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….
