent a few minutes looking at my new car. I realise that (apart from the colour) it is pretty much identical to my current car, but it’s still quite exciting.

This car will be my tenth motor vehicle, and I’ve just amazed myself that out of the thing’s nine predecessors, I can only recall the registration numbers of four of them. My DAF, my mini, the Maestro – what were their numbers? My motorbike “Zoomy Petal” – what was his number?

I then mucked about adding an RSS feed to my blog. I have absolutely no idea what an RSS feed is, but if you look at the very bottom of the screen you’ll see there’s a link to it. I was actually trying to blag an animated header similar to that which one of my loyal readers uses on a certain kiting forum, but I got this instead. I wonder what it does….

26 April 2010 (Monday) - Stuff

I read the news this morning over breakfast. I know I shouldn’t. Sometimes I wonder if I am really the only sane one in a mad world (and that’s a scary thought!). Take today’s news for example. Apropos of nothing, one of the greatest minds of the age, Professor Stephen Hawking has announced that he thinks that intelligent aliens have exhausted the natural resources of their own world, and are on their way to Earth in enormous spaceships to take ours. Has anyone told the Professor that “V” is a program on the Syfy channel, and is make-believe?

And then another genius professor has discovered that the sun goes through phases of more intense and less intense activity. And the phases of less intense activity correspond with our getting harsher winters. What can I say? Dur!!!!! Isn’t that patently obvious?

I had got a service booked on the car I’ve just sold. So I phoned the garage to check that they’d cancelled it, and to speak to them about my service account. Each month I’ve been paying fifteen quid into an account to help meet the costs of having the car serviced. Seeing I’m getting a new car I’ll need to have the account transferred to the new car. After all, I’ve been paying into this thing for two years and haven’t touched that money yet. It would be a nice little amount to put towards future services. Or so I thought.

It’s not that simple. These things never are. The service deal wasn’t with the garage. It was with some third party that the garage was dealing with two years ago. Whilst the garage can get money out of them to pay for services, they were pretty sure the funds would not be transferable to another car. It would be easier all round if I cancelled the service plan, got my money back and started a new one. Or so I was told. The garage suggested I contacted my bank to ensure the direct debit was stopped, and they said they would get onto this third party to get me a refund. They warned me there would be an admin fee. I phoned this third party myself to find the admin fee is forty quid. Forty quid!!!

I won’t be taking out a service deal with the new car. I shall just stick fifteen quid aside each month and I will have the interest and admin fees for myself.