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So, I had an appointment this morning, which is why the panic to get a car back on the road. Chester, bless his little rubber feet, is waiting for a part. Waiting for a part for a volvo 340 is much like waiting for Lemon Soaked Paper Napkins, although the garage have yet to ring back and say they “can’t get it” which is what usually happens with any non-service part.

Anyhow, so, poor Rebecca was yanked unceremoniously from the garage, and we made it, eventually, to the garage for the MOT, as I said yesterday.

She didn’t pass.

This is not wholly surprising, although it was quite irritating. Then things didn’t go quite to plan. At the MOT test station she decided she didn’t want to start again. After about 10 minutes they managed to get her to go, querying whether the vacuum advance on the distributor was playing up. It does, it must be said, not seem to be doing a lot. They suggested it was sticking, but given that I couldn’t get it to move at all I’m not sure how it would be sticking.

Anyhow, we pootled home. And then I tried to get into our garage. Now, getting into our garage’s second bay is a fine art, ideally practiced with two people. Mainly because one of the door currently sticks on the ground outside the garage, which is something I can rectify with a shovel and some time. I may do so today. There only being one of me (something of an inconvenience I’ve often felt) it took a little longer than would perhaps be desirable. Also, on one of the shuffles to get her aligned, she stalled and would…not….restart.

I unclipped the distributor cap, had a wiggle and a check over. Nothing was obviously amiss, and I went to clip it back together, only… PING! Away went the distributor cap clip into the gravel outside our garage. Gravel and weeds. I fished around on the floor. I moved the car back and fished around on the floor. I found a small magnet and my work lamp and fished around on the floor.

After a while of fishing I decided that this was a stupid way to spend an evening and zip-tied the distributor cap to the distributor.

She instantly started and purred into the garage with only a little more shuffling. Having got her in I made a start on the list of three fails:

– Exhaust hanger broken (yes, Nikki, I forgot about it)
– Exhaust blowing at front silencer
– Tight spot on steering (I’d noticed that on the way and couldn’t work out whether it was me imagining it or not).

After a lot of searching I located the spare exhaust hanger, trimmed it down and got it fitted.

Then I slathered the back of the silencer (which has already been welded twice) in exhaust paste.

Then I popped the steering wheel back off, and the cover back off the indicator switch and found that whilst I was arsing around with the steering column mount* I’d managed to move the indicator switch so that the cancelling pin was just fouling on one of the mounts, and thus creating a tight spot. Rejigging things showed, again, what an appauling fit the new indicators are but eventually I managed to hit the point where the cancelling mechanism is more or less in the right place and it’s not fouling. Unfortunately, en-route I found that the cancelling mechanism still isn’t working right :(

Anyhow, this morning, with my appointment at 9:45, I fled the house at 8:18, pulling up at the garage at 8:25. She was in, rechecked and back out by 8:45, and off I walked with my shiny, shiny MOT certificate.

Then I went to my local post office which, the Post Office website tells me issues tax disks. They don’t. However, Church Road post office does, which I arrived at at 9:14 (by my Moskva). New (free) tax disk obtained, and I flew across Bristol to my appointment, arriving fully 4 minutes early. Which is pretty darned impressive, I feel.

And Rebecca? She’s lovely. And later today I shall take her to a jetwash and get all the dust off her, because she deserves it.

*I’d forgotten to fit the plastic ring, and then done so without checking whether I’d disturbed the indicator switch mount

I know on this blog I’ve ranted and raved about the destruction of the NHS, but it appears the final plank is in place. Whilst the legislation passed a while back to allow private companies to become NHS providers, i.e. opening the door to privatising the NHS, the regulations that were yet to be passed still held out some slight hope for slowing that privatisation. (Now, this is going to be a little dull for a second, but keep reading…)

The reason for the potential delay was because the regulations that defined how the GP Commissioning Groups would choose providers for particular services had not been written yet. So there was some hope that with some beating the wording could be made to make sure the NHS was at least a little bit protected.

Last week the House of entitled arseholes Lords passed the government’s sneaky section 75 regulations. s75, as they are known in the healthcare circles are the regulations that define how commissioning groups chose providers. And they’ve been worded in such a way as to ensure that the NHS is gutted as quickly as possible.

Not that you’d know this from the almost utterly silent press.

Apparently the mirror had something, although I couldn’t see it on their web front page, or their health page. The Belfast Telegraph appears to be the only paper that’s covered it, and it’s about 3/4 of the way down their web-front-page.

So despite my mother’s pain at me going and working in a for-profit healthcare system in the USA, I’m thinking the that, if DOMA unpasses, then that’s where we’ll be going. Because the For-Profit healthcare system here is undoubtably going to be at least as bad as that in the states. And I don’t think I can bear watching them do that to the NHS. Canada seems to want an inordinately large sum of money to have me work there, which is ridiculous ($1800 for the assessment (plus $900 flight) then $600 for the exam plus $900 flights, with no guarantee at the end of that of a job. Also, they’ve taken nurse of their skilled worker list, so we would then have to go the long way round for citizenship. That move also implies an excess of nurses in Canada as a whole (despite Nova Scotia appearing to be somewhat short of them, at least out in the boonies). I guess I should start researching the good old US-of-A for immigration purposes…

So because the Volvo has decided it needs a new part (small, difficult to obtain) I decided to run Rebecca to the MOT centre today. The journey there went entirely smoothly until I got lost… and then Rebecca decided to stop. She stopped outside a random bloke’s house who seemed under the opinion that he knew more about cars than me.

He was quite nice, but irritatingly condescending.

Having turned over the engine a few times, it became apparent that something was amiss. I knew I’d put fuel in, and had a worry that I’d managed to suck enough crap through from the tank into the carb that there wasn’t any fuel getting through. A quick check suggested that there was at least fuel in the carb. I had a quick look over of the wiring and nothing seemed amiss, then I disconnected and reconnected things optimistically. Retrying it and praying didn’t seem to work.

I finally gave in and rang the breakdown company, and then sat for a few minutes. Tried again. No dice. Then I thought this is ridiculous, you can perfectly well fault find a Minor. A more thorough look revealed what should have been instantly obvious.

The rotor arm looked like a bucket load of crap.

A quick rub on a passing cobble, and she started instantly.

And now she’s at waiting to be squeezed in for an MOT.

Whilst I wandered back in the sunshine.

So I got my tax return / self assessment back and nearly had a quiet heart attack. It worked out that I owed £2000 – minus change – for 2 of the last few years.

I ate my lunch in solemn consideration of this fact before ringing them and preparing to say “I don’t have £2000”. I explained I was surprised that I owed so much considering I’m paid through PAYE. And we went through, and then the nice woman on the phone said ‘how much were you paid by such and such’ – and I looked at my P60 and we discovered I’d put my pay for both them *and* the previous hospital in as being my pay for that employment.

So I went from owing £1,100 to overpayment in one easy step (although I need to pop a letter in the post confirming that I am an idiot). But that didn’t explain the other 900. It turns out that I should have been paying my student loan through my pay cheque, and entitled to tax relief on it, for the last 7 years. I’ve not. I’ve been paying it back via direct debit, because that’s what I’d done forever. No one ever said it was wrong, I’d no particular reason to question it.

…

…apparently it’s wrong. I’m now waiting for a call back as they’re thinking that my apparent underpayment of tax is actually due to this, and I’ve no idea how that gets fixed. I don’t trust the student loans company to do it right, but then this has gone thoroughly wrong so far, and I’ve only followed their instructions.

Lord knows if I’ve paid as much as I should’ve.

Never mind, we’ll find out.

So there’s a point after my night shifts when I run into a wall. Usually a fairly solid wall of tiredness. I’ve been a good girl so far – although I’ve watched a fair bit of TV (The Americans) I’ve also emptied and reloaded the dishwasher, hoovered the kitchen floor, taken out the recycling, taken out the composting, filed the papers that have been piling up in the kitchen, arranged taking Chester back to the garage (because his idle has gone to crap since they serviced him) and arranged my interview for the agency…

But as I contemplated going down to the garage to look at Minor seats I thought “hang on a mo, you’ve been up since 1610 yesterday, that wall is probably fast approaching”. I poured myself a glass of apple, I sat down and OHDEARGODAMITIRED.

I’ve got trouble focusing on the laptop’s screen, so I think, at this point, we’ve hit the wall. And now we STOP.

Post nights. Sleep deprived. That must mean it’s time for me to write a post.

So, tomorrow is ‘car day’. Hopefully between tomorrow and wednesday Rebecca can be returned to a roadworthy state (if not an MOT’d state, and she may still need a new battery, I’m not quite sure what state that battery is in). She also needs a wash and a polish.

Jobs for the next couple of days are:

2 Person, tomorrow jobs:
– Install the new diff (& simultaneously replace bearings in axle)
– Install the headlining
1 Person tomorrow or day after jobs:
– Respring the seats
– Install radio speakers and trim panels.

It should all be doable in the two days, and the speedo will actually read correctly again (I never got as far as installing the one corrected for the 3.7 diff).

Once the car’s out of the garage we can return to regularly scheduled house renovations – first up – make and install a set of shelves to go under the stairs. Then painting the trim (including the newly installed shelves) can go ahead. That and trimming the door to fit. That will actually lead to a second finished area in the house, which is pretty good. To be fair, apart from about 8″ of sealant, the lounge is finished. Although given the simplicity of taking the hardboard off the doors, and how much better they look without it, and the fact that we’ve not attacked any of the doors, it might come to pass that we take the door off and remove the hardboard. But ignoring that, this room is done*.

I’m quite looking forward to having more finished bits.

The other thing I’m starting to contemplate more forcefully is building our deck. We’ve had a few nice days (quite a few actually) and each time we have one and I go potter in the garden, I wish we had the deck for us to relax on afterwards. The plan remains to build the majority of it out of reclaimed pallets, so I need to get the pallet stripping bar. Having tried various methods of stripping pallets, this looks to be the most quick and effective. Most designs seem to rely on having the deck built on a layer of pallets, which I wasn’t sure about…but it would be nice to raise the deck up to roughly the same level as the floor in the house. Having checked things out, it looks like that would be a reasonable plan as it’d raise the deck up to a height that would clear the airbricks, and I’d just need to leave a gap running along the wall where the damp proof course is (I assume) with some sort of nicely tweaked finish to that edge. Mmm. I’m seeing a plan forming in my head. A plan. Yes indeed.

Also, given that we’re staying in the UK for at least a year now (see how I didn’t say ‘stuck in this benighted awful country**’) I am, I fear, going to have to insulate underneath the floors. Our heating bills for this past year were flipping terrifying, and it also wasn’t actually that warm in here, given the amount of heat poured in.

I’ve found a fairly cheap source of sheep’s wool insulation which, as we’ve discussed is not ‘nice and soft and fluffy’ but is, apparently, less itchy than rockwool. At least I won’t be grovelling under the floor mid-winter, which was the previous plan. So I shall schedule that in for the next couple of months.

And so, my dears, that is where we stand.

* Although, we’ve been talking about small people. Well, a small person. And this has brought to light the horrible realisation of just how un-child friendly our house is. It’s an “Oh, just off white walls. Gramophone records sat on the floor. My, that’s a lot of cables. Those shelves…they’re exactly the right height for someone learning to crawl to use to pull-then-climb-up” type experience. Anyhow, that’s a little while off, at any rate.
** And yes, I know other countries have problems, but if you work for and care about the NHS the way I do then watching this foul government rip it to shreds so it can hand the tattered remains to it’s rich and powerful friends to make money off is astonishingly painful. I hate it, it actually makes me cry.

So, today I’ve been a busy little bee. In fact, this whole weekend has been nicely busy although I’ve not had a chance to go and see anyone (which is a shame). Yesterday was spent on the Dead Bug Jumping podcast (not out until the 24th, but you could all subscribe… although, actually, there’s been way more access on the site than previously). I’ve still not managed to cure the hum from the record deck but I’m about 90% certain that I need to change the cable in the tonearm, which is hassle, but I think would markedly improve the situation, because I suspect from its behaviour that it’s broken or not connecting well. The problem with this concept is that I then need some kind of connector to connect to the little connectors that sit on the back end of the cartridge and I’m not quite sure what they are, or should be. At the moment they’re made from bent-brass connectors which once connected the original cartridge.

Anyhow. At some point I need to accost the lovely John and see if he’s got a dead mouse I can cannibalise for cable, because apparently mouse cable is pretty similar in weight to audio cable. Then I need to dismantle the tone-arm, and fit it.

So that’s in the future, and will hopefully cure the hum and the tendency of the deck to suddenly drop from normal audio levels to something very, very quiet. Doing the podcast took up pretty much all of yesterday. Today, in contrast, was a much more active day. Keeping to the 20 minutes a day cleaning (‘cept it’s 40 minutes-only-on-days-off and I’d ended up not doing it yesterday, because yesterday I woke up at 4:30 am for no readily apparent reason, and couldn’t get back to sleep) today I dusted and swept the lounge. Between Kathryn and I our house is creeping towards the level of cleanliness and tidyness we want. It’s not like it’s ever been horrendous (except at moments of extreme decorating action), but with both of us working shifts it’s been hard for us to hit a point where cleaning was as frequent. What tended to happen was it would get overly dusty, then we’d have a frantic cleaning frenzy, and then it would deteriorate slowly again.

This new process does seem to be making it move towards a higher level of cleanliness with less dust around. Indeed, it’s possible we’ll soon actually be cleaning before things are noticably dusty, which is nice.

The other thing I did today was spend an inordinate amount of time in the garden shredding things. I actually went out there to finish digging up the shrub* which has been sat in what is intended to be the pea bed. This actually went surprisingly well, and I took the opportunity to pull up more of the sycamore trees (I’m told that’s what they are). There were a lot of them. Somewhere in the region of 20 of the sodding things. I also chopped the last chunks off the bushes that now lie where we’re planning to have some sort of raised alpine garden type affair / rock garden. It was going to be a pond, but for the sake of cost, time and sanity (and because we’re not going to live here forever) it’s now going to be a rockery**.

I then took this pile of stuff down to the other pile of stuff and combined them (although the roots have been kept separate, as I imagine our garden shredder will not be terribly fond of stones). I pulled the shredder from the garage, the ear defenders from the house, and spent a merry hour shredding stuff. It is immensely tedious, it’s too noisy to really listen to anything on headphones, although I might give it ago. And being as it’s just a little electric shredder with very blunt blades*** I suspect it’s going to take quite a while to shred it’s way through the rest of the pile. I did about &fract14; of the pile today which it has made into quite a nice mulchy type substance. That hour or so has taken at least one load of car-to-tip-chunks of wood and made them into something useful though, which is quite pleasing in and of itself. However the battle with the bush and the shredder has left me fairly tired this evening…

Thankfully I’ve spent a little of today reading some of Gail Carriger’s Soulless. The first three books of the, I believe, four part series were in the Amnesty store (although they were only 50p less than they would have cost in The Works, new, but appeared to be new). Having read the back and a little of the writing I thought they sounded like an entertaining romp, so bought the set there and then. I’ve now got to the Epilogue of the first one, and if they maintain this standard will happily read the rest. It isn’t, as it says on the front, wit that recalls Austen and P.G. Wodehouse (I feel that’s overstating it), but they are good, and very funny. So err, that’s a recommendation. I’ve got such a massive pile of books to read though… Ready Player One was a gift from friends, which I’ve been wanting to read for ages, but which has got waylaid by not being next to the bed at the opportune moment. Now I’m tempted to read all three of the Alexia Tarabotti novels in a row, since I’ve got them, and I’m in to one of them now.

Other entertainments at the moment are Elementary which has been uniformly excellent, Heading Out which I think is terribly underrated. But then I think Sue Perkins rocks. I’ve also, obviously, been watching Doctor Who, which has left me a little underwhelmed this season, so far. Cold War was definitely stronger than the second episode (“Rings of Akhaten”), but didn’t amaze me. Rings of Akhaten had more plot holes than I care to mention, which was disappointing because I quite liked the concept of story, and I think Clara is an excellent companion, and Matt Smith is doing his usual loveable Doctor Who. Meh. Hopefully it’ll pick up. Maybe they used all their best ideas on the 50th Anniversary Episode (which better be good, god damn it). I’ve also listened to an awful lot of Sallie Ford and The Sound Outside, which I heartily recommend.

In other news, my quest for an iTunes replacement lead me to Media Monkey which looks ideal, except that it’s not available on Mac. *sad face*.

* Contrary to popular opinion, we do not require ‘a shrubbery’. Not even ‘a nice one’.
** Again, just to be clear, not a shrubbery.
*** I’ve just discovered you can buy new blades for it for 20 quid. It’s probably worth it, considering the quantity of stuff left to shred.