Almost as much fun as watching paint dry – watch the crack slowly creep across the windscreen!
Category Archives: MobLog
Mobile MMS Log Postings
Great Mysteries of the World
This is a bit of a strange one…
The picture is of the top of the cubicle divider in one of the Gents toilets in our building. I spotted this a couple of months ago, and noticed that it was still there today, weeks later. So whose it is, and quite how long it’s been there, is a mystery. (And I don’t propose to pick it up to find out!)
Looks to me like a boiled sweet, and it’s only visible from within the cubicle (note the ridge behind the sweet), and only by someone tall. Very strange.
Wedding Bells
We’ve just reached the end of a rather busy weekend. I had Friday off work, as David, my soon-to-be former line manager at work, finally got married! He’s been about to get married pretty well since I joined SSE two years ago, but as with these things finding a suitable date and location has taken some time. Whereas one of the previous propsed ceremonies would have been just down the road, the wedding actually took place at the Bookham Grange Hotel in Little Bookham near Leatherhead. I took a load of pictures, which I’ve posted up as a gallery at http://www.daveandlouisa.peat.me.uk/ to take a look at.
It was actually the first time in a while that we’d been to a civil wedding service rather than a Church wedding. The interesting thing is that although David and Louisa were allowed to write their own vows, they were followed by a set form of words that is almost identical to the standard vows that are used in a Church of England wedding, except with any mention of God removed. From having talked to David when he was planning the ceremony, current rules require that there be no mention whatsoever of God in the ceremony, the logic being that if you want any sort of religious ceremony, you should be getting married in a Church. Reading wise they used one reading on marraige that actually comes up quite frequently in the Church weddings we sing at, and a Shakespeare Sonnet.
One advantage of holding the wedding at a hotel, is that there then isn’t the traditional chance for half the guests to get lost on the way to the reception, as the hotel was handling the entire event. After the ceremony we moved out onto the patio for drinks, and then swiftly moved on to taking the pictures. Despite the ongoing lousy weather this summer, David and Louisa managed to pick a day when we had beautiful weather.
After pictures we moved on to the meal, where David and Louisa had cunningly sat us with several other IT people, although once someone on the table had found out how Beth and me had met, we spent an awful lot of dinner talking about that. (It’s strange – sometimes we get an ‘oh, you met on the Internet’ and not much else, other times people are really intrigued!)
The speeches were good, no cringe-making moments as you sometimes get at weddings. The BETTA project trips to Scotland, that as a result of which, had they continued, Louisa was threatening to pull the plug on the whole wedding, got a mention in passing. From there we moved on to the evening events, the disco.
As I’ve got older, I seem to have developped a bit of an aversion to dancing. Whilst I actually had a membership card to Utopia, the nightclub in Reading when I was at University, and still went every-so-often after graduation, now I don’t tend to like dancing at all. Having said that, even when I was younger I used to go for safety in numbers, and only dance when there were a lot of people on the floor. However, unlike Cathy and Steve’s party a couple of weeks ago, I had Beth with me, so thanks to wifely persuasion I did end up dancing!
Anyway, the wedding certainly seemed to go off well, and both Beth and myself had a great time. Hopefully David and Louisa are having a similarly great time off on honeymoon in Italy.
Final Drink
As I missed Dave’s stag night (clashed with the Choir concert), and nobody else from work went along either, we went down to The Ship Inn at Langstone for a drink. I grabbed the picture whilst Dave was on the phone. The other shot is a nice view of Langstone harbour, which is sheltered from the Solent by Hayling Island which you can see in the distance.
Anyway, we enjoyed a couple of drinks together, and David remained at the pub to have dinner. (Excellent fish, not suprisingly!)
Space Saver Spare
So there I was, driving to work, had headed along the A327, turned out onto the A30 and accelerated up to 70mph onto the dual carraigeway, then heading down the hill towards Hartley Wintney the steering on the car starts feeling a bit odd, somewhat like it does in a strong wind, then turning off the stereo the car sounds rather odd, so I slow down, and there is still a rather odd rumbling, and the handling seems wierd. I’ve always had worries about the running of the engine not being quite right, partly as a result of what happened to my old Fiesta, and being told by the mechanic that if he’d seen the car sooner it wouldn’t have been so bad, so I initially thought that the rumbling was the engine. However having pulled over into the layby in the centre of Hartley Wintney it was pretty obvious what the problem was, a flat tyre. For some reason between the top of the hill and the bottom the tyre had spontaneously deflated!
After fiddling around for a bit, I eventually decided that rather than get myself messed up and frustrated trying to change the wheel, and considering the amount of money I’ve paid to the AA over the years and not had to call them, I’d phone them and make use of the cover. The service was pretty impressive, at the height of the morning rush they had a van to me within 25 minutes. They even sent me a text message confirming the arrival time. The AA man of course had a much better jack than the weedy one that Ford includes, so the wheel was off and the spare on the car in no time, which was then that I remembered the slight problem – the spare wheel is one of those Space Saver Spare’s…
My Focus has 15 inch wheels, a standard size, but the Focus has space for a 14 inch spare. The spare is also narrower, and inflated to a higher pressure. The AA man gave me the dire warning as to what would happen if I exceeded 50mph with the space saver spare on the car, and also wrote on the job sheet that he’d told me, I guess so that there is no chance of someone trying to get compensation if they break the wheel. Thankfully, as you can see the wheel is helpfully painted bright red so that when people get stuck behind you chugging along they know why you’re going so slow.
With regards to the flat tyre, there was no visible sign of a puncture, or anything in the tyre, the tread looked fine. The only noticable problem was that the outside bit where all the make, model and so on was written was decidedly worn.
Anyway, I was still about 50 minutes from work at normal speeds, so I decided to head straight for Micheldever Tyres to get the tyre replaced.
It took the best part of an hour to get there at a steady 40mph. Once there they took a look at the tyre, and decided it had to be replaced, which took about 20 minutes to do, and cost me £61. I eventually got to work about 2 hours late. Had the Focus been like my first car, or the Fiesta I could have made it to work and sorted the tyres out on my lunchbreak, as both of those had proper spare tyres. If the spare were full size, true I’d have less boot space, but then most of the time I don’t fill the boot anyway. Having the space saver spare just seems to generate more hassle. Having said that, on a Porsche there isn’t enough room for a full size tyre, so if you get a flat and have a passenger, the passenger ends up with the wheel on their lap for the journey!