Mostly lemon based

Category: Moggie

Stuff directly related to my Beloved Moggie Minor

  • You can’t fit better’n a fuel filter

    Somewhat tardily I put in a fuel filter on both DAFs today. I say somewhat tardily because after quite a lot of investigation I found this in the carb on Jejy:

    Which I dug out with a screwdriver, tissue paper, and cotton buds – giving me this:

    Yes it does look like fine-brown sugar. Yes that did go into my engine. Yes I have sod-all compression on one cylinder.

    I realised I was possibly screwed when I looked at the butterfly in the carb and saw a layer of crudy-rusty-dirt the same as was in the float chamber. I did everything correctly all the same; popped in an inline fuel filter before I started her, somewhat hopefully. The erratic idle’s gone, but the engine still runs like pants on a stick. I’ve no idea what ‘healthy’ values are for the compression on a DAF 44 – on the minor I think it’s around 140lb/in2. Jejy returned 110psi and 70 psi. I know 70 is too low.

    There was also a cheerful line of sooty oil sprayed out the exhaust when I moved her.

    Tomorrow I shall ring places and obtain quotes. I may as well get them to do the clutch shoes as well, frankly, since the engine has to come out. All please pray.

    I’ve also asked JLH for a quote for the minor. That needs prayer too.

    Anyway, now it’s time for me to convince Cardiff to let me be a postgrad despite my attrocious grades on my BScs :(.

  • Moop

    So, another week of nights approaches, and we’re trying to get a car ready to go on holiday. The minor’s exhaust is fouling the suspension, which should be fairly easily fixed. Rebecca is the most likely candidate; only the noisy gearbox and worn diff and suspension being a problem. Jejy’s right out. Vixy’s heading that way too. In fact, Vixy is looking like she might end up being a parts car for Jejy. In so far as I might pinch the engine, and possibly the seats.

    Jejy then gets all new hoses, all new front brakes, new shoes, and a 21k mile engine. Vixy gets a worn out 79k mile engine and shipped off to a new home, keeping her new brake shoes and brake cylinders.

    In other news I forked out for a new charger for the batteries. Years ago when I bought some Uniross rechargable NiMHs I went for the nicer charger that they had. It did NiCds and NiMHs and all seemed well, until, obviously, I looked deeper into the ‘my batteries seem to die awfully quickly). It turns out it can’t deal with more than 2,000mAh batteries. It’s timer, not ΔV based, which means it’s never, ever charged the batteries properly. The new charger (VapexTech, had a good review, somewhere) is ΔV based (although it has an over-time shut-off), sports specs for 2900mAh batteries (my highest capacity ones say 3,000mAH but probably aren’t after having never been charged properly), and came with 4 shiny new 2,900mAH batteries. Hopefully the holiday snaps should be snappable.

    Also, in the name of longevity it runs on anywhere from 100-250V at anything from 50-60Hz. Woot for portability.

    Now, I’m gonna go shower and get working on the DAF. I need to get the rear brake drum off, because there is, what looks like a leak. Impressive, I feel, since when I tried to bleed it no fluid came out. A whole and proper WTF moment.

    Anyhow. Shower. Car*.

    * We were meant to be going protesting today. Can’t though, ‘cos we need transport. Granted we don’t need transport more than we need to be able to breathe, but it’s all a matter of timing :-/

  • ‘m okay!

    So, my good friend Nikki rang me up after the last post, concerned that I sounded very down and wanting to check I was okay. She’s kind and thoughtful like that.

    So I thought I’d just say, I’m okay. It’s perhaps a healthy dose of realism time. I’ve been sticking solidly to the “the house will sell for enough and we’ll go to Canada” belief because of the options we’ve got it’s my favourite. To use the house metaphore, it’s the one I’ve built foundations for, I’d been looking at the plans and preparing to get contractors. It worked thusly:

    Buy house
    Fix house
    Sell house, use funds thus obtained to enable us to
    1) Go to Canada
    2) Me to pay off *all* my debts
    3) Have some savings to live off in Canada if it all goes pearshaped
    And I’d added:
    4) Hopefully have enough that some of those savings can be scooped off for our notional world trip in a few years time.

    There wasn’t really a plan B. I knew that the housing market was going to plummet in just the way that bricks do, I just hoped it did it after I’d (now) we’d sold. Unfortunately, my hopes lacked the strong foundations of reality.

    The new ‘plan’, for want of a better word, is to finish the house (because whether we’re living in it, or selling it, I’d rather like it not to niggle like a splinter. The unfinished floor in the lounge, the dirty old door* in our shiny new kitchen), get it valued and make the rest of the plan based on the outcome of that.

    – Sell and get to Canada ASAP
    – Sell and move somewhere else in the UK (I don’t need to clear my debts to do that**)
    – Enjoy the lovely environs of Slough.

    I’m rooting for A, hoping that at worst B comes off and trying to think about ways to make C more bearable. Ironically, the house is coming together to be a really lovely place. The garden should be beautiful this year, and even more so next; there should be fruit and fresh veg, herbs and gorgeous flowers…

    If it weren’t for the builder’s yard right behind it would be glorious*** .

    Anyway, so I’m okay. I’m just…. disappointed.

    In other news, I just realised that I’ve owned Rebecca 17 years. That was quite a shock. And in another quirky thing I’ve never noticed before; she was first registered on my mum’s birthday. How bizzare is that? It’s funny how coincidence pops up on you.

    Now, What shall I do with this last hour before I go to work? I’ve swept the bedroom (and put clothes away), and looked depressingly at my Student Loan deferment thing (I think I may finally have to actually start paying back the loans****). Hrm, maybe I’ll watch some Holmes on Holmes.

    Tomorrow is another day, and I’m hoping a day when bits of DAF might turn up.

    * Needs the 1960s hardboard overcoat taking off, then it needs stripping and painting.
    ** I don’t, I suppose, technically need to clear my debts to move to Canada, but it really makes everything a lot more complicated if I don’t. And it makes living much harder to do. It’s bad enough here where I can go and chat and shuffle my lack of money around. There… well…
    *** It *was*, when I moved in, a wild untended lot. It was pretty.
    **** Confusingly my loans are owned by two separate companies. I’m not sure if I’ll get two separate student-loan-deferment letters, and need to make payments to two separate companies. That would be distressing. But only one of them has been flagged as ‘needing payment’ in this letter. It appears I won’t make my dream of never paying them back by remaining a poorly paid wage-slave.

  • Another day in the dirt

    Not all car stuff today; to skip the car stuff just scroll down to where it proclaims that car stuff endeth. :)

    So, today I shuffled the cars to get the Minor on the drive, and whipped off the ill-fitting exhaust, separated the 45 degree segment at the base of the downpipe (which I spent about 40 minutes attacking last time with ‘penetrating oil’, this time I got the Plus-Gas on it, and the thing just came apart. Simple as that). Then, with Kathryn’s help, we reattached the exhaust.

    Only took from 11am to 3pm. I’m not very good at exhaust fitting, and having done it we drove into town and… it’s rattling against something at the back. Usually this is the exhaust hitting the fuel tank; not a soothing noise at the best of times; so that’s something to attack later.

    Then I spent about half an hour adjusting the mixture. She’s been running rich and idling too high. A bit of a tweak to that and she’s now idling at a much more sensible speed and lord knows what the mixture’s doing. I suck at setting carbs up, I keep meaning to buy a colortune to aid in my attrociousness. The DAFs have a much more ‘relaxed’ carb than the HiF44 in the Minor, which is slightly worn (not terribly so, she doesn’t hunt horribly at idle) and which has proper mixture adjustment.

    Still, she’s running okay, so I’m going to presume it’s alright for the minute.

    Next week will be more car stuff, hopefully, in so far as I’m hoping that the brake bits will arrive for Jejy and Vixy and we can get them assembled.

    Then comes the difficult decision, which of the cars to take on holiday with us. We’re looking at around 1000 miles plus whatever motoring we do while we’re there. The minor’s swivel pins are worn, but I don’t know how badly. Jejy’s a big no-no, without the new clutch drum she’s not going anywhere far (so that’s easy), but Vixy? Vixy’s kind of an unknown quantity. Unknown quantities aren’t good for holiday relaxing, I find, but on the other hand she’s been recently serviced by a garage, she’ll have new brakes, she’s got a spare pair of belts in the boot…

    …and only 21k on the clock.

    We’ll see.

    Anyway, hopefully we’ll have less car-posts for y’all once this is done. Then we can return to the ‘house posts’

    car stuff endeth here

    Mind you, I ought to do a garden post because the garden is *awesome*. Kathryn spent time today breaking up soil and prepping it, then planted some of our wild-flower seeds; she’s hacked down pruned the buddleia, out the front, which officially needs to be dug up and moved into the raised bed at the front, but since the builders haven’t quoted (or contacted me) then, uh, that’s not quite happening yet. The back garden is looking really very nice; when she takes the photos off her camera and flickr’s them I’ll linky.

    It is just amazing to look at the ground and go ‘my god, they’re beans. They are our beans, that we planted and they’re growing. I could get quite into gardening, I fear. It’s really lovely though, to go out there, in the nice weather we’ve been having and see plants we planted growing, and indeed growing well. It’s not like either of us is particularly ‘green fingered’, but we’ve got good soil, and my mum’s around to help and advise us (and Kathryn’s mom is available for advice too :) ) and it’s come together to be a really restful place, potentially.

    And the lie and deception which is the gravel-over-concrete path appears to be working.

    Anyhow, now it’s time to make dinner. So I shall scoot.

  • It’s a rockery

    Or, possibly a breeze-blockery. One or other.

    Before I get started on this update, can I share a moment? We were expecting (to use a very loose term, I think faintly hoping is more what I was doing) that we would have a delivery of top-soil today. Our local top-soil merchant having given us a price which is much better than one of the national companies (but also means it’s almost certainly not screened, graded soil). Yesterday they didn’t turn up, and I had a little book running in my head regarding today’s excuse.

    Sorry, we…
    a) had problems with equipment
    b) over-ran on the previous job
    c) got stuck in traffic coming back from our previous job
    d) had to close early due to a sudden onset of bubonic plague
    e) were overrun on site by a horde of marauding miniature nuns (skateboarding nuns, no less) demanding all our topsoil for a new convent garden they were building

    It was of course e, uh, I mean, a, today. But it did make me wonder, do builders have a magic-8 ball which they shake when a customer rings? Or do they have an excuse of the day message e-mailed to them?

    Apparently he will ‘personally’ deliver the topsoil tomorrow. I will believe it when the annoyingly large pile of dirt is on our driveway.

    Anyway, we went to Tummies for lunch, the service was somewhat lackadaisical, not dreadful, but not brilliant. I was slightly less than impressed that they pulled the panini from the chiller (and Kathryn’s sandwich) – at the price they’re charging I’d expect a bit better’n that (given that for much less in a similarly nice cafe in Brizzy you pull things from the fridge and they toast ’em). But the food was good, and it’s a pleasant (and less paint-y) environment. And we needed to celebrate Kathryn’s test-passitude.

    Anyhow, after shopping and a somewhat lax period of web-browsing, I headed out to the garden to move rubble. I’ve moved a slightly distressingly small amount of rubble, although I did create the basis for the breeze-blockery (aka rockery, aka good-way-to-disguise-a-pile-of-rubble). It includes, at the moment, an impressively large lump of concrete which I have no means of getting to the tip. Once the earth arrives, we shall pile it all over the damn thing, and then wedge some nicer stones in it, and some of those rockery-type-plants and no-one shall know the evil lying beneath; at least, not until they go forth and attempt to move it.

    Plan is to put a fence segment up behind it (between it and the compost bin) and thus hide the big-black compost bin from the view out of the windows. Of course, the big plain brick wall will still be there.

    Oooh, there’s a lot of fumes in here now, I may have to move.

    Anyway, the undercoat’s gone on the door frame, Kathryn’s working on my anniversary prezzie, (I cheated and bought her something, but it must be said I just looked at it and wanted to give it to her right there and then, so ordering it and waiting was pretty good). Rebecca’s booked in to have her exhaust sorted on Friday*, and the oven’s on to cook dinner.

    Today has been a day where much has been accomplished. Ra :)

    ETA: The laptop, incredibly, has a bid on it. i.e. it has sold. Even despite the description.

    *I should ring the gearbox reconning company about the gearbox but can’t pay for it until I’ve been paid anyhow. And there’s still no signs of the king/swivelpins; a somewhat significant component in the front suspension which have now been on back-order with most MM companies for over a year. A situation which borders on the ludicrous.

  • Wakey wakey rise and shine

    Said my body at 4:45am. I’m not quite sure why, I think I was woken by my throat, and then my brain started listing all the things I need to do today. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) Kathryn said I wasn’t to do anything that might upset my throat further – so my cunning plan to strip the paint on the door frames, and uh, paint them is off*.

    I’ve still got a fair bit to get on with. When the frost’s melted a bit I need to take jejy round to the tyre place, having found that the ‘slow’ puncture’s got quicker, and that it’s leaking from the valve. Now I can point and go “look, it’s leaking from the valve; that’s definately your fault, please fix it”. I also am debating getting an external enclosure for my now spare SATA hard drive (what? why?!)…

    Let me explain. I want to sell the G5 Mac. The G5 Mac currently sports 2 largish harddrives, a lot of memory, a 20″ monitor, a 14″ LCD monitor and so on. To sell it, I have two options:

    1) Dump all my data onto and remove the second HDD.
    2) Copy all my data onto the 500Gb ex-entertainment-Hackintosh drive in an external drive case and then nuke the two drives.

    I think the latter is probably the better solution. Whilst it will cost 20 quid, it will probably add more than 20 quid to the value of the Mac, selling it with two big hard drives in. Mind you, if one of them is bigger than 500Gig it’ll be being swapped around.

    At any rate, I’ve been travelling in the DAF a lot recently, and it’s come to my attention that the Radiomobile radio doesn’t work…

    It did work when we got the car, it stopped working a while ago, and has not spontaneously reanimated itself. But I rather like the look of it. Ratty and tatty though it is, it’s part of the car’s 1970s charm. The plasti-chrome is peeling and the volume knob turns on it’s spindle. But I have a solution. Rip out its guts and throw them away.

    I’ve finally found a cheapie company making (almost certainly lousy quality) automotive amplifiers (but you’re in a car with no soundproofing to speak of). In fact, the one I’ve bid 75p for (but £9.99 shipping) also sports 2 inputs (but no means of switching between them, switches, presumably, are extra). But since I intend to gut the poor wee beastie, that’s fine. I’m also hopefully going to get my grubby little hands on one of the Matsui DAB tuners. Back before I planned to move to Canada I debated buying one of these for the Minor. But they were 30 quid at the time.

    Now, at a few quid second hand, they’re tempting to again be the subject of my soldering iron. The plan is simple; gut the DAB tuner, gut the amplifier, make Radiomobile into DAB tuner. Leave socket for MP3/CD player. And lo, we’ll have the perfect modern stereo in a 70s box.

    Mind you, that’s how it is in my head. How it’ll work in practice is another question. The other thing I quite fancy, having driven the car a while now, is a small amount of illumination around the air vent controls and the hot/cold air selector sliders.

    I usually end up waving my arms around under the dashboard to find them (when driving in the dark) so a little glowy white LED illuminating the up/down arrows seems quite tempting to me. And a little red/blue illumination on the hot air and cold air sliders also seems like quite a nice idea (potentially mounting them in a small piece of sanded perspex to diffuse the light). I’m slightly concerned she might look a little boy-racer though with the blue/red glow eminating from the dash, but at least I’d be able to control the temperature while driving without too much concentration. I’m also slightly concerned that I might get overly attached to Jejy. But hey.

    This all comes about because I need to prepare Jejy to be Rebecca’s temporary replacement while I fit the diff (when it arrives), the gearbox (when it’s ready), the new swivel pins (when they’re manufactured; if ever), trunions, poly-bush the front suspension, and repaint the damaged paint areas of the engine bay. Oh, and strip out the dash, find all the things that are rattling, stop them from doing so, clean out the heater, fit a new inline heater control valve (from a golf, apparently), and potentially convert her to Left Hand Drive (which involves moving the brake master cylinder and associated plumbing, remanufacturing the dash I made (otherwise the worry gauges will all be in front of the passenger), fitting the other gearbox front plate and somehow working out how to lock and unlock the passenger door from the outside), oh and ideally fitting a heated rear window that works, and in a perfect world sending off the speedo to be recalibrated, the revcounter to be reinternalised and the clock to be made to work (a car with a working clock! that’d be a novelty).

    Just a short list of jobs…

    So Jejy may have to do service for the minor for a while. Which is why I fancy a radio and a CD input.

    Anyway, today I need to get my act together and sell the Mac, and possibly the Dell (although I doubt the dell is going to sell). And in aid of getting started, I shall now have my breakfast.

    * Yes, yes, I know she’s right, but it seemed like a good idea in my head :)

  • Amazingly, I’m not working on the car

    It’s Sunday, it’s cold out, and guess what. I’m inside!

    Inside!

    I can feel all my limbs, my peripheries are not the temperature of something you’d normally drop in a cocktail, and I can’t see my breath. The lights fading and I’m not struggling to put in bolts in the half-light.

    The minor has an exhaust, I’m not rating it as the best fitting exhaust in all of christendom, it’s an Aluminised Steel one so it hopefully last a few years longer than a plain mild steel one (before it rusts and drops off). I’ve poked at LJ, Kathryn and I went out for a drive in the DAF – we went out for one yesterday and on hitting 40mph the L plate (a magnetic one) peeled up and flicked off the front of the car, fluttering gently into traffic. Sadly it meant Kathryn couldn’t drive home from the store, so we checked the road today and couldn’t see it… Instead, today, we bought a static-cling one which is living behind the front windscreen – seeming less likely to go fluttering off.

    Assuming it’s not pissing down with rain tomorrow I may even take the little DAF round the corner and get the front and rear windows removed and refitted in an attempt to stop the high rate of water ingress.

    We’ve had a very nice breakfast, in a relaxed and quite decadent manner (Lady Grey tea, scrambled eggs with mushrooms and Parmesan; with toasted bagels and home* made jam (apple and ginger)) before we head out to inflict DAF on Slough. I’ve placed a bid on an e-bay Bread Maker – we appear to have missed the whole bread-makers being cool thing. Every shop appears to have stopped stocking them. The two laptops have all of a few quid between them – which is less great, but hopefully the watchers will bid in the last few minutes as normal.

    Jejy still has a few quirks, most noteably a distinct leftward urge when braking hard. The idle’s started to settle down now, which is nice, it was far too high (my fault) because I kinked the throttle cable (and also because I pulled it too taught). Other than that though, she’s been a good little car, and definately is running better with the new air filter, the new insulated king lead & the insulated HT leads… :)

    You’d think I’d’ve noticed the horrendous lack of insulation at some point earlier….never mind :)

    *My mum’s home, not ours…

  • Defeated by one nut.

    So, the plan was to do the clutch on the DAF. This is, obviously a simple job…

    1) Remove the bonnet, bumper and grille
    2) Detach all electrics (including the solenoid on the carb, the coil, the ….)
    3) Remove the air filter
    4) Remove the exhaust and heat exchangers
    5) Slip out the engine and clutch
    6) Change the clutch
    7) Put the whole darn lot back together.

    Theoretically a weekend should have been enough. Hell, with enough light and it being warm enough it should have been done in a day. Unfortunately, mid way through day two (siezed bolts, the fact it was freezing yesterday) this bolt intervened:

    DAF exhaust

    It is actually impossible to reach with ordinary spanners, a 3/4" wrench or a 1/2" wrench (even with a UJ inserted into the mix). I’m contemplating a set of S-shaped spanners but I’m not sure I can even get it off with them. I’m suspecting that the answer is: Angle grind off old exhaust (which I suspect may have been badly welded), Replace. Put on new exhaust with S-spanners. Unfortunately this doesn’t fit into the plan of having the car running tomorrow, or uh, any day this week.

    It’s very annoying to have been defeated by a single nut. Once that’s off the engine can come out and we can attempt to change the clutch shoes, but until it’s done we’re stuck with a DAF on ramps with a tarp over the front on our drive. Not really what we had in mind.

    On the plus side, we had a very, very nice dinner yesterday at Wagamamas in Windsor. And then came home and had a very nice evening at home :)

    Also on the plus points, the minor’s oil leak is now sorted, theoretically, and the heater while not pumping out heat is significantly warmer.

  • Shedloads of Cash

    Yesterday I engaged in shameless money grubbing, despite being exhausted I drove for an hour and a half after a revoltingly early wake up call, to go work in St. Marks Hospital for the Feverish and Sickly. I’ve done one shift there before – a night shift months ago – and bizzarely some of the staff were on again. And also somewhat confusingly we’ve had so many agency staff at the trust in which I work over the last few weeks that I knew a whole load of people who were at St. Marks yesterday – all of whom looked very confused when they realised I was out of my normal location. Not only that, but a member of the Ambulance Service who I thought seemed interesting, but never got around to working out how to say ‘hi, shall we meet up for a coffee some-time’*, and who recently left our area to work closer to home, happened to be on duty too. So it was kind of like working in my own department.

    I even knew how the system worked and were the drugs were… which was nice. It wasn’t that harder day, although being one of the agency nurses I got shuffled from one place to another through the morning, ended up doing admission assessments, having my own bay, looking after an observation ward… It was all fine though.

    Unfortunately, it has left me exhausted. The 3 hours of driving after how ever many days on shift has left me feeling drained. I slept in ’til nearly 10, which is incredibly unusual for me, and even now just ache. I need to sort out the exhaust on the mog, the front manifold of which is leaking like….well…something. Although I’ve asked (at long last) about the abandoned garage a couple of houses down, so if I’ve got access to that then that’d make all the jobs that need doing much more pleasant. Unfortunately, it also requires time; time which I don’t currently have. ONe would think that you’d either have time or money, and though this month through a process of working a ridiculous number of extra shifts I’m able to actually look at my bank account and not wince, which is nice.

    There may even be some to pay off the overwhelming debts that lurk on my credit card. And perhaps there’s the possibilty that Charles Ware’s Morris Minor centre might respond to my statement that I’m going to have to take them to court over the ‘restoration’ of Rebecca they did 7 years ago – in which case – the debt incurred fixing that restoration will be somewhat ameliorated.

    Anyhow, I need to get on with doing Kathryn’s present, the coffee doesn’t seem to have kicked in in quite the way I’d hoped, but I am at least upright.

    In other news I’ve sorted a place to sort the gearbox – so the new gearbox is off to them to be reconditioned (later today if I get off my arse) *and* I’ve got the clips to hold the trim in place on the DAF. Woo yeah!

    * I’m always faintly worried that it’ll (a) sound odd, particularly with the techs/paramedics because I barely know ’em, and (b) sound like some sort of come-on, when all I want to do is make some friends**
    ** Yes, I really suck at making friends.

  • There’s greasing to be done

    So, ‘becca’s covered a full 3000 miles since her rebuild and it’s service time. While the newly rebuilt A+ engine has somewhat longer service intervals than the A-series, the suspension, gearbox and back-axle are all original mog and need servicing every 3000 miles. It’s a clear blue sky out there and I’m going to shower and head to the store to get some oil and oil-fiter and bits and bobs (I’m not going to do the valve clearances, but I will ring Southam Metro Centre to see if they can fit me in any day before Xmas to get the 500 mile check over done; because they said just carry on driving and come back when you’ve got enough time free).

    I’m planning to take the fan-heater outside with me (the one with switches) so I can warm my toes and my hands as I need to – because despite the sun being ‘out’ it’s still frosty outside. I’m also planning a quick trip to the bank to deposit Kathryn’s half of the mortgage and such – and then I will get the stuff ordered for the DAF. I’m already going to have to move ‘er today, which is less than ideal, but I need the driveway space. My lax approach to asking about the garage on the corner means today’s service has to be conducted on the driveway. In the cold. Lying on a sheet of cardboard.

    I also need to sort out some means of getting music outside or I will, and I say this quite honestly, go nuts. I hate working on the car in silence, and I’ve done it often enough. I’ll probably run the cable round from the back of the house and dump the laptop on the wall. But I must admit to being slow about getting outside because it’s fucking freezing. It was cold *in* the house (this morning, it’s not now :) ). Outside it’s going to be even colder.

    Work continues to be incredibly short staffed, virtually every day they’ve offered me extra shifts – I’ve covered 2 this week and been offered another 2 – and we’ve been working with more agency staff in the department than I’ve ever seen before. We have had some truly excellent Thornbury nurses, which is not entirely surprising, but it’s good when you see how agency should be. People with plenty of A&E experience coming in, which makes it far easier to deal with than when you have lots of non-A&E staff.

    I’ve accidentally accepted a shift I shouldn’t have though. I’d meant to keep the day open for Agency, but forgot to put that on the Calendar. Ah well, at least I know I’ve got a shift.

    I need to send my agency my Plaster form and Suture form and Cannulation form too. Get that sorted this week, maybe.

    Sorry, this is emensely dull for you. Today’s journal post comes from the ‘Post it note of things to do’ genre. ;)

    Yeah, so anyhow, on other topics. Canada’s been lurking in my consciousness a lot recently. Contemplating logistics, and timings, and considering posting on the vancouver community (and possibly canadian lesbians) to get some input on ideas. Propsects for Kathryn’s job-interests, good hospitals, should we consider living in Richmond – or would it be like living in a giant Slough. Also wondered if there’s some kind of equivalent to housing auctions here – there – just because I’d like to look at Reno possibilities (not yet talked to Kathryn about that) – with the idea that we could live in place A, reno place B (or even get people in to do it) – and thus be able to land up in a house of our own (again) – ‘cos I like having a place which is ours. I like painting and decorating and the fact that we picked the decor, and we can change it when we want.

    I keep having this sort of pseudo-dream that I’m coming home from work and we’re living in Canada. It doesn’t get as far as ‘and I’m not working 3 jobs’, but I suspect that all the extra shifts I’ve been doing are factoring in to it.

    The unnerving thing is that to earn enough to pay off the credit card I’ll almost certainly earn over the threshold of starting to pay my student loan. Which I’ve been carefully avoiding for the last 6 years. In fact, I was hoping to make it, in some cunning way, to the point when they write the loan off (which iirc is around 50 years old). Unfortunately I’d like to earn enough to eat and go out – the two don’t necessarily coincide.

    One quick question though – I read this post in the Vancouver community – I can’t find anything about this new show (‘Paradox’) anywhere online – has anyone heard of it? Only it sounds quite cool – and I’m intrigued ‘n want to find out more about it…

    So – anyway – I need to go shower and get on with getting oily and dirty. Have fun with your days, y’all. Think of me, frozen to the floor outside.