Silver linings

Things weren't actually all tickety-boo by the end of yesterday.  A momentary lapse on my part meant a tiny but terribly inconvenient bit of remedial work had to be taken care of today, which only added to the bits that didn't go entirely to plan.

By one measure, that one where you compare where you think the job might have been at the end of the day versus where it actually is, we may have actually lost a day in the programme.  Since in the absence of working space in the garage we'd decided to postpone painting one  of the cabinet carcasses until we could shuffle things, perhaps one could argue that perhaps that was the plan all along.

Another day lost is neither here nor there as it seems to be a daily occurrence, and it did happily create a fortuitous lay day in the middle of a heatwave warning where "older people are advised to use air conditioners where possible".

The warning didn't say who one had to be older than, but since one of us is older than the other, there didn't seem to be any point in not taking advice.   

I could just scurry out into the steam pot for a bit, spend twenty minutes or so laying on another coat, and then sit quietly in the cool for two or three hours for the time to pass until the next one.

Everything is hiding under the spray covers so even finding tools would be a challenge even if I had the motivation to do so.  Not being able to find my (insert name of tool) will be tomorrow's problem.  

Paint it black.

I looked it up and discovered that one's 49th wedding anniversary is apparently celebrated by giving copper gifts.   I thought that was the seventh, which by my sums happened 42 years ago so I happily concluded I have dodged that particular bullet.  If you do a reverse look-up there's no mention of 49 in the copper stakes, so that's good enough for me.

It's a scary day, that day you cover perfectly good paint on your van with thick black goop, but if it sticks it will make the bit around the rear door more durable, and it certainly makes the white PVC look like something it's not.   I suspect that now is not a good time to discuss how well paint sticks to PVC either, but if it's half as good as the way it sticks to skin it will be fine.

Oh well, happy anniversary my love, they tell me that black is the new copper, so how lucky are we to be covered in the stuff!

Holy Bed Base Batman!

 It was the kind of day which would have been enjoyed by anyone who gets their jollies doing repetitive work while standing in a sauna wearing sweaty earmuffs and a dust mask, as their hands go slowly numb from the vibrating machinery.

At the end of it, another four kilos of PVC had to my great shame, been dispatched to add to our land fill catastrophe, although I am consoled by the thought that the weight saving achieved may well contribute ever so slightly to a carbon offset by way of fuel saved during the service life of the vehicle.

Thanks to the miracle of 3d printed templates, the job was less difficult than it might have been.  I am not sure how I avoided the temptation of spelling out a secret message in binary code, but I think I did.

At the end of the day, not much else was done, but if I had a box on my list next to the words "add lightness to bed base" there would be a check mark in it tonight, and the tingling in my fingers is slowly abating.

The Summit.

 

I think today was some sort of turning point.   Everything that has to come out is out, which logically means that the only direction things can go is 'in', and everything that goes in is therefore evidence that some sort of positive progress is being made.

The fridge drain seems to be working well enough, so it stayed, which accounts for that tiny piece of silicone tube poking through the floor near the wheel well.

The wiring was going to stay too, but it turns out when we uncovered the switch panel that one or two things had not been done in our final rush, in quite the way we expected them to have been.  On closer inspection one or two turned out to be three or four things and by the time we'd finished wondering what to do about it, the wiring was lying in a small heap on the floor, and we were ready to start again.   

It's curious fact of modern life I suspect, that the only area of the work which, due to pressure of time we entrusted to qualified person, is the only part of the job that requires replacement.

Ah well onward and upward, or possibly not, since we are standing at the top of the mountain. It's all downhill from here!

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.

Times of Uncertainty Saturday 17th September - Brussels to London

The day began delightfully at a railway station in Brussels well before sensible people are out of bed, with a Belgian Waffle for breakfast, and continued that way with an equally delightful and terribly British lunch in Wandsworth High Street.

The lead -p to those points of delight had been somewhat more fraught however.  This was the day that our EU visa expired, so we had to be gone.  As we had originally planned to be in Corsica by now, we  had lashed out on fairly flexible Business Class seats on an aeroplane to take us from Ajaccio to Paris and then to London.  When our friend’s illness caused cancellation of those plans, the airline (bless them) agreed to fly us from Paris to London in economy class at no extra cost.

That was all well and good, but the train from Brussels to London was about the same as to Paris, and we could save a day’s worth of travel and visits to two airports as well, so we took the momentous decision to “walk” away from our (now non-changeable because we were already feeling somewhat bruised and what could possibly go wrong(?) tickets.)

Perhaps we could have foreseen the sad demise of the Monarch, and the even sadder last-minute contraction of Covid by our friends, but we hadn’t, and with every seat on every bus and every bed in the whole of the realm unavailable while folk mourned as our Australian PM would say “in his own particular way”,  this leg of our journey was beginning to look a little more adventurous than we would have preferred.  Suffice to say a rather large black hole had appeared in our schedule.

Thankfully Matt and Kathy, who we were hoping to catch up with in a week or two, welcomed us like a long-lost Uncle and Aunt, and our evening ended no less delightfully with them and our little grand-nieces, with an awful lot of catching up still to be done.