It's evident that the new job and amount of travelling it demands (Barcaldine last week, Townsville this past week, now Brisbane ) means that for a while at least, blogging will be sporadic.
This weekend is devoted to helping fix up the Chateau for sale, which means today we were in a shop whose name is not unlike "runnings" and where you can't get decent help no matter what you do. So a request for assistance with the correct bag for the lawn vacuum was met with "you may as well buy a new machine, those bags are so expensive."
Well I knew that already, even though the price came down from $56 (yes, $56 for a consumable!) to $38, they still only last a month or so. What I needed was help to translate the previous part number into the new one, because the packaging was quite different.
Which explains how I came to back there late afternoon trying to exchange this morning's guess for the correct one. But that seemed to be a request too far.
And so that's also how I came to be in the 'refund/exchange' line later this afternoon, behind bogans who use it as a quicker way than the main checkouts. Bogans who don't look after their kids while they carry on and show off to their mates. So the kid begins to wail that he's lost his daddy.
Now, blokes my age can no longer help little lost boys in shops and supermarkets lest some misguided zealot, or bogan father perhaps, makes an unwarranted deduction.
Anyway today a nice young Indian girl pointed the youngster back to his dad who immediately abused him for wandering off and then accused him of being "mental". Nice.
About a year ago the wonders of the internet brought me an inquiry from the UK about a car I had owned when I was still at school. Having googled "Morris Isis", my interlocutor came across this post and left a comment on a later blog, asking me to contact him.
Which I did. And it turns out that not only is he a Morris Isis obsessive, but he owns the actual car from which my model, as shown in the post, was copied.
Here it is on the right. The model didn't get the length of the bonnet correct - the Isis had a 6 cylinder motor and a mighty long bonnet to put it under.He asked me to write up a longer version of my post, which I did some months ago and this week a copy arrived of Quality First: The magazine of the Morris Cowley, Oxford and Isis owners club with my piece in it. It's titled It's a small world and indeed it is.
So life still provides plenty of opportunity for comment along the way, but I fear that somewhat less of it will be coming from Chateau VVB until Mrs VVB and I are comfortably established in RARA land. We've got to a shortlist of houses we like, we're organising the bank finance (eeeeurrgh interest rates) and as mentioned earlier we're trying to get Chateau VVB into saleable condition. It's a bugger of a plave to keep clean inside and outside and so there's a lot of work to be done to make it presentable.
Along with the move I have to sell the current motor, this one. A long way from the Isis, yes? And does anyone want an acoustic electric Maton 12 string, by any chance?
4 comments:
Am I missing something, Phil? What on earth is RARA? :-(
Going to replace the GM errrrr Saab with something more economical and inclined to stay in its present lane until otherwise directed?
For what it's worth that is apparently why the older Saabs had a north-south engine configuration despite being wrong-wheel-drive... It meant they could have equal-length driveshafts and apparently that dramatically reduces torque-steer. According to a 20-plus-year veteran Saab mechanic, this is...
RARA=Rural and Regional Australia - a Special Place which deserves Special Treatment, depending on who you're talking to.
And mine was the last of the Saab Saabs before GM moved in. So it has Automatic Unintended Lane Change, but not as much as my old 4.4 litre Triumph 2500 used to manage.
May 1st is approaching, a pagan rite of spring date - when the northern hemispherers go
MORRIS DANCING!
(the polite compromise from rushing naked into the forest to procreate, which is apparently what the pagans did.
maybe now it's just done on the backseat of a Morris 1800 ... or Isis).
Plenty of room for dancing there, a o'd!
Mind you, I've always wanted to be a pagan, now I know why :-)
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