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Advent 2019 days 5 to 8
A little catch up:
Something to remember about Tory promises
It's almost time for yet another snap election - so everybody is bigging up all the things they'll do if elected. Something to remember about all the great sounding pledges of the Tories is to remember... no, not that Boris is a habitual liar and a court found that lying for gaining votes is acceptable... no, it's worse than that. Look at all the things they plan to do and ask yourself a simple question - they have been in power for ages, why haven't they done this already?
The Tories have brought you austerity. Public sector pay freezes, while granting MPs pay rises. Big polluters and foreign interests are backing Johnson - who is actually pulling the strings? They promise to put twenty thousand police officers back on the streets. Well, this would bring the number of active officers up to near the number that there were in 2010. Isn't that about the time when the Tory Home Secretary Theresa May (remember her?) decided to cut back on public services. God help you if you're on benefits, especially disability allowance. Or, wait, let's not forget the joy of Universal Credit. University tuition fees shot up (like, tripled) while many schools received lower funding. Let's not forget the Starter Homes - perfectly affordable at a quarter million, or twice that in London. Clearly not aimed at those on lower incomes. And a long stay of Tory manifestos is scrapping the Human Rights Act and replacing it with their own version - probably one that exempts them from liability for trashing your rights as they see fit. They're also the ones who introduced The Investogatory Powers Bill, otherwise known as blanket invasion of privacy "because terrorists" or "because paedophiles". If you're in a union, since 2016 you can only go on strike of 50% of the union members vote to go on strike (before it was 50% of those who voted). As is painfully obvious from Brexit, 50% of voters and 50% of the electorate are very different.
Windrush? Grenfell? Brexit itself? The Tories have a proven track record of screwing up the country to the benefit of the rich and powerful. If you fall for the mindless slogan of "Get Brexit done", you've just helping them cause even more damage.
Saturday work
Normally everybody is expected to work one Saturday in two, from 5am to 12.30pm. I was exempted from all of them due to not having transport on Saturday. Last week I wanted to go to Châteaubriant. This week I didn't feel like it. As I mentioned before, I had come down with a cold that was at it's worst on Thursday.
So I knew how things were going to go. I'd sit in bed until noon and feel sorry for myself. Or I could get up off my ass and do something. So on Friday, I volunteered to come on at nine on Saturday. My boss was like "huh?", though too polite to continue with "are you mad? nobody volunteers!", although some of the girls said pretty much that to me on Saturday when they found out that I was there by choice.
Did my usual morning stuff, helped out in plonge, and then the day was done. I went into town and walked around. Bought new lottery tickets, had a nice organic hot chocolate, and noticed that there was some big telethon thing going on, or at the other end of the car park, a truckathon. Uh-hu. ☺
Went shopping at the local U and got some stuff for the weekend. All of the toys were effectively half price - you pay the full price and you get a credit voucher for half of it. I looked at the Playmobil (not much left) and only found something worth about six euros to tempt me. I guess that's kind of sad.
Came home, washed Felicity (country lanes equals muddy) and then watched a couple of movies on Prime Video before having an early night.
All in all, better than feeling sorry for myself.
An eventful Sunday
I know if mom was still alive, we'd probably have gone to a winter vide grenier in... Messac, I think it was. And probably had a meal either in a truck stop near Bain (she liked the salads) or McDo on the way home.
Since Messac is a long way from here, I didn't think of going.
One thing my little car suffers from is the windows misting up in the cold. Every morning it's the same story. I do up my coat, put on gloves, and drive to work with my side window open. It seems the ventilator isn't much use at shifting the condensation (on either cold or hot), what works best is to put the blower on max, heated, and aimed towards my feet, and then just keep the window open to get changes of air inside. Clearly not an option that'll work in the rain, mind you...
Something I did notice was that the heated rear window didn't seem to have any effect. Perhaps because of the stupid stick-on nonsense that was put on the back windows to darken them?
A closer examination suggests a fine crack in the conductive track just above the cable connection. Which would explain why it isn't working, certainly. I ordered a repair kit from Amazon, and noticed that there might be another problem, as exposed by my little endoscope camera:
I've attempted to join the two bits, but it might need some more work, like being soldered, perhaps? Certainly, it's an indication that Felicity had a hard life before ending up with me.
Since the back demister may be currently out of service, and I have a patch kit, I decided to just go ahead and peel off that rubbish stuck to the back windows. Felicity is not a pimpmobile, and since I have to back into the hangar at the end of the day, this tinted rubbish actually greatly obscures vision when moving backwards at night. Thankfully it peeled off fairly simply.
I then hooked up the battery to the C1 and turned the engine over for a few minutes. After that, I got out some tools and installed an LED floodlight around the back as that's where I park the car.
Since I had tools, I extracted the car radio to fix the left/right speaker issue. Clearly the radio had been salvaged from something else. Interestingly, the speakers were hooked up to the outputs for the rear speakers. As it worked, I didn't bother changing it. I'm not quite sure why the blue/white wire (antenna motor control) is plugged into a socket with a red/white wire. I suspect the red/white may be a switched feed of 12V for powering the unit (you'll notice a splitter on the left running the unit from the constant 12V feed intended to preserve the memorised channels and settings). Don't worry, the two aren't connected to each other, they're on different pins. It's just kind of weird.
As the weather starts to degrade, I hope it'll hold out long enough that I can watch/record "His Dark Materials" tonight while enjoying a big bowl of tagliatelle carbonara. Then, wow, even on my own the weekends seem to pass too quickly.
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| Rick, 8th December 2019, 20:48 |
My bad, it's fettuccine. But that's just the same thing cut thinner... |
(Felicity? Marte? Find out!)
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- entry 2019/12/08
