Mostly lemon based

Category: EV Conversion

  • Not since November?

    Wow. It’s been a while. I mean it’s not entirely surprising. Life’s been full – at the same time as it’s been the same as always. But November was pretty much all taken up with writing my book – first draft finished but not edited. Dear lord is it not edited – and my short story. First fiction I’ve published online since a terrible start to a terrible story back in, what, the late 90s? That’s here, by the way. I’m quite proud of it. There’s things I’d change – every single pass, every read, I’d fiddle with stuff. There’s more that I could do, but I’ve decided to let it go.

    People don’t seem to hate it, which is nice.

    I’m back to editing the book. That’s a slog, which is why I’m writing this.

    That’s not true. I’m writing this because I decided to log in to post Chapter 1 of an Audiobook version of Glow, Worm – by Alyson Greaves. I’m not going to promise to keep recording it, but it was fun to do this one and it didn’t take quite as long as I though it would. I’d like to get better at soundscape stuff. I know audiobooks don’t generally have a lot of soundscape, but the few I’ve listened to have a bit, sometimes, and part of it is that I’ve been using just the freesound stuff. Nikki’s happy for me to use TE stuff (but then I’d feel the need to credit TE. Which is fine, but also…I feel weird about promoting my work on the back of someone else’s).

    Anyhow. So I logged in and realised that I never did my year in review thing (which, ha. I’ve not done that reliably for years anyway), and I’ve not updated you on my awesome ongoing life events, that you all care so deeply, deeply about. Well, anyway. So. What have I been up to? Well, there’s been slow progress on the garage. I’ve been clearing it with the theory that I have about four-hundred-billion projects that I want to get on with in there, but it’s hard to do that when you can’t actually get to any of the workbenches because they’re all covered in shite. However, it turns out that I still at a fundamental level neither like organising, nor do I feel particularly good at it. But I’ve been plodding along, giving an hour or two here or there. Another couple of hours might see it sorted to a point where I can get some projects done and out and get back to working on RebeccaMog. Which I really should do. I should really be doing the garage today, or working on the house, but in my defence, it’s freaking cold outside (there was ice on my car at lunch time) [please insert other excuses here].

    I have been intermittently working on the house. I really need to cut some more trim – I’m so close now that it’s painful to think about. The bathroom is the worst, it’s missing a bunch of trim around the tile edges, and the interior door trim, and the window trim. But honestly? It’s probably two – three days worth of work to get it all cut and oiled and up. (Although there’s a solid week inbetween of letting it dry). I also need to actually cut and attach the skirting board in the two bedrooms. That’s trickier because there’s furniture in both bedrooms, and that… is going to be more of a pain. But since they’re oiled and ready and just need cutting to length and attaching to the damn wall, I really should get on it.

    Once that’s done the main thing is the doors. We really should have some doors.

    The main thing that’s been taking our time has been adoption stuff. We eventually signed up with an agency and that means that we’ve been spending a lot of time filling in adoption related paperwork. It’s long and – while not complicated – takes a lot of thinking about it. And doing that and creating our profile book took a long time, and occupied a lot of the space that I notionally allocate as free time. Between that and my writing, oh and my singing, I’ve been fairly full up.

    Singing has been fun, hearing my range expand has been wild – I’ve gained, like, an octave plus since I started singing (a chunk at the top and a bit at the bottom). Hilariously, I discovered a ‘boy’ voice which I don’t think is my actual voice from pretransition, because I don’t think I ever really did chest resonance. People always thought I was my (female) flatmates on the phone (or my mum / sister when I was home). Most of my vocal therapy was focussed on getting me to have some intonation. But yeah, it is theoretically available – funnily enough though I was trying to do it today for recording Glow, Worm and could I do it (even after vocal warmups)? Hell no. Wouldn’t happen at all. So feh. Trans-girl-doing-boy-voice it is. Also, apparently I’m crap at breathing. I’m better now than I used to be, and it’s really noticable, but I’m not great a breathing still – and trying to remember to breathe before singing a line rhather than discovering mid-way-through that I have run out of breath is a whole thing.

    I’m also now singing with a group. As in, a people-with-instruments-and-lots-of-practice-and-skills-expectation-I-might-eventually-perform-in-front-of-people which is fucking terrifying, if I do say so myself. But last week I actually put some welly into it and sang in front of them (all it took was Sarah telling me to shout at Erik), and lo, I was off. Fuck if it’s scary though. And trying to develop some kind of faith in my body, and my voice, and my abilities? Not something that I’ve got a lot of successful past experience with.

    Still, I’m having fun. And Kathryn got me a little mini-synth for Xmas, which is awesome fun. Had a play with that this afternoon, which was fun. I feel like I need a sequencer to get the most out of it, and then I want to play with the BBC Micro / Music 5000. And then, and then. I really need to just be wealthy, it would make “not working and just doing the stuff I want to do” a feasible option.

    In other, other news, I got approval for FFS. I don’t think I’ve talked much on here about this, but it slowly dawned on me that other people look at themselves in the mirror. They don’t necessarily love what they see, but they can deal, and they feel like the person in the mirror is them. That’s never really been the case with me. There are bits of my face I’m fine with, but some of my face I’m really not. To the point that doing makeup, I’d focus on the eyelids, or the lashes, or whatever I was doing. Same with lipstick. I would then glance at, like, my whole face for a moment to check it looked “okay” as a whole look – and actually, with makeup on it was much more tolerable. The faceblindness meant that away from a mirror it wasn’t so bad, although in my head my face feels suuper angular. I can’t picture it, but I can’t picture anyone’s faces. It’s always kinda aggravating, because I ask my brain what someone looks like and it just produces this fuzzy blob. Me, them, anyway… so to an extent I think that’s what made it somewhat tolerable. But this year I realised that fuck me, that’s more dysphoria. That’s a discomfort with myself. And those discussions I had early on with my shrink about it – they’re still fucking relevant now. 20 years later.

    Genius that I am.

    Anyhow, I realised that I could, in fact, get something done about it. And that’s my plan this year. I had my consultation just prior to Christmas, saw a psrhink in December, and the surgery was approved by insurance this year. So.

    Apparently, also, in the list of “things I should have known but didn’t get fixed”, when my endo back in England advised me that I might want to see an ENT specialist about my nose, I should have listened because the FFS surgeon said that my nasal structure is why I find it hard to breathe through my nose. I’d always attributed it to allergies, but no. Apparently I have ‘hypertrophic turbinates’ and a deviated septum. Both those things are fixable. So that’s also on my list for the year. If I wanted nasal work as part of my FFS then he’d do it, apparently, but in my case, I don’t. So apparently I get to have that separately. Yay.

    Anyhow, so that’s the big kinda catch-all update. I now have paperwork to go fill in, so I should, uh, do that.

     

  • Creeping ever onwards

    I’ve not posted for a little while because progress has been painfully slow. Despite reassurances from our conveyancer, the contracts haven’t been exchanged, although she believes that they’ll be exchanged on Monday*.

    Today we did the sad thing, we sold our iMiEV. Well, technically we sold it a few days ago, but the very lovely (and excited) chap came to pick it up today. He’s taking it on a massive trek (well, for a little EV it’s a massive trek – across to Wales, then back to his home…), which is funny, given that it was the first thing we did too.

    We’ve also been packing, the front office is nearly completely packed, and after lunch I’m going to head down to the garage to do more packing down there…

    …and we’re selling things off, and giving away, and recycling, and so on. And arranging meetings with friends who we’ll not get to see again for a long time.

    Mostly it’s switched from excitement to a mixture of terror and the complex practicalities of scheduling, or disposing of things. Our lovely cabinet in the lounge, that needs to go. Our espresso machine? Not suitable for 110 volts… got to be sold. Piles of gunks in the garage – oils, greases, polishes? All got to go.

    It’s like one big discount superstore here at the moment.

    And it’s hard, because this is stuff we like, or care about, and have collected over our lives together. But it’s all got to go if we’re going to cram both the car, and our stuff, into a 20′ container.

    Oh, in other news, Rebecca is done. MOT’d, graced with new brakes, gearbox, back axle and exhaust. She’s roadworthy and running. So I’ll be bringing her home on Monday… Which leaves the Prius to be sold once it’s been cleaned and polished and photographed… Oh, and ideally after the many trips that we’ve got to do to see people, because whilst I adore my Minor, she’s not the most efficient beastie in the world.

    In other news, I’ve applied for 2 jobs, and screwed the application for a third (it submitted it when I logged out, despite it not being finished, although I’d still like to get an interview*). I’ve got a third that is in progress, and a fourth that I’m poking at.

    But today? Today is going through stuff in the garage. Woo.

    * I am not holding my breath.

  • Monday’s not the day

    But in my head it feels like the day.

    There’s no particular reason that I shouldn’t get a visa for the US. I’m not a terribly naughty person, beyond my ownership of a rather high number of MZs and my two soviet era watches, I don’t think I harbour enormous communist sympathies, and I’ve (so far) not been kicked out of the US on my trips there.

    I’m a reasonably well educated person with a fair potential for being a productive member of US society.

    And my health is pretty good. Yes, I’ve got a bit of a crap liver, but apparently something like 20% of people have a fatty liver – probably more – because most people never find out. Just that routine blood tests before an operation in my past picked it up. I now eat more healthily, exercise more, and that seems to have at least fixed my blood results… So I don’t really think that there’s a good reason to deny me entry on health grounds.

    But Monday is the medical.

    Which means that I get to trek to London, have the deep joy of going through my medical history, then hopefully at any point in the 6 weeks after that I might have a visa in my grubby little hands.

    Obviously, we still need to sell the house, two cars, a bunch of non-usefully-exportable tools (like, say, my drill-press, which I used once, or the shredder, which I did use, but got fed up with it being so noisy), clear a million books, make a container to transport my vinyl and gramophones in… pack everything, organise the shipping of the piano and some of our nicer bits of art…

    …Rebecca needs to go to JLH for the expensive repairs and modifications to get her back roadworthy.

    …it’s not like our move will be superquick once that visa’s here.

    But it’s making it very real and quite scaryexciting.

    And yes, yes, I know people do far more scaryexciting things. They go and live on deserted islands, or near volcanoes, or they move to some place where they don’t speak the language. But this is big for me. I, like most people, have never lived outside the island (country) I was born in. So it’s big.

    On the plus side, my friends Nikki and Kate will already be in the country, in their nice new house. Hopefully just a month and a half ahead of us.

  • I have done stuff

    So we’ve been away. I’ll tell you about that later (summary: Norway is awesomepretty).

    Next week is my USA medical.
    6 Weeks after that I might have my visa.
    Which is terrifying and exciting and scary.
    Work know, now. Because they asked me to apply for a more senior position, and I had to explain that I can’t because…I’m planning to leave.

    Which means that the house needs to be ready like yesterday to go on the market. Which it’s not. It’s nearly, but it’s not. Today I ran around and touched up the paint in the kitchen using paint which, thankfully, has not merely survived in the garage but actually it’s pretty much invisible when used as touch-up paint. Some of it needs a second coat because I managed to yank it back to bare plaster with the masking tape, but it’s looking pretty much okay. The bit around the where the worksurfaces were installed that I filled…when they were installed… that’s looking much better now it’s been sanded and painted. It’s kind of odd to have put up with this stuff being not quite right for so long, and then to fix it in minutes. (I’ve updated The List, incidentally).

    Next up is the mortar under the sink and the render at the back of the house. Which means going and getting some ready mix mortar (for speed, I think that’s wise). Which I’m trying to coax myself into doing now – but having just come back from Norway I’m feeling that things are financially a little tight.

    A feeling compounded by talking to Jonathon at JLH who advised me to get the gearbox I’ve got rebuilt (or buy a rebuilt one – and then suggested getting a much higher spec one given the torque available from the electric motor…) and get the axle similarly treated – which did painful things to the price of the work on my minor. I fluctuate between option A of getting all the bits for the EV conversion installed now, so all we need to do is, essentially, battery pack and motor when we get there, or option B of putting in a recon minor gearbox – but the cost of a really good gearbox that’ll tolerate the fast-road cam’d engine is pretty close to the cost of a type 9 ford box, and then…well, it just seems foolish to not do the rest. Feh.

  • The Awesome Power

    So I’ve given in. I don’t think I mentioned on here, but we finally bought a modern car (lookie, a post at Transport Evolved, where I’m a staff writer now!). I’m planning to cut my hours at my main job to do a bit more agency work; with the theory being that we might be able to save a more significant sum of money up. I suspected that the Austin would probably not tolerate this very well, and moreover given that there’s less than 500 of them left, in total, it seemed a shame to throw that many miles onto it.

    Not only that, but we saw this (which when the link dies is a small live/work shop in Port Townsend that we can actually afford to buy outright). It’s fracking tempting, and I have this sort of sensation that we really should just go for it, but also, we don’t want to end up in the US broke and with no health insurance. That way lies insanity.

    On the other hand, if we owned somewhere outright our outgoings’d drop pretty dramatically.

    But our house isn’t finished and so isn’t terribly sellable, so that kind of puts a crimp in that concept anyway.

    Anyhow, as part of the process of selling the Austin off (which if anyone’s interested, I’m looking for around £1700) I’ve scrounged Nikki’s DA polisher, some paint restorer and some of her much-higher-quality-than-I-use-car polish. So I wandered outside this afternoon having completed my other exciting tasks for the day (go and get a polishing sleeve for the polisher; clean the steering wheel and switchgear and some other bits and bobs of the new car because they were hideously filthy it having been owned by a builder; spent several (quite a lot of) minutes trying (and failing) to persuade the Prius and the iPhone to talk / transfer contacts; organising Kathryn’s anniversary present…) and I gathered together the stuff to wash and polish the car.

    I washed it and grabbed the cutting compound… it said ‘wash and dry the car’ so I waited whilst it dried, applied the cutting compound and followed the instructions which ended with allow to dry. Literally as I finished applying the last bit to the roof it started to rain.

    I waited it out for a while, washing the Prius somewhat (which needs some cutting back in a few places too, being as a few places have paint transferred from other objects that the previous owner’s run into on them) before finally wiping off the worst of the cutting compound from the austin with the rain and heading inside. I really need to get it sold though because (a) I could do with some of the money back from the insurance and (b) It’s just sat cluttering up the street and (c) I could use the money back from the Austin to pay for some of the stuff that I had done to it to get it decently roadworthy. So I may have to have a look at it this weekend. Once it’s cleaned I need to tidy up the joint in the exhaust that I threw together when I was putting it on in a hurry (which is leaking), clean the inside and photograph the car. Then it should be good to go.

    I’m hoping this will feel like progress because at the moment I’m feeling terribly frustrated. We’re hoping to try for baby-stuff again this month, which should also feel like progress; but having been on holiday the house feels very stalled; and we’ve neither of us made great progress on the planning of the grand adventure nor of the possibility of just dropping that and going to start our bookshop.

    Feh, basically.

  • Mini Triptych

    – I am becoming an occasional staff writer for Transport Evolved. Don’t think I don’t see the irony in that, I own a bike from the 1930s (pushbike), a 60’s car, a 70’s car and a pre-production EV. That said, I’m the head of The Electric Minor Project, so that probably has more to do with it! You can see my Staff Car Report up there, if you’re so inclined.

    – I keep getting lost down the rabbit hole with respect to our media server. It’s reached the end of hardware support for my chosen OS and I keep thinking, well, should I actually replace it. It still works… Anyhow I’ve been dinking and still go no answer, but am pleased to find I’m just as geeky as I always have been and am quite happy to spend an inordinately long time trying to work out what the cost/benefit ratio is of getting each processor. And how far back in history I have to go to get a decent one. And whether I’m better off getting an older-faster or a newer-architecture-slower one.

    – Our dishwasher’s died and it turns out I still dislike doing the washing up. I’m not sure how long my streak of ‘I will wash up every day’ will survive. Part of me thinks I should look at the dishwasher and see if I can fix it, but frankly, it’s 15 years old – at least – and is shorting to earth, only intermittently at the end of its cycle. Spares for it are, broadly speaking, unavailable. Leading me to conclude that I probably can’t be arsed to fix it. Which is terrible. And I am a terrible, weak person, but buying a replacement second hand one just seems much, much easier. Never mind.

  • That futzed with the plan

    So, I had this simple plan for today: Get up early, take Rebecca for MOT. She passes MOT. I spend rest of day either pottering in garden or recording podcast.

    Actually the day went: Drive to MOT. Fail on a few minor points (no pun intended), then drive back via parts store, then grab lunch, then reorganise the garage so there’s more space, then… well.

    First up was the washer pump. The old pump’s been moderately pathetic for quite a while. It still sort of worked, but most of the spray was kind of directed onto the screen surround unless it happened to be in an astonishingly enthusiastic mood.

    So, it was out with the old…

    Out with the old...

    And in with the new. Which would have been awesome but for the fact that the generic washer pump I picked up has a substantial design flaw. One of those design flaws where you look at it and think ‘Really? Really? You didn’t think that was a problem?’. Can y’guess what it is?

    Untitled

    Didja get it?

    Both the holes for the screws are behind the supply and output pipes (which are moulded into the body of it) and, as a bonus, on one end they’re behind the power connectors too. Well done Generic Brand designer. Fortunately, because it’s made of cheap nasty plastic it was bendable enough that I could brute-force-bend it enough to get the screwdriver in to get one of the screws properly tight. The other screw is a bit more of a problem, but I’m really not sure how to fix it short of an entertaining bit of 3D printing to make the damn thing some kind of bracket with clips. Either that or tightening the screw edge-on using pliers :-/

    Oooh, or I could replace it with a teeny tiny hex-bolt. Cunning. I might do that.

    Untitled

    Anyhow, the washer fluid now hits the screen in a most vigorous way. Cleaning the screen with vim and enthusiasm. So I also changed the somewhat leaky windscreen-wiper-washer, which, it turned out was a bonus level challenge because the windscreen wiper spindle comes through at a subtly different angle than the chrome finisher is meant to fit, so the rubber doesn’t fit at all. In the end I used two of them on the one side to give me a bit more thickness in an attempt to make it fit. The other side doesn’t really leak, so I’m going to leave that for the minute.

    Then we had to explore the brakes. There were two failure points:

    – Nearside brake binding
    – Brake imbalance

    Now I could have assumed that the brake imbalance was due to the brake binding, but thankfully I didn’t. A quick look in the off-side drum revealed a partial cause for the imbalance; everyone’s favourite paper gasket had failed. Again. Oh ho.

    Yes, it's everybody's favourite oil seal failure...

    So my brakes had a thin coating of oil on them. Again.

    Although I’d picked up new brake shoes I’d not bothered to get anything else; I mean, why would I? So a quick dance with the stanley knife and the cardboard from a packet of ice-lollies later I produced a new gasket. This is, of course, the oldest trick in the book. Well, one of ’em. I also popped a thin coating of silicone gasket sealant on it this time since I did that to the other side and that, finally, seems to have stopped the recurrent failures. I have a feeling though that I’ll need to repeat this with a paper gasket instead of the cardboard one I’ve made up because I imagine it’ll leak again :-/

    Of course the plan is, as part of the EV conversion, to switch it for an Escort rear axle and a Sierra gearbox. So it would be amusingly ironic if I finally got the seals to both be perfect now.

    Anyhow, having tweaked that and the brakes on the other side which seemed to be over adjusted-up (oddly, since I’ve not adjusted them since the service 2000 miles ago), things seem better. The handbrake is coming on at 4 clicks like it should. If it’s not good enough then either I or the garage will have the joy of replacing the shoes (I’ve got them, just didn’t really want to waste the barely used ones that were on the car, even if they’re a bit oil contaminated).

    Then there was the misadjusted headlamps. They’ve been ‘a bit low’ since she was returned to the road, and every MOT has been kind of scraped through on that front. I don’t know if the suspension’s settled a bit, or if the guy today was a weeny bit more picky, or indeed, the simple fact that the fuel tank was all but empty was enough to tip the scales against her, but she failed on that too. I’ve tweaked them both up a bit, but it’s kinda guess work. We don’t have a flat area with sufficient room to back up that we can adjust the headlights properly. Unfortunately, this brought me into close contact with the plastic headlamp dome, which it turns out is a terrible fit. After several minutes of me fiddling, I managed to get the headlamp ring back on and screwed on, but it…well, it’s still loose and any degree of tightening in one area makes it want to pop off from somewhere else. Modern parts really can be quite rubbish.

    The funniest thing about the day was I rang the garage to check up that I’d hit all the points on the MOT list, and the guy proclaimed “I thought you’d fix it, well, I hoped you would. It’d’ve been disappointing if you didn’t”. Hopefully we can trundle up on Saturday with the iMiEV and the Minor and come back with both of them sporting new MOTs.

    To be honest I’d’ve quite liked to go out for my nice lunch at Hart’s instead of spending the day lying by the car. But hey, needs must… :-/

  • One of those days

    Not, oddly, one of those days where you wonder about whether your continued existence on the planet will ever produce anything tangible and worthwhile, or whether you are instead doomed to spend the entirety of the rest of your life looking at cat pictures on the internet*.

    No, today was one of those super productive days.

    I’m wondering if I need to write myself a to-do list for every day when I’m not working because the effect was astonishing.

    On my list was the following:

    – Clean some house
    – Practice Guitar
    – Practice Piano
    – Order power supply connector
    – Bottle cider
    – Garden
    – ?Print sepsis card

    And apart from the sepsis card all of it got done and some other bits and bobs. Also I listened to lots of music, which is a bonus.

    (more…)

  • Oh hai, it’s January

    So, it is traditional this time of year to look back on the past year and think ‘what did I achieve’ and discern whether it was ‘a good year’ or not. My vague notions about last year is that I didn’t really make much progress on the house, and that it was a quiet but not unpleasant year, for the most part. However, as with my friend’s recollections, thousands of miles away my general opinion wasn’t exactly the whole story.

    It started well enough, with the discovery of Rise, the music store in Bristol, where I make infrequent pilgrimages and fawn hopelessly over the ranks and ranks of records. The fresh stacks of vinyl make me want to spend all the money. Every time I head in there I find my bank account substantially lighter on leaving, and frequently seem to pass from not knowing of a thing’s existence, to utter total desire without pause. It’s both terrible and wonderful simultaneously.

    Not only that but I took my aged BBC Master around to my friend John’s, and he applied his L337 soldering skills and replaced the dodgy capacitors before they could expire. It functioned exactly as it should, lending hope to the possibility that I can inflict it on our child, when s/he is old enough to want a computer. Heh. Actually, I think our child will get something akin to the Pi. When I got my computer the deal was “here are some basic games, if you want more you’ll have to write ’em” which I think is a fair way to do things :)

    Anyhow, so it was an auspicious start. Flicking through blog entries made me finally take stock of what I’d achieved on the house over the year, and perhaps I’d been unduly harsh on myself. Perhaps, when you look at it, I’ve actually achieved a fair amount. In the last year I:

    – Finished decorating the bathroom (which was essentially decorating the bathroom and plumbing in the new shower)
    – Painted the downstairs half of the hallway
    – Built and installed the understairs storage
    – Insulated under the house
    – Designed and made the kitchen lighting
    – Built the top surface of the deck, including sinking 4 posts in to the ground
    – Completely decorated Kathryn’s office

    Amongst that there were a number of smaller jobs like installing the telephone, adding a radiator to the central heating, adding in bits of trim, repairing other bits and bobs that broke throughout the house.

    Y’know, given that I’m working full time and had various other projects ongoing last year, I don’t think that’s a bad list.

    As I say I had a number of other projects ongoing, my beloved Minor’s disintegrated differential was finally replaced after months sat at the front of the house being sad. I’m still working on the Electric Minor Project, and have a potential sponsor to contact, which has led me to fawn hopelessly over Adobe In-Design. My background with Ovation Pro (which, assuming it still works in modern versions of Windows I highly recommend to anyone needing a cheaper DTP package for Windows) came in handy because it had many of the features of In-Design and works in fundamentally the same way. Playing with layout and design is quite delightful, and one of the few things in IT that I think I could get quite into if my career in nursing ever went south.

    Anyhow, so the Minor is [touch wood] back on the road.

    However, it wasn’t all sunshine and bunnies. Last year witnessed the death of our plan to move to Canada. Nova Scotia telling me in the politest way possible that I would need to spend thousands of Canadian Dollars if we wanted to land up there. The difference between UK and Canadian nursing registration was simply too great. However, the good news is that we plan to move to the States, which will put us closer to Kathryn’s family and some of the awesome people (Kathryn’s friends that I’ve met too) over in the USA. We’re maybe looking at San Francisco, although it’ll be a while.

    We also found out that we can’t have the free solar panels installed. A fact which makes me very sad, because in all honesty, if the UK was like Germany our roof would be well within the benefit side of the cost-benefit analysis; solar panels in the UK being way more expensive than in Germany. This is because UK has decided that we’d like to pollute the planet and our local environment as rapidly and depressingly as possible, by fracking every last bit of this once green and pleasant land. Indeed, politically this has been one of the most heartrendingly awful periods I can recall. The Conservatives and their political lackeys, the Lib Dems, for whom, shamefully, I voted, have destroyed the few bits of Britain of which I was proud. The’ve pushed our xenophobic streak and also made this country hateful for it’s treatment of the poor, those with disabilities, the sick. They’ve divisively separated every minority group and demonised everyone who’s not rich.

    I recently saw a quote from Aneurin Bevan, the awesome angry Welshman who rounded up the Doctors and Nurses and said ‘Fix the people’.

    “Illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune, the cost of which should be shared by the community.”

    Which I think is a perfect way of describing illness. Mr Bevan rocked. Incidentally, he also said of the tories, this, which seems pretty accurate at the moment:

    So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin. They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation. Now the Tories are pouring out money in propaganda of all sorts and are hoping by this organised sustained mass suggestion to eradicate from our minds all memory of what we went through. (1945)

    Anyhow, enough depressing, because all in all it was actually a pretty good year.

    So, other projects are the ongoing attempt to re-rip music and video. That’s sort of fallen into stasis, but I really should get that going again. There are still massively large stacks of stuff that need to be re-ripped. All the DVDs/Blu-Rays, and still stacks and stacks of music. Actually, that’s pretty depressing to think about. It was a good starter project but maybe I need one of those lego diskchangers. Unfortunately so many of our disks fail to pull down art, or fail to get listings… which completely screws up the rapid disk ripping.

    Oh, actually, whilst we’re on depressing, I sold my motorbike. I, for the first time in many years, am without motorcycle for the long term. The thing is though, I’ve no excuse to ride them. And not enough money to just ‘have’ a motorbike kicking around. Nor the space. So… Yeah. But I do miss it. It’s like not having a bit of me. One day I’ll have a Zero or somesuch.

    We also, on a more cheery note, sold Chester. We ran all over France, toured the place, and having pushed him really hard travelling down to the base of the Alps and back we sold him and switched to our much loved iMiEV. You gotta love an electric car, they’re just flipping awesome. Not only that, but it’s also managed to get me a little bit of fame writing as a guest writer on the Transport Evolved website. I need to have a ponder about more things to write about because I’ve enjoyed writing them. I also got featured, briefly, on the Kyocera blog. Not my writing, but a brief bit about our aged Kyocera FS-1030D which continues to provide sterling service and provides endless glee when it prints wirelessly.

    And on the writing front, I also did NaNoWriMo. Didn’t finish it, but I’m still working on the book, which is interesting. I’ve never written a novel before, it may be awful, but it’ll be my bit of awful. I need to find some people to look at it, so if anyone wants to read a not very good first-half of a detective novel (be my Beta testers!) then let me know :)

    I also, for the first year ever (I think) managed to push out a full year of Dead Bug Jumping. Something I’m quite proud of, because it’s actually a fair amount of work to produce new episodes.

    Oh, and there were a few other minor achievements. I finished and passed my MSc. And I got a permanent Senior Staff Nurse position… so, job wise, that’s pretty good.

    I think all in all I achieved a fair bit in 2013. Some things didn’t go at all the way I’d hoped. Some things went very well, and y’know, screw my sense of ‘I didn’t work hard enough’. I clearly bloody did. Stupid brain.

    So here’s to 2014. Let’s hope it’s a good one.

  • What is this shit?

    So, I know I’m harping on about it but. Look, sometimes I forget how much I enjoy driving the minor. Driving the minor is a properly visceral experience. It’s so simple, there’s as little between you and the road as there realistically can be. It would be considered pared down, except that at the time, that’s just how you built cars.

    Tonight I slipped into ‘that place’, with Filthy/Gorgeous playing on the radio, Rebecca’s engine humming along, and winding country backroads between here and Bath*. That place where it all comes together, the car is gripping the road like a limpet, the road is clear and the whole thing is just bucket loads of fun. The exhaust note of that 1300 A series engine is wonderfully musical, and in the moment the whole thing, that whole package, it’s delightful. The entire point of putting a fast-road 1300 A+ engine in a minor is that the car is delicious like that.

    A well tuned minor, on good suspension**, with brakes up to snuff is quite simply a joy to drive.

    Then I got home, and had to put the car in the garage.

    And whilst our garage is pretty darn big by UK standards, the garage doors are pretty narrow. So it’s a careful shuffle to get in. And it’s not like it took a long time, I did in about one more than the customary 2 shuffles. It did take a little longer than normal because I forgot that I’d put a box off the shelf on the floor earlier today, and that stopped me getting in. So, maybe in all an extra minute.

    After all that – the garage was full of fumes. It was hideous. Kathryn was coughing and I stepped out of the garage with a headache. Having dipped our toe (rather an expensive toe, I’ll grant) in the EV waters, we’ve found it warm, inviting and perhaps above all, so clean and quiet. And the idea of taking Rebecca on that journey with us fills me with delight (and a little trepidation, because we’re heading in to territory that I don’t know well). But I’m quite excited, and need to go save up lots of cash so I can make it happen :)

    And we can stop burning this hideous dinosaur juice.

    It is funny though, we’re so used to it that we just think that’s the way it has to be, and then you discover it doesn’t need to be that way and…well… it just doesn’t. It makes you think about things.

    * I was off to Topping and Co to see Deb Perelman talk.
    ** My car may not be standard at the back on the suspension front, but the front end is pure Issigonis.