phillsacre.me.uk

My photo today was – again – taken at lunchtime. There are a few little paths near where I work, this is one of them.

You can’t see it in the preview, but on the post there’s a little direction arrow indicating the walk. I like this because it’s absolutely pointless – you can only walk in one direction there! I wasn’t massively happy with any of the photos I took today to be honest, but I think that’s the purpose of this exercise!

I will also mention the car. I might have said something last week about the clutch needing to be replaced. Anyway, it went into the garage today and the clutch is now replaced. It feels a heck of a lot lighter and smoother now – I can see why it needed replacing!

Also… I feel pretty stupid admitting this, but I’ll say anyway because it might actually be useful to someone. When I took the car in for a service last week, I asked them to look into a potential problem: it seemed that the engine was revving when it shouldn’t be, i.e. when I put my foot down it would rev up and then drop back down again. I initially thought this was due to the engine – maybe the turbo was kicking in too early or something like that!

It turns out that it was the clutch slipping. I didn’t really know what that meant when they told me at the garage, but I Googled the symptoms the other night and it turns out that the engine revving up is one of the symptoms. The clutch was also getting pretty heavy – when I drove someone else’s VW Beetle earlier this year and then went back to the Saab, it felt like I had to put a lot of effort in to depress the clutch!

So having the clutch replaced fixed the imaginary issue with the engine. Just thought I’d say in case someone else is having issues with the engine revving when it shouldn’t… it might be the clutch slipping!

… that pretty much describes our Friday night: at 21, we were studying Haggai. Laura dressed up as Haggai, in something which was meant to look a bit like sackcloth, and did the talk in character. I think the kids really enjoyed it! – and there were less of them this week, so it wasn’t quite as manic.

Afterwards we came back home and watched – that’s right – Ashes to Ashes! Sarah came round as she had just had dinner with her work colleagues in town. So, the three of us watched Ashes together. What an episode! [SPOILER WARNING] I still don’t really have a clue how it’s all going to end. I really don’t know. I still like the purgatory theory, with Keats being the Devil or something like that… but beyond that… ?! How the whole Ray and Shaz “Life on Mars” music thing fits in, and them seeing stars, I don’t know. Either way the next episode is shaping up to be good.

Late on Saturday Anne-Marie and Sarah came round as they had just been somewhat let down by a letting agency / tenant / landlord / some combination thereof. After judicious application of the internet, maltesers, and pink lemonade I think they were feeling better and went off to look at another house round the corner. We then headed off into town to do some shopping. In the evening we went round to A-M and Sarah’s house to watch Doctor Who, followed by a few episodes of “I, Claudius”.

I thought this week’s Doctor Who was excellent – probably the best of the current series so far (better even than the weeping angels). It was funny, a bit silly, but at the same time had a good story – even if it didn’t quite stand up to close scrutiny it was good. Just what Doctor Who should be like, in my opinion.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then went our separate ways for lunch: Phil had a ladies lunch at Fordham with Laura, Jen and Tash, and I went over to AJ’s with James and we had pizza and watched “Platoon”. I’d never seen Platoon before – it was good! Quite harrowing, but worth watching. And John C. McGinley a/k/a Dr. Cox from Scrubs was in it! He was really different but quite recognisable. Strange seeing him in something else.

Anyway, after all that we went to Sunday@6, and then came back home and watched “Mallrats”. So that was pretty much our day :)

I had to get the bus into work today. The car developed a bit of a shake since it was serviced a couple of weeks ago, so I had it looked at. Apparently the driver side drive shaft needs replacing – it had seized up completely! So bizarre. To coin a phrase, “Cars do the darndest things”. I have been wondering about maybe replacing the car – although Saabs are generally good quality and last for a long time, they’re not immune to things wearing out – it’s a ten year old car and I drive it a lot (250 miles per week, give or take a bit). I did look into the cost of leasing, but that would be £3000 per year, and you’d still have to pay insurance on top of that!

So I still think the car’s worth keeping around for a while longer. I’ve had it 18 months now and only had two things go wrong, which is not bad for a ten year old car!

This weekend was the 3rd Annual Colchester Winter Beer Festival, held at Colchester Arts Centre. We went along on Saturday afternoon, and met up wtih Alex, Matt, Tom and Alison. In general it was a very good afternoon, as always! Afterwards we headed to the Ashiana for a curry, which I managed most of even after having a few slices of the Pie of Awesomeness from Proctor’s. (The Pie of Awesomeness is a very nice pork pie which we first tried at the Fat Cat. I don’t usually like pork pies but those are … well, awesome).

Anyway. So Saturday was very enjoyable :) On Sunday we went to church in the morning (getting a lift with someone, as I shall explain in a moment), and then in the afternoon we went for a nice walk around Highwoods (through the mud!), then went round to see Jo and Evie for a bit, then watched Lark Rise to Candleford and Rhod Gilbert’s Award-Winning Mince Pie. On our new HDTV. I shall review the HDTV at a later date, suffice it to say at the moment that I am impressed with it! We haven’t yet watched any proper HD content on it (some Blu-Ray discs are coming via LoveFilm so hopefully soon…) and I will give it some more time then.

Aaaaanyway. Back to Rhod Gilbert: he has got to be one of the funniest guys I’ve seen in a long time. Absolutely hilarious. The show itself was very clever, the way he drew out one story into all the different strands, and they came together quite cleverly at the end. I would recommend anyone who’s a fan of comedy to see it – you can get a good idea of what it will be like by looking up his Live at the Apollo gig from a year or two ago.

I mentioned the car. We’ve been having a few problems: on Tuesday morning I was driving into work, and noticed the car losing power. It turns out that the car hadn’t just lost power, it was basically dead (the engine pretty much cut out). Fortunately, thank God, I wasn’t going very fast at the time and was just able to coast off the A12 and pull up at the side of the road. (The fortunately is because I’d been spending the previous 20 minutes doing about 2mph, average, crawling along the A12 – I wouldn’t have had enough speed to get off the road! And if I’d been going much faster, it would have been very difficult to stop: the Saab is a heavy car and the brakes didn’t do much without being servo-assisted)

So, I pulled over and called up the AA, who arrived fairly promptly. After doing some tests the AA man decided he couldn’t fix it on the road, and so towed me to Wivenhoe. Being towed was an interesting experience – it was a fixed bar, the van in front of me did all the accelerating / braking. I just had to steer and indicate. It was strange not actually having to use any of the pedals! Anyway, we eventually got the car to the mechanic, and I worked from home that day.

The rest of the week I have been getting the bus into work (not nice – there are limited buses to Chelmsford from Colchester and it takes over an hour… although I guess I should be lucky I can get the bus at all).

It took a couple of days to diagnose exactly what was wrong with the car, but it’s apparently the ignition coil pack. That is … well, suffice it to say it’s a fairly expensive part to replace (in the order of about £400). But again, I should be grateful it wasn’t the ECU – modern ECUs are quite expensive (£1800 or so), so it could have been much worse. The part should have been delivered on Friday or Saturday, so I’m hoping that the car will be fixed today! I think the part is fairly easy to replace from what the mechanic has told me, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it will be back with me later today (or tomorrow).

So, anyway, that’s why I didn’t mention going to 21 on Friday night: I wasn’t able to (the bus doesn’t get back to Colchester until too late), and why we didn’t go to Sunday@6 yesterday. Still, these things do happen! One of the perils of running a car – even newer cars aren’t immune from these kind of issues.

On Friday night we headed round to Karen and Steve’s for their leaving party. They are leaving Colchester in a couple of weeks, sadly, so we went round there for a BBQ. It was a good evening – good company, good food, and it didn’t rain! Nice to see Foz again too, as it’s been a while.

On Saturday, I spent the afternoon taking Sarah round to various garages to try and find a car for her (she passed her test a couple of weeks ago). No luck so far – small cars are expensive because a lot of people want them! We saw quite a few big cars which were pretty cheap – including a couple of Saabs! I was quite pleased because we saw a similar one to ours which was more expensive.

Afterwards we headed down to Phil’s parents. In the evening we went round to see Julie and Dave, and then on Sunday afternoon we went to Emma’s christening! It was a really nice service, although the rector was very… quirky. But still, everyone enjoyed it. And then we had a nice reception at a nearby pub!

And we were home in time for Top Gear ;)

So that’s pretty much a quick summary of our weekend. Apologies for the briefness, but we’re watching “Zack and Miri Make a Porno”! Kevin Smith films are both disgusting and sweet in the same measure.

I mentioned before that the hire car company rang me up on Thursday, asking for the hire car back. It turns out that the hire car (arranged through my insurance) was cancelled – but I was still able to pick it up for some bizarre reason! (They didn’t tell me or, apparently, the hire car company). The reason was, the other insurers had offered to provide a hire car. Fair enough. Anyway, after spending some time on the phone on Friday, the other insurance company (i.e. the insurers of the person who reversed into my car) provided me a new hire car.

I am now driving a Peugeot 308 Estate. I must say, it’s probably not the car I would have chosen. In fact, it would have been a fair way down the list. But it’s a decent enough car – gets me from A to B, and that’s all I care about for a hire car, especially given that my car should be fixed soon.

Anyway, I hope that my insurance company have collected the hire car today – I was hoping they’d pick it up on Friday or Saturday, but no dice! If they don’t, I won’t have room for it – I’ll just have to leave it on a single yellow line and they can pick up the tab for any parking fines it gets while there…

They should have just tried being me for five minutes :(

Ok, so that’s a huge exaggeration. But I’ve not had a good time of it recently with the car, i.e. getting it repaired. The story so far: in late February, someone reversed into the side of my car while it was parked. This buckled and dented the door. I rang up and made an insurance claim.

On Monday, the car (finally, after more than five weeks) went to Colchester Accident Repairs. They initially said that it would take three days to repair the car, I rang them up today and they said they were working on it and it would likely be Monday or Tuesday. Ok, well, that’s inconvenient but I guess I can live with the hire car for another few days.

The hire car, by the way, was delivered to me at the garage on Monday morning. They rang me up this morning and said that they were going to be needing it back. WHAT?!!! Apparently someone made an administrative error and he had down that I was due to finish with the car on 30th March, not that I was due to pick it up then! Why they ring me up three days afterwards with this I don’t know, but still. I (politely) told them to shove it where the sun don’t shine, and they’re not going to pick the car up today – but I might be driving round a car which is uninsured.

Grrrrrrr.

The hire car itself is nice though – it’s a 2007 VW Passat. It’s got a pretty good engine on it so is more nippy than my Saab. And because it’s diesel, you get a fairly decent MPG (although I must say the petrol guage has been a bit more mobile than I thought it would be). It also feels lighter – I think the Saab is built a bit like a tank!

So in general I like it. Still would like to get my car back though, the VW is nice but it’s just nice to be in your own car. Hopefully not too long now (I’ve been saying this for ages, but I really don’t think it will be now…)

Last week turned out to be pretty busy! I had a pop quiz at work on Monday night, we were out at Anne-Marie’s for pancakes on Tuesday night, we had Moore Course on Wednesday night, and then I was leading home group on Thursday night. So by the time Friday came round we were just about ready for a break!

And we were able to watch “Into the Wild Green Yonder”, the latest and final instalment in the Futurama DVD quadrilogy. I really enjoyed it – I think it was a fitting end for the movies. Although the ending did conflict with the last episode of the series (“The Devil’s Hands are Idle Playthings”), I think it’s comparable to there being contradictory versions of the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And, of course, if they do go on to do a sixth series they might explain it somehow.

On Saturday, I took the car into the garage to have an estimate done for repairs. Hopefully the insurers will get back to me soon and tell me that I can go ahead with having it repaired! In the evening, James and Tash (some friends from Fordham) came round for dinner. It was a really nice evening! After dinner we played a game called “Mexican Train” which was very good fun – kind of like dominos. More on that later.

On Sunday morning we went to church (to both services!), and then came back home for lunch. In the evening we went to a prayer meeting at Fordham for the new Sunday @ 6 service (which is beginning at the end of April), followed by a “Visual Bible Journeys” presentation. Basically it was an overview of Saul, David and Solomon illustrated by photos and maps. Very interesting, actually! There are two more coming up in March, they’d be well worth coming to if that’s something you’d be interested in. Seeing (for example) a photograph of the valley where David defeated Goliath does help to make the Old Testament more real. And being able to see roughly what Jerusalem looked like is very useful too – often you can read something about the temple but not really visualise what it would have looked like.

Anyway, after that we came back home and collapsed watched “Lark Rise to Candleford”.

I mentioned a while back about “Mexican Train”. Well, it’s basically a dominos game – see here for the rules. You basically have to lay out your ‘train’ with dominos, matching the numbers end-to-end. As we were playing, I kept thinking what the best way of arranging your dominos would be in order to make the longest train.

I thought this would be a good problem for a computer to solve… so I just knocked up a quick python script which will generate the longest chain given a set of dominos. (If you just run the script, it will generate a random set of dominos and a random start number and give the longest possible path). It’s a fairly useless script, but then again maybe it will come in handy next time I play the game ;)

I’ll start with the good news: last week, as I mentioned, we had some work done on our bathroom. That work is now finished! Yay! We still have a couple of things to do, but we don’t need the workmen back in. So the towel rail / radiator, shaver point, extractor fan and plastering is all completed. All we have to do now is decorate, i.e paint and fit some kind of flooring (we had a wooden floor fitted last week, but need to put down some kind of laminate flooring on top. Or something like that).

So we’ve been enjoying the additional space we’ve got in the bathroom, it’s fantastic :)

On Saturday we went down to stay with Phil’s parents. On Saturday evening we went out to the Royal Festival Hall to see a performance of Mozart’s 17th Piano Concerto, followed by Mahler’s 5th Symphony. I think my favourite of the two was probably the Mozart – but I would like to hear the Mahler again! I think the Mahler piece is one which you would appreciate much more if you knew it, and unfortunately it was the first time I’d heard it. The last two movements were beautiful, though.

Unfortunately, this is where the bad news comes in: when we got back frmo the concert, I found a note on the car. Someone had reversed into it, putting a dent in the driver’s side door and buckling it slightly. Fortunately the door still opens and locks, and the car wasn’t damaged otherwise, but it is annoying because now I have to get it repaired and deal with insurance and the like. Still, at least the guy who did it owned up – apparently in 70-80% of these kind of incidents, people just drive off!

Anyway, he gave me his details and I have called up my insurance company to put in the claim so hopefully it won’t be too long before it will be sorted. The garage are supposed to be ringing me within 48 hours.

So, it wasn’t the most pleasant way to end the day! But still, these things happen. On Sunday morning we went to church with Phil’s parents, and then after lunch drove down to West Norwood to see my sister Alison. It was really nice to see her, the first time we’d actually been to her flat. And after that we had a fun-filled trip back home… we set off at about 5:00, and got home at around 7:30. Not too bad, I suppose, given that we had to go through central London (well, skirt the edges of it really).

After that we watched “Lark Rise to Candleford” and just crashed out for the evening! So there you have it. Tonight I’m going to a charity pop music quiz, something which the company I work for has arranged. Should be good fun, although I was absolutely rubbish at the last music quiz I went to – I just think I know nothing about music! Not pop music anyway. Ah well.

This weekend was a pretty quiet one actually – which I think we both needed! Friday evening we didn’t do much – just watch the usual selection of TV. I like the fact that QI is back :)

On Saturday we did a bit of shopping. We bought ourselves a new Kenwood food processor and blender, our old food processor died a couple of months ago and they are actually surprisingly useful. We have a few recipes which call for their use, including a very nice cashew nut curry. We didn’t have a blender before, though, and we made good use of it on Sunday. But more on that later.

On Sunday we went to church in the morning, and then afterwards Laura came back with us for a “comedy-a-thon” (as we called it). Basically, Laura is an apprentice at Fordham and we discovered recently that we haev pretty much exactly the same taste in comedy as she does :) So we invited her round for lunch and a watching of lots of various comedy things, which was great. She’s loaned us the first series of Black Books which we haven’t seen before (amazingly enough), watched a couple of episodes of it yesterday and it was great.

Oh, and we used the new blender to good effect – we made a milkshake using a cadbury’s fruit & nut bar. Not as good as a Shakey Jakey’s, but not bad for a first try! Anyway, the afternoon went well, we will have to arrange another one soon…

One more thing to mention: we also managed to sell the car :) £361 in the end, which isn’t a bad price at all considering webuyanycar.com offered me £50! I’ll feel happier when I have the money in my hand, but still – the winning bidder is coming to pick the car up this afternoon. Now I’ve started, I might try and sell a few other things on eBay – I’ve got lots of bits and pieces I don’t really want but I’m sure someone would be interested in.

Well, I’ve now got 27 people watching the auction! Not only that, but someone has made a bid. Yay! So, if you’re interested in a Hyundai Lantra, now’s your chance :-) At the time of writing there are 3 days, 22 hours left on the auction.

Get it while you can! ;)