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So, excuse the slow posts, I’m blaming that partly on our internet connection which has turned to crap. When it rains, ironically, it now works better. I’m supposing that water makes a better connective material than whatever crappy bit of copper is currently running from our house out to BT’s exchange.

It is, however, something I need to sort out after xmas. Our connection, incidentally, has hit a new low – being the same speed as my old dial-up connection :(

Anyhow, yesterday I, along with Nikki replaced the batteries in the G-Wiz which has come to be my mother’s. This was a car which Going Green apparently quoted an exorbitant amount to ‘get it through it’s MOT’ and informed the owner that it needed new batteries. The latter was definately true, the former – not so much. An advisory for 1 tyre and a general advisory concerning the underside needing to be cleaned and painted as there’s lots of surface rust was it.

The run to the garage, however, did prove the statements about the sickly batteries to be true. That and the constant thirst of them when charged. With the old batteries we had a range of about 6 miles… maybe 7.

So on Thursday I made the long trip to Corby to collect a complete and entire set of Trojan T125s. 240kgs of battery loaded up into Chester and a new respect for CVT technology. I’d never considered it before but it gives you adaptive gearing. Unlike your conventional car where you’re limited to the set of 4, 5 or 6 ratios (or 3 in an older auto) and that’s it, the CVT means that the gearing is appropriate to the load and speed, meaning that the 12% gradient we went up, and the trip down the motorway was achieved effortlessly.

Unloading 240kg of battery from a Volvo, no so effortless.

Nikki turned up painfully early on Friday (well, reasonably early for me, but she’d been up a long time having driven from Bristol) and we set to on replacing the G-Wiz’s aged and it turned out shagged batteries. It’s a fairly simple process.

Seat out, disconnect BMS (4 plugs, in size order), Disconnect battery 4/5 connection, whip out the filling system (complete pig), disconnect the batteries and replace them*, reconnect the filling system (another complete pig), drill holes in two of them for the level sensors (scary, scary), reconnect the wiring, the BMS and you’re good to go.

It was complicated by the fact that the Reva software wouldn’t connect to the car beforehand. We tried, we coaxed, we cajoled, we rebooted windows 18,000 times, we cursed, we tried different versions of windows. It was not having it. In the end we just went for it, and a few hours later the object of our energies was equipped with new batteries, all of which were nearly charged, and the software? It miraculously worked.

Nikki and her two lovely dogs, Pepper and Eddie, piled into their Smart car; and I gingerly got in the G-Wiz.

As an introduction to EV motoring, the G-Wiz is…well… not exactly the best example of the concept. The Enfield, with it’s solidity and reasonable handling, and all-round 70s ness is pretty fun, it also has a lot of low-end go. The G-wiz also has that low-end-go, but lacks most everything else nice. It does have a heater though.

Only… I couldn’t use the heater, and that low-end-go was sacrificed to running in Economy mode such that we could extract the maximum range from it. New batteries have a settling in procedure, one which maximises their life and gives you the best range. Essentially, I’m told, you run the car ’til it’s flat, charge, rinse, repeat. About three or four times.

We couldn’t do that either. 46.2 miles, iirc, avoiding the motorway (on which the G-Wiz is not allowed, being as it’s not technically a car, and also can’t do the minimum speed limit for a motorway). The GPS told us it would take 2 hours. I mentally doubled that, and concerned about the soon to be fading light we set off.

The G-Wiz, well, it’s a town car. It looks and feels like a town car. It is not a belt-round country lanes at speed car. After about 10 miles, the battery meter was looking a bit pathetic, so we pulled into a very nice pub who were very excited to see a G-Wiz and who let us charge outside, while we ate a very nice scampy and chips. Horse and Groom, I think it was, just outside Maidenhead.

After about 40 minutes we went out, poked the car with the laptop and set forth again. My technique for driving was improving, and I got better at coasting, and remembering to come off the throttle earlier, and trying to use the regen on hills. Everyone else, no doubt, hated us. Crusing at a top speed of 32 (not the G-Wiz’s, but an acceptable maximum speed to give us more range) the queues behind us were becoming legendary, and I didn’t really want to pull over because stopping would destroy some of that precious momentum which we’d built up.

However, as towns gave way to villages, villages to hamlets, and hamlets to fields the charge meter, and the requirement that despite much forbearance with the fading light I actually did eventually have to acquiesce to the darkness and have headlamps on, started to beat the batteries into a much feared submission. The laptop, when I finally pulled up in some crappy little stuck up village (Upper Basildon, it turns out) outside of pangborne, was indicating about 5.8 volts. The inadequate nippyness I’d felt before was becoming a sluggishness; and hills were requiring more and more in terms of non-economy mode just to get up them.

Nikki, generously dealing with my phone-phobic nature, rang the Red Lion, who informed us that their electrical system was so dodgy that plugging in so much as an extra lamp would cause them to loose all power, and declined to allow us that much needed charge. We pondered, and decided to rock up anyway, and try our luck. They were but seconds away.

And so we entered into the strangest of places. The place was the Red Lion pub, the strangeness was that it wasn’t a pub. The SUVs in the carpark should have alerted us; nothing less ‘prestigious’ than a BMW to be seen. We walked in, and I was struck by what appeared to be the absence of taps from the bar. How would they serve beer?

At any rate, we popped in to use the toilet as the landlady was serving some customers, and were met by the most bizzare thing I’ve seen in a toilet. The toilet itself was decorated with a painting of a boat on a lake, a little rowing boat; in which the toilet was at one end. At the other, however, rather than a pleasing view over the lake (and it would have been fairly pleasant because it’s really well painted) was a Mr. Darcy type figure, letching and staring right at you.

It’s not right…

Anyhow, we abandoned ship, as it were, after they declined a second time to let us charge.

We managed to make it to Hampstead Norreys – home of the very nice White Hart inn, who did indeed let us charge. They actually sport a 16A socket, such as is advisable for the G-Wiz, but sadly using this tripped the circuit breakers on their 16A circuit, which, they said has happened many times before. They were actually quite apologetic about the issue, and allowed us instead to charge off the 13A circuit while we munched down a tasty dinner.

After a pleasant period of relaxation we lied to the batteries again, and set off on what was to be the most difficult segment of the journey. Cold, it was, and dark, as we sallied forth. But we were hopeful, our chances of making our destination seemed reasonable. Neglecting, of course, the fact that we didn’t know how much of that time outside had been spent sat in isolation with a tripped fuse, rather than charging.

At any rate, we were about 7 miles from my mum’s when the little battery-state-of-charge meter flickered down into the lower reaches of amber and red, and about 5 miles when for the first time the lights flickered off, the power went and I made an uncivilised dash for the side of the road.

This was to be how the remainder of the journey would be conducted. Driven incredibly gently and slowly, peaking at around 15 miles an hour we nursed the poor tired G-Wiz to my mum’s house. Just over a mile away we called her and her husband out to give us a hand, a slight incline was proving too much for the battery, but by the time they’d arrived, and with a bit of a push to get going we cleared the hill and actually made the rest of that mile into her village with only a flickering service light. The little yellow cube actually made it into my mum’s garage under it’s own steam.

So auspicious it was not, but it is possible to take a G-Wiz with new batteries 46 miles through the countryside, and we met some very nice publicans and had some very nice food…

…and my mum, she has the G-Wiz for her allotment runs, and potentially shopping runs once the batteries are sorted…

* Every EV advocate neglects to mention this, although with modern battery technology it’s not an issue, but dealing with 30kg of plastic box filled with highly corrosive and unpleasant material is actually less fun that dealing with a butt-load of dirty old engine oil. That said, old oil is carcinogenic.

So, Nikki – amazing person that she is, gave me a Reva G-Wiz for my mum, well, gave my mum it. It requires some work being a first generation G-Wiz, and a complete new set of batteries. The set in there at the moment are dying and while they do short distances okay, longer drives (over a few miles) are going to push your luck.

So today after it’d sat all week I went out to look at what’s required to get it back on the road. It also needs a corner of the battery tray welding, which I knew…

So I whipped out my ramps and planned to shonk it up onto the ramps. When parked up a week ago it had a full state of charge, after a week it’d dropped to 3/4 – a factor of the sickly batteries. And it turned out it wouldn’t move. Charging it has made it happier – it needed about 2 minutes of charging before it suddenly went – oh! I can move!

So I’m trying to set up a laptop with the Reva software on it, so I can poke it and see state it’s in before we whip out the batteries. This is more complex than it sounds. I dug out the old Dell to see if I could set it up with Win 98SE. I found the windows disk. I then spent an hour trying to (and eventually succeeding in) find(ing) the cable.

Now it’s set up I recall than I need a specific device driver disk for it. Which means getting the ancient and terrifyingly virus-able object onto the internet :(

What is good is that this morning I’ve laid half the tile for the hallway. ‘Ray!

So, the repeat of radio silence was due to a week of nights, my body seems to have largely come to understand that when I randomly say “nope, you’re confused, it’s night now“, it needs to sleep because otherwise I get to awake the next day with a whole new level of exhaustion.

Which is good, but it’s now the end of the week and I feel suitably ropey having had too much caffine to ensure that I stay awake for the majority of today. I’m not planning anything much more demanding than a bit of xmas shopping (online) and some book scanning (delicious library development) and maybe ringing my mum.

I have spent the last few weeks sucking in the content of a variety of books… mostly this is the fault of Nikki and Kate who dragged Kathryn and I into Borders in Bristol* where they demonstrated the true awfulness of the current technology of e-books, and a failure to actually have any of the books on my wanted list****.

E-books, well, the e-book reader they were demoing suffered from one fatal flaw. Speed. It sucked like a dyson, but in a bad way. It took substantially longer than my average page turning time to change page, and added to this was the fact that you get less text on the ‘page’ and only one of them (as opposed to your standard Book 2 page spread), so you’d have to turn twice as many pages – and painfully slowly each time.

The menu system on it seemed archaic, non-intuitive and clunky, and I just thought ‘no’. Incidentally, as with vinyl, what I want is to buy a book and get a free e-book copy with it. Then I have my nice textured tactile experience object, and my convenience one in one purchase. Of course, that would be far too sensible.

Anyhow, after a brief confubulation with Kathryn we left the shop with 2 books – my half of the buy one get one half price offer being Scat; Carl Hiaason’s latest book – which is apparently a teen book and interestingly covers the gap between Flush (the excellent children’s book written by him) and his adult novels; even including one of the adult-novel-characters.

As usual, I found myself devouring the book, it taking me away from the latest Cory Doctorow novel. I’m not sure whether it’s just the online reading experience (Big Brother I read cover to cover as rapidly as I could manage, and then read again, but I had that as a proper paper experience; I was reading Makers as a PDF. I will probably go back to it, but it didn’t suck me in in quite the same way. Possibly it’s because I found it hard to suspend disbelief for such a future when I’m so the-world’ll-be-f*cked-when-we-run-out-of-oil*⁵). It’s good, but anyhow…

…The problem was, having asked in Borders about Rosemary and Rue, which was occupying mental space on my wants list without actually making it onto the real one, and discovering that Amazon had it at a price that could easily be justified (Borders did not have it in stock), and having then dinked around looking at ‘books that have been on my wants list a long time’ and noticed that some of them are actually going out of print…

….err, yeah, I also got “The Dyke and the Dybbuk”.

I can recommend all of these.

Rosemary and Rue is a fairly light, but great read; Kathryn’s discomfort with Changlings being defined differently than in popular literature not-withstanding; I found it very engaging. I don’t think it’s the next Wordsworth, but I rather like the main protagonist*⁷ and will be buying the second book in that series (in March, apparently).

And then came The Dyke and The Dybbuk – I’ve read this through my week of nights and am conflicted: I wish I’d saved it until I wasn’t on nights so I could enjoy it to it’s full potential but I’m awesomely pleased that I read it. After so long languishing on my ‘to read’ list after it was suggested by Rachel, it’s a really excellent book – and I’m so pleased it finally made it off the ever so long ‘to read’ list and into my somewhat sad ‘read’ list.

Anyhow, I think that’s enough of my rambling for the time being. I’m going to get back to lazing by the fire and doing sod all.

* Which I actually found a somewhat saddening experience, largely because I was previously under the impression that Borders was a bookstore. In fact, last time I went I recall it being almost entirely bookshop in nature, but this time it was DVD and Games and Music and Overpriced-Cheap-Tat-Plastic-Crap**.
** I felt like Thursday Next going into Bookworld***.
*** I think that’s what it’s called.
**** Okay, more accurately, a lack of books that I actually wanted to buy from my list at that moment. They did have a cool member of staff though.
*⁵ Bearing in mind that travel, plastics, medicines and food are all largely dependent on petrochemicals*⁶.
*⁶ And obviously ignoring my nascent fears of the impact of climate change.
*⁷ Bloody straight protagonists.

So, it’s been a busy and at times stressful (still going on) ol’ time here at Chez Us.

The larder is, actually, floored. I do still need to throw some white paint on the door frame, but that’s it. I’m really pleased with it. The DAF which has been up for sale for 2 weeks and garnered no interest at all (I would take some pictures, but they’re seriously depressing) – I may have to fix it and e-bay it. I’ll throw a coat of white paint on it too.

Today marked, however, a genius moment. Inspiration and understanding (of a sort) struck. My bike has been limping up and down the motorway at 60 mph. Odd, I thought, since the engine’s just rebuilt and it’s all new and shiny. I’d been thinking to myself – perhaps the timing is off. Maybe the mixture’s wrong. Perhaps it needs a hotter plug. Then today it struck me.

I was riding along this morning contemplating the drizzle falling on me, my cold arse, and the fact that I really could fancy having a bike with a decent saddle, and also perhaps a bike with third gear, when I thought…

‘What could cause my bike to perform in a very similar manner to my old bike’?

I’d thought this before and then brushed such silly thoughts aside with the fact that this is a newly rebuilt engine and gearbox (never mind the missing third gear, natch). That the electrics, electronics and such are entirely different. That it doesn’t burn gearbox oil, and nor does petrol find it’s way into the lubricating areas of the gearbox.

And then the little tiny 10 watt bulb that is, on occasion, my brain lit up. It sparkled dimly in the dirt grey sky that was the morning.

The fracking carb. The carb came off my old bike because the carb that was on the new engine, that I knew worked with the new engine was blocked and I couldn’t figure out where. And I thought ‘well, I wanted to use the Bing carb (off my old bike) anyway because it’s better than the BvF carb (from the new bike). Gah.

So, nights off, I shall have to see if I can make the BvF carb work and thence fit it and see if I can go places quicker.

The stress, however, hasn’t really come from this. It’s come from a potential visit to the civil claim court being organised by the current possessor of my mum’s EV. We took it to him for some work, when it got there he stated it would ‘probably’ be beyond his original quote so we agreed that he would take out the controller, examine the rest of the vehicle and come back with a revised quote. This he did. Then it all starts to go the shape of a pear. We said stop, he didn’t, and now he wants money for work that he won’t warranty and so far has declined to tell me where the car actually is so that we can retrieve it. I’ve had to fork out for legal advice now, and now I understand where we’re at, I’ve got to get the EV on Sunday. So that’s a whole bundle of fun coming.

And after the disaster that was the Charles Ware ‘restoration’ (the front has outdone the back in terms of being actually dangerous*) I’ve restarted the process of taking them to the small claims court. This is less than relaxing for me… I’ve contacted Watchdog about them this time…

Anyhow.

In other news I’ve been playing with Delicious Library – in an attempt to achieve the utopian state of being in a bookstore and being able to find out if I’ve got any particular obscure tome I’m looking at. While I only really need it for ‘series’ (like xxxHolic, Discworld, the VI Warshawski / Sara Paretsky novels, etc, etc) I’ve been working through entering all the books we own (yes, seriously) into it. Annoyingly the iPhone plugin has been removed by Amazon (DAMN THEM!) which is funny because I could be easily persuaded into buying more books that way. I hope that changes, but for the meantime I’ll be abusing a little corner of my website at some point. I need, of course, to do some upgrades to the underbelly of pyoor, but hopefully once that’s done we’ll be ready to rock and roll with a searchable book and eventually music and film database.

Finally, in news, my Nursing Registration in Canada is slowly progressing, my CV is updated and needs proofreading and then I’ll be sending it off. It’s all becoming a bundle of scary (I mean exciting).

* Bulkhead tie plates not welded at all – just seam-sealed to the tie plates; flitch panel just tack-welded to A post area. Whole hinge pillar flopping about like a goldfish out of water**, chassis legs incorrectly welded – and cracked as a result, the sill was an inch out of alignment… etc, etc…
** Explains the hinge breaking, the whole pillar had moved.

So, driving back from dropping off documents at the solicitors… Nice bloke tells me how wonderful the DAF is.

…

…about a mile from home CRACK! BANG! SCRAPE scraaaaape scrape.

The exhaust has snapped in half.

Home: Tax bike: Find bike gear: Charge battery: Pray.

Anyone want a DAF 44?

Never trust a company without a written quote. Always confirm spoken agreements in writing.

Fuck [redacted] and also fuck [redacted]. Now I have to spend money on solicitors.

END.

One of the things that comes up, particularly after a few days of triage is that England, or at least the bits of it I’ve encountered, appear to have a problem with entitlement.

Now I was unfortunate, due to the skill mix being a bit less than it could be, and us being extraordinarily* busy I ended up triaging a lot. Really, a lot. To the point where what is termed an ‘inappropriate attendance’** really really tested my abilites with professionalism***. Anyhow. This front-loading of the system meant that those poor souls who should have been there (not that many) and who actually needed treatment (even fewer) were sometimes left waiting quite a while.

The government in the UK stipulates that we must, in the emergency department, see, diagnose, and admit or treat/discharge within four hours of their booking in time. No matter if you’ve stubbed your toe and got a bit of an owie or suffered multiple trauma, 4 hours is all you’ve got****. This, when it takes up to 2 hours for blood results to return is not actually that long. Before this standard was applied, people stayed in the ED overnight, and I’m told by colleagues in other countries that 4 hours is actually really very quick in emergency department standards.

Which is why when people sit around for 2 hours and start to get stroppy I want to tell them a few things. I don’t, because I’m – at the end of the day – fond of my job, and my job is to behave in a professional manner.

But really. 2 hours? I can waste more time than that reading a paper.

People also seem to suffer under the delusion that their problem is more important than everyone elses, and that they should be seen before everyone else, and that 4 hours is just too damn long to wait. I understand that it’s not very interesting being in the ED. Well, frankly it can be quite entertaining, I suspect, as a spectator sport watching the many, many drunk people rocking up on nights.

But shouting at/cursing us and telling us that you pay your taxes does not serve to impress me. Especially when the UK ranks 18th in the world for it’s spending per-capita on healthcare. It’s cheap. It’s really *really* cheap. It’s incredible value for money.

And frankly, it needs more. Lots more.

Less managers.
More money.
More wards.
More beds.
More on the shop-floor staff.

We won’t get that though, because the greater population of the UK are sold lies about the NHS by the tabloid press, and largely, the population seems confused as to how much tax we pay. It turns out we’re not nearly as heavily taxed as even I thought. And I never thought we were *that* heavily taxed…

So.

Basically.

Yes, Shut your yappin’ is basically the point. That and take some frickin’ responsibility for your own healthcare. Jeeze. Learn something about that body you inhabit and try, at least try and look after it a very little bit.

Anyhow, sorry if that’s a bit incoherant, but I have been up 24 hours.

* a situation which is becoming depressingly ordinary
** true examples: ‘I’ve had this pain, here, for a few months… and it’s been bothering me… so I thought I should get it checked’ (at 4:30 in the *morning* at an *emergency department*?!). “I’ve had this pain in the side of my nose since this morning. Well, it’s more an ache. Or an itch. It’s been bothering me…” and “I’ve had a cold since yesterday, and I’ve taken this [waves X brand cold/flu medication] and I’m not better yet, so I thought I should come in”.
*** And of course, handily there’s always the young-person-with-rare-condition who you read the booking in complaint for, *sigh*, call in and then go ‘Oooh, you really are quite sick I best do something rather rapidly’ which reminds you of *why* you remain professional and do your job properly and don’t just say “Get thee hence! Begone foul abuser of our fine services!” when people appear to be inappropriately attending.
**** There is a clinical exception which I’ve seen applied all of once or twice – when it is actually unsafe to move the patient because the ED is the best place, clinically, for them to be.

Well, I forgot that I needed to go to the post office when I was making my list. Having put it up I instantly realised that my first job of the day was postofficing. So of I wandered. My original plan, such as it was, was to go into town; collect my contacts, my parcel and post stuff. But then I realised that I was knackered and really didn’t fancy it.

So I wandered there, and I wandered back. I read some of Makers, and I chatted to James, and then finally poked myself with the giant get-off-your-arse stick and went and dealt with the shower. The hot supply of which had managed to develop a very slow drip. I’m suspecting this is a case of thermal expansion/contraction because it’s been fine for over a year. A quick tighten and it seems to have stopped. Should have done it ages ago, really.

Then I decided to take on the kitchen tap. This was, I believed to be a simple disconnect and unscrew old tap; assemble, put in and connect new tap. Ye-es. I also believed that taps had a standard size hole in which they fitted. Apparently not. Because this tap was bigger than the hole. A bit of filing later and it fitted, but by then I’d munged the top-ends of the threads, which is where the “no, it definately isn’t a wiggle-it-and-it’ll-fit” realisation came to me. Thus I spent an inordinate amount of time under the sink turning the brass retaining nuts 1/8th of a turn with a spanner because they were just slightly too tight to turn by hand.

Knowing that I was tired I very carefully followed the instructions, checking each step of the way that I had done exactly as described. I turned on the water. No leaks. I turned on the tap, the cabinet under the tap became the new and exciting Slough Swimming Pool with added water features (Be amazed by our wet pile of tiles in what was once a cardboard box!); yes, it turned out that the instructions lacked a vital note.

Having done much mopping and cleaning, I discovered that in one of the bags lain unnoticed were two small washers. Not in the diagram, not in the instructions. No. It comes with 4 hoses, this tap. 3 of them have all the sealing washers built in. One, it turns out, does not. Thankfully it’s an easy to reach one. Having reassembled it, and switched the hot-and-cold around so that they were the right way round (doh!) the tap now doesn’t appear to leak. But I think that’s me for the day.

I’m now resorting to contemplating the rearrangement of the office and more pressingly the larder.

One day, three tasks.

Sand/fill/spray DAF’s bonnet.
Swap tap in kitchen.
Reattempt, for the final time, shower sealing.

The only problem is that this comes after a week of nights where the NHS were clearly trialing their new slogan: Doing the impossible with the insufficient.

Wish me luck.

We watched The Boat that Rocked – this, I’m aware got some fairly poor reviews. Reviews, which, having seen it I’d say were unwarranted. It certainly wasn’t narrative genius. It didn’t make me laugh hysterically, nor did it reduce me to a weepy demonstration of just how not-butch I really am.

But it was a passable rom-com, a pleasant way to spend an evening, and it certainly had some excellent music :)

And reminded me of my dad’s tales of running a Pirate Radio station at Uni, and listening to their somewhat awful radiostation on the Reel-to-Reel tapes that lurk about the house. So yes. Not brilliant, not awful.