janewilliams20

It is now 2011, and that means the '11 plates are available - assuming of course that you buy a new car to put one on. Or maybe not? Maybe I could buy one and save it? Or something?
The attraction here is the fact I noticed when buying the current car - the KA prefix is a local one. So, KA11YRS would spell... yes, I'm sure my Gloranthan friends can see where this is going.
So, I went over to the DVLA site and found out. Yes, I can indeed buy it, for £400. I can save it for when I have a car new enough to put it on (you can make a car look older than it is, but not younger). £400 is quite a lot of money, without also replacing the current car earlier than I need to, or waiting several years before I get to use it.

Are there alternatives? I looked up common substitutions of numbers for letters, and did some more searching. Too many theoretically possible options aren't available, and some prices are incredible (1 ALL will cost you £90K!), but I could, if I wanted, get V7NGA for £326 - and that could go straight on the current car. K666LYR is available for £185, but that isn't really all that close.

No, I haven't even bothered looking for variations on "Jane". I suspect that's a common enough name that others will have been there before me.

I won't be picking up the new car tonight after all. The salesman rang - he'd done one last check and noticed that something was missing. The air conditioning.....

We'd looked at the controls last weekend and seen air-con-like things, very similiar to those in Dave's car. It turns out there's one rather important button missing, the one with "AC" written on it.

So.... either we take this car (knocking £500 or so off the price), or he gets back to the factory and tells them to build another one and this time get it right. The result will arrive in March: next year's plate, slightly better wheels, more miles on the car I'm trading in, but the same price. We're waiting till March.

Little car gets traded in for New Little Car in January (New Car becomes available while we're away, so it'll be latish January before I get it). One thing they mentioned while valuing it was the state of the front tyres, and they're quite right. Legal, but.... not that I corner hard or anything, you understand.

Tyres for an Audi A2 are not cheap. I do NOT want to buy a pair for a car I'm about to sell, not when they won't increase the value.

Tuesday, right front tyre was observed to be soft to the point of saggy, and the gauge read 18, not 30. There's a difference... and its done this before. I'm keeping an eye on it, but a very slow puncture is a possibility.

The route I use to work is fun, scenic, and free of traffic. The last half is also ungritted in winter. Driving that on slicks, when the flooded bits freeze, is probably not a good idea.

Last night, it turned foggy. Patchy fog, but thick. Bits of that road were still safe to do 80 along (not that I would, I obey the 60 limit, naturally!), other bits had 5-yard visibility, with not much warning of the change. Little Car had front fog-lights once, but after too many Pyrric victories over pheasants, we stopped replacing them and just tidied up the bare holes.

The weather is not improving: this morning was very scenic heavy frost on trees and road, mist, and fine snow in places.

I'm beginning to think about taking the Wimp Route to and from work :(

... and old Astra, or something like that. Something boring. 60 limit, I usually do about 70, it was doing about 50. Until we got round the next corner, and it in turn got stuck behind a Landrover doing 40. B***y Landrover drivers.. :)
So, knowing that there were no more places where I could do a double over-take, I sighed and settled back for a slow journey home. Then dropped to third gear, as the convoy had dropped to 30. WTF? The Landrover was now stuck behind some sort of classic lorry - I know nuffin about lorries, but I'd guess it was from the 1940s. Lovely condition, polished, shiny. Probably heading towards the steam fair at Shuttleworth over the weekend. But I can't take photos while doing 30 :(
Up to the T-junction at the top of Old Warden, and the original Astra turned right instead of left, while the rest of us carried on in a steam-fair direction. One less... And then we ground to a near-halt. The lorry was stuck behind something even slower. We'd found a traction engine.

Fortunately at this point the traction engine pulled in, the lorry pulled in behind it, and overtaking occured, peeling off from the back first. I never saw any of them again, despite stopping beyond Old Warden to take photos of Shuttleworth House across the fields. But, heading towards the final roundabout, I did have to pass a huge yellow tractory contrivance.

Been de-stressing and hence not updating much. So a catch-up, with multiple cut-tags.

Weekend - Pete and Shirley came round for Saturday afternoon and evening.

( Read more... )

Sunday, caught up on some sleep. ( Read more... )

Sunday afternoon was Summer, ( Read more... )

Monday... work, the usual. Helen's birthday, and I now have a really nice source of E-cards, so I used it. It had been a couple of days since I last did a note/card to Enid, so ( Read more... )

Should have gone back to slimming/exercise class in the evening, but still feeling tired (and achey from the gardening), so skipped it. Instead, pulled out the fabric for Dave's new cloak. ( Read more... )

And then, late at night, I did a final check of email/LJ, and found Vaurien's post saying that Enid had died. Oh. Oh, various words that won't be appreciated by filters. Yes, it was expected, yes, it was as he says, in many ways a relief, yes, she went in the best way that could be expected under the circumstances, but even so... Didn't wake Dave to supply hugs, it's not fair. Bears are perfectly capable of soaking up tears. I expect I'll drivel on more about this over the next few weeks, I'm just starting to realise how much she meant to me. Dave did the sums - I'd known her for 18 years.

Ah well, on to more cheerful topics. Tuesday night, I went back to back-swording class for the first time for far too long ( Read more... )

MOT and service. Those boring things that you check it in for, and take for granted. Yes, the service on an Audi is a bit pricey, but the FSH is important, and you can't hand an A2 over to the little mechanic in the back of town, he hasn't got the kit. Anyway, Audi at Bedford pick the car up from the work car park and bring it back again, and it comes back cleaned inside and out. A very expensive car-wash, Dave says.

Boy, was he right.

My service representative, Richard, phoned Dave then me to discuss what had been found. There were a few little jobs that needed doing. Brake pads. Discs. Brake fluid. Antifreeze. Two new front tyres (who, me, eat tyres? No, I drive sedately, honest...) None of these items cost anything really excessive (by Audi standards), but it added up. It added up to four digits. Ouch!

We tried to get the tyres at least cheaper elsewhere. Not at that kind of notice, and only a £15 saving anyway. In fact Audi phoned me back later to say they couldn't get the Pirelli's they'd quoted for, only some (much nicer and more expensive) Dunlops, for which they would of course charge me the originally quoted price. Ah, well, a slightly silver lining, maybe.

They didn't replace the missing front fog light (the one that had lost an argument with a pheasant) - the part hadn't come in, and it wasn't an MOT failure anyway. More expense saved.

The little car did indeed come back beautifully clean. But over £1000 is a lot to pay for a car-wash.

Maybe we won't take it for a fortnight touring Europe after all.....

Took a half day and Dave picked me up from work, then off to "The Original Reenactors Market". Not that we needed anything, as such, but.... Dave got some new boots, I got some horn spoons (better for early period than my pewter one), there were beads, there was a book about Confederate uniforms that was illustrated with pictures of, well, us... and while I did spend over £50 on fabric, it wasn't for me. Got a useful picture for the Scavenger Hunt. And found a nice looking (and sounding, more importantly) little harp that might do Saf (follow the "other harps" link). Also a harp book for me - easy medieval music, Mel Bay.

Then on the way home (4:30 - escaped early!) remembered there was a new Ikea at (or at least, near) MK. Pulled out PDA and Googled for location - yep "somewhere near" is right, but their web site had a map. And we wanted some shelves for the computer room. So, a trolley-load of things we hadn't realised we needed and a nice meal later, we headed for home. Tired, but a very satisfying day.

Now Saturday morning, Dave has gone to work, I've loaded a couple of Scavenger pictures to Flickr, and once I've updated this, will walk into town, pick up a letter that someone didn't put enough postage on, and see if I can find some "Multi-colored graffiti" to take a photo of (Scavenger item 18). I'm sure there were other things on the to-do list, too.

This afternoon we get to test-drive his chosen new car - a Fiat Doblo. Based on a van, so will carry just about anything, but also comfortable and fast. He says. We'll see.

I'd like to get more done on the army and stronghold for the May wargames event, but may run out of time. Still, quite a bit of it I can do while sitting watching TV this evening., Yes, me watch TV, I know, this comes as a shock. But there's a pile of DVDs we intend to watch, so we have a diary booking for the purpose.