Kates Journal

There’ve been a bunch of days where I thought I should post. There’s been stuff at work, and stuff about the wedding, and then there was a conversation I overheard, and then stuff about the DAF, and stuff about the Minor. It’s all been happening, and thanks to hayfever and exhaustion I’ve just not got around to it.

I barely feel like getting around to it now. I woke up at 0652, which thankfully is somewhat better than the 0430s of late, but I’m feeling fairly awful. I appear to have got through almost an entire toilet roll, and the remainder of the box of ‘nice’ tissues and still can’t breathe. I’m tired now and my brain feels faintly like treacle.

I shouldn’t complain though, we had a glorious day yesterday – and ignoring all possible hayfever related risks we headed out on a 4 mile wander down to Windsor. Apart from a brief stretch past the water-works (or sewage works, as they really are) the walk’s really beautiful; meandering down around the Jubilee river and then (rather more nicely) around the Thames. Eton Wick is also terribly pretty and filled with the kinds of houses I actually rather like (although it does appear to have been attacked by the 1970s, somewhat).

We sat at the bathing place of Athens, we lay in long-grass eating cheese sandwiches and muching on Tomatoes, lay in the early evening sun and then wandered around Windsor. I picked up a couple of rock and roll gramophone records – which are extraordinarily loud (I can only actually listen to them by putting my portable gramophone in the next room, since it’s not as posh as Nikki’s and doesn’t have a volume control (or, as you might call it, a door)). I also got a Ketelbey gramophone (In a Persian Market / In a Monastry Garden) – Ketelbey was one of my dad’s favourite composers – and while I have his 45 of In a Persian Market / In a Monastry Garden I fancied hearing an earlier version; and there it was.

At some point when I have more money I’m tempted to go back – because they had a couple more of the rock gramophones – which I’ve a bit of a fancy for – but it’s probably best that it’s too far for me to ‘pop’ back and get them. They also had pianola rolls, I’ve always fancied a pianola, but thankfully don’t have one (I can’t even get my own piano into our house!)…although there are several on e-bay for £0.99…

We had one less positive incident, we got some cake from a cafe as a treat (we didn’t look too carefully at the menu and it said ‘organic cakes from £2.50′) – we’d already felt that their prices were a little high – but when Kathryn went to pay… £7! For two very average slices of cake. Sure they were nice, but not £7 nice.

It put a bit of a dent in our otherwise excellent day. We rounded it off by wandering through Waitrose, buying a rather bizzare dinner (but very nice) and then lazing on the sofa at home drinking cider and snuggling. Photos from the set are here…

Today I have kitchen based intentions, and have spent the morning trying to persude VMWare on the Hackintosh to see the USB (it won’t) so that I can update the music on my MP3 player. If anyone’s got software to make an iDJ 360 do it’s database update on a Mac or Linux, then that’d be very handy. The best I’ve found is this topic on the Ubuntu forum which is a few weeks old and hasn’t changed for a while…

Tidying and cleaning also needs to happen today.

Next week we have *lots* of DAF related activities scheduled. Painting the new metalwork, although despite my request he’s thrown underseal on some bits (I went to go and look, and the new sills are very shiny, solid and sill-ey); there’s floor in some of the boot and the driver’s side floor actually looks like floor now. To be restoration grade it’d need filler and smoothing and various things, but to be ‘useable’ and ’solid’ it needs painting, and some waxoyl in through the clips for the trim and that’s it. The Brakes need to be unsiezed – they’ve resisted despite moving the car around a fair bit – I ordered a hub puller from ebay after ringing every auto-factor in slough. One had a bearing puller (“universal”) but had no idea what size it was, it was an order only item, and cost the same as the one on e-bay which I knew what size it was…

So, the plan for next week is paint sills (and other new metalwork), unsieze brakes, check over (again), MOT, Tax (difficult, we’re still lacking a V5) and drive around happily. The mog should be done in about 2 more weeks, apparently. So then we’ll be back up to full strength….

So, I saw an ‘incoming link’ on my Wordpress blog, which oddly appeared to be linking to an ancient post about Coniston Copper Mines. I shan’t name the place that it came from, but I’m always pleased to have people linking to posts….until I followed the link. It appears there’s some obnoxious company which has decided to use content from other blogs to pad-out it’s porn-peddling and advertisment ‘blog’. Presumably the idea is it gets indexed by google and the like, and by having random shite on there people will follow links and end up being bombarded with crap.

Given that I also suspect that they are the kind of bottom-of-the-gene-pool merchants who throw spam at people I’m not going to try e-mailing them to say they’ve stolen my content. Instead I’ll post this petty little rantette and leave it at that. Grr.

Now, we all know I like a good whine. but I’m bored of whining now. My hayfever’s been attrocious this year; bad enough that I’ve not slept. That’s pretty rare for me, to have hayfever bad enough that it wakes me or stops me sleeping. Traditionally night’s been the time when I could forget about my hayfever. But not this year; I’ve not had a solid night’s sleep for about a week. I wake at 4:30am-ish, sneezing, coughing, barely able to breathe. If I’m lucky (like last night) I can eventually get back to sleep – but it takes a long time. And then I’ll wake up at 5:30 or 6:30 to the same problem. I usually give up then, because by the time I get back to sleep it’ll be time for me to get up.

I am, therefore, clattering unhappily towards complete exhaustion. I note, looking at my account, that the money for my prescription payment certificate’s been debited, so I shall make an appointment to see my GP this week. Hopefully I can get the nasal spray and the referal to Guy’s in London, where I can get some kind of allergy treatment. I can’t go on like this; I’m so tired I’ll end up doing something dumb at work.

Yesterday I was so bad at half four in the morning that I gave in and got up.

Anyhow, despite the tired I need to commence doing my ‘Induction Workbook’ for the agency for whom I’m commencing my employ. I need to get that in the post ASAP so I can start working for them – and get some shed-loads of cash delievered to my ailing bank account. It only arrived yesterday, and after spending the first 4 hours of my day proper (after the first three hours of sitting around sniffling) fixing the DAF – and then riding after the truck taking the DAF to the welder so I could have a chat with him – and popping in to Tesco – I was so knackered I had to sleep. I very rarely sleep during the day but I was utterly exhausted.

But the *good* thing about my little journey was that I found some local abandonment…

It appears to be an entire abandoned industrial estate – Although I could only see about 1/3rd of the way down. Were I not so broke as to be worried about buying fuel for the bike midweek then I’d have gone back with my camera. But I am, so it’ll have to wait. Knowing me, and my failure to get around to such things I’ll probably not get around to it until it’s gone :-/

In other news – while looking at someone that Kathryn liked reading posts from on quiet_thrills (moshimoshi_13), I found her link to The Fugitives. I really like their stuff, and perhaps thankfully they don’t have an album – I’m torn, I’d love them to have an album so I could buy it, but I can’t buy it at the moment, and so it’s less things for me to desire). And then today on Boing boing there was Clara Belle, who also doesn’t have any released albums. So I’m still mainly just waiting to get the AM album. Unfortunately and deeply irritatingly Ubuntu’s audio just doesn’t seem to be working properly on here. What’s more bizzare is it works perfectly from within firefox, but VLC and the movie player that come with Ubuntu just produce either clicky-unpleasant noises over the music or don’t make any sound at all.

All in all, the Ubuntu experience (well kubuntu) isn’t going as well as I might have hoped.

All it does is reinforce my desire to pay off my debts and buy a mac laptop. Shiny.

Anyway, I should get on and do some work, so that I can go to work later :-/

That’s how I felt yesterday as I popped rust-killer on to the various bits of rust I thought were worthy of the effort. Or which might not get fixed ‘properly’. Or which are a bit more than surface but less than through-and-through so might (or in some cases, do) need filler.

Distressingly, it turned out that the filler fairy’d already popped around, leaving an unfortunate gift:

I’m told that, ironically, rear and front windscreen pillars are no-longer failable points on the MOT due to a ‘failure to include it as a failable point in the MOT Computerisation Software’. Which means that technically we could apply filler to it. It’s not very widespread so I may consider that option, but I’ll talk to the welder first. I’d much prefer to have that corner welded up properly.
At any rate, I plodded through various jobs – I worked out why the poor benighted thing couldn’t get up on the ramps from a stand still – the back brakes are completely siezed on. Unfortunately, on the DAF they’re splined on to the drive-shaft (see, my problem is I compare everything to the Minor, and were an automatic / variomatic minor available, I’d so love Kathryn to have that, because the Minor is simply a delight to work on. And I’d not realised how much of a delight until I worked on other cars) unlike on the minor. This means that to extract them requires a hub-puller. I don’t have one of them.

I did, however, attempt the fairly traditional ‘beat the crap out of them with a rubber mallet’ – which achieved almost as little as you might expect it to achieve when they’re that siezed. I played with the adjusters, and attempted (unsuccessfully) to rotate the wheels. Eventually I gave this up as a bad job, but it’s lucky that I looked, because lurking underneath Jejy I found more MOT chalk. Not a lot more, but a bit that’s close to a suspension mount (I don’t think it actually does anything terribly exciting structurally, which is frustrating). It’s also close to the petrol tank and so is a bit of a pig, because it means that I’ll be asking the welder to do some more bits which I wasn’t intending to ask for.

It’s about a 2″x2″ square of metal which has rusted away – probably due to the hideous rear window leaks.

The rest of the car though (and I maintain this) seems surprisingly sound.

Unfortunately, post my fiddling I found that the hazard lights, which I’d worked so long to fix, only worked briefly because the entire electrical system then died. After a great deal of effort and an award winning battle to the death with this screw

I managed to remove the regulator and complete my clean of all the open connectors on the vehicle. That leaves only the ones which are in the dash or contained within a plastic connector of some sort. I was incredibly good, even removing each and every wire from the fusebox, cleaning the connector and putting it back together.

This obviously didn’t actually fix the problem – oh no – the problem turned out to be that the +ve lead wasn’t connecting (somehow) – or more accurately, it was connecting well enough to give readings of 12V until the thing was loaded – then the resistance obviously broke down the votlage enough that it all just didn’t work.

It does now though, and the hazards work, and the hazard light tell-tale works, and the horn… the car started and ran, the sills are in and ready to be welded on when the old ones are cut off and I’m just waiting for ‘er to be collected.

Waiting is a struggle though, ‘cos I woke up at 420 am due to hayfever and haven’t slept since.