Things have to get worse before they get better.

 

"Wait", I hear you say"what happened to the last couple of weeks of your trip last year - you know the road trip in Scotland, and what about the bit about the Queen's demise?"

Well you might ask, but all that does is serve to illustrate a point that I haven't yet made. There is a very, very long list of things to be done and a correspondingly few days in which to do them. 

By my current estimate, we're running about 18 months behind, which is when the van was due to be completed had that trip to the far North not got in the way, so have a little patience please!

Life at our place must be a bit like how it feels being a silicone chip manufacturer; delivery may or may not happen at some future point but if you wait long enough you'll either forget what it was you were waiting for, or realise that you can get along quite well without it anyway.

In the meantime, the number of parts coming out of the van appear to be in excess of the number that went in, and where the car once slept is standing room only I'm afraid.

Death by a thousand projects.

 

It's hard to explain to ourselves, let alone anyone else how we never did quite get back to finishing the van, but we never seem to run out of things to do, places to go and people to see and it's pretty clear that on our list of "fun things to do today", "pulling the van entirely apart and working in a humidified oven for a couple of weeks" hasn't actually figured very highly.

There are eleven other months left to choose from this year, months that promise cooler weather, less humidity and generally much better conditions for lying upside down in confined spaces while spraying toxic substances around, but they are also much better for doing other things.

So we've started.   We've backed our poor thing up to the garage, borrowed the ramps, and have begun pulling everything apart and spreading them all over the garage, workshop and house.

We have five weeks to sort it.

Surely that's enough time.

Surely.