Karl’s Asylum ... for the terminally deranged

Hah. Well, in the last post I made successfully (Thankyou SO much, WP upgrade..), I pointed out the Astra was going for MOT. Did it pass? Hell no.
For 3 days I was reliant on the “Jo Cowell Taxi Service” (Thankyou!) until I could get the fault fixed. One cheapo suspension bush was worn. That’s all. By Wednesday, I was mobile once again. School broke for summer on the following Friday, and on Saturday the devil once again pissed in my fishtank.

Pulling out from our weekly Tesco shop into 3 lane traffic, the car lurched and stopped..the rear passenger wheel had jammed up. In traffic. Cue the screaming, smoke belching tyre being dragged god knows how far to an out of the way place, where we abandoned the car and managed to knock up Rik and his good lady. One call to the AA from his phone (we weren’t carrying the mobiles), and I heard “We’ll be with you in 4 hours tops”. This was 3pm. 7pm came, and we got a call..”Won’t be with you now until 9-9.30pm”. Emergency service, my arse. We got tooled up and went back to the car, and managed to get it rolling again. It would only move IF you held the handbrake half on. Fully off, it’d lock up.

We were able to drop it at my nans, and get a lift back here. On the way back, we say 5 RAC vans. Typical. Come Monday, we were able to limp it to Tyre Force Shrewsbury, who are absolutely bloody wonderful! They’ve done most of the sorting of my cars, and they’ve always been cheap, but damn good. I left it in their hands. He fixed it that day, kept me up to date on the repairs, and even waited for us to pick it up after the 5pm close of business. Now THAT’S service. £240 was the damage, for an entire new back braking system and 2 new tyres. It seems the rear brakes were utterly shot, and effectively decided to destroy themselves and the hydraulics in fairly spectacular fashion.

So, now we’re back on the road..again. New brakes throughout, new tyres, new ’stat, new headgasket, new exhaust, recent service…fingers crossed. Heh..it’s too good to scrap. No rust anywhere, and 430 miles to a tank still.

So..AA..you’re useless. Sorry, but you are. Flooding or no, 2 of your patrols were seen chatting at a service station..fully stretched much?

On to the floods. My, my..the UK’s had a bloody nose there. Build on floodplains - get flooded. Concrete/tarmac over surfaces - expect surface water. Our drainage system is WELL overdue for replacement and upgrade, I’d say. Dredge the damn rivers, and start to exersize the common sense our forbears had about building and where/how to do it well. Maintain the drains, don’t leave them until they fail because IT’S TOO LATE THEN. In so many ways, we’ve really made it worse for ourselves. I really feel for those affected, I do. Do our goverment or the powers that be care? it seems not, if they still intend to build on floodplains.

It was being watched closely here…Jem and I were walking twice a day to see the river by the famous “Boat Pub” that floods regularly. The most we had was some reverse drainage, a brook that was unable to cope, and the water breaching a wall under the footbridge for a few hours…normally we flood at the drop of a hat, but..not this time. Everyone had prepared, except the council. The water was inches (if that) off the high street in Ironbridge..yet the defences were apparently lent out to worcester or similar..so we’ve heard. Hmm. Fluke saved us this time, I’d say.

As to the scum that apparently tried to steal the barriers in affected areas, and that are siphoning off the emergency water etc to profiteer…you sicken me. You should be handed over to the army and made to do all the really NASTY jobs..after all, you’re no loss to society, are you? Hopefully, lessons will be learned here..and maybe water companies/power and infrastructure planners will start to implement some changes. OK, you can’t help this, but surely there should be some redundancy built into systems?

On the subject of Power companies, I’m on a mission. Our power previous to last bill was £268, and our most recent was £205. For a 2 occupier, 3 room flat that’s empty from 9-5 most of the time.

Seems a lot. I’ve done some calculations, and barring the cooker, shower and water heater, I’ve figured it should be about £70 a quarter tops at most. If we can get our timeswitch repaired, the water heater goes on economy 7. Until then it gets turned on for 10 minutes before it’s needed. Even then, it shouldn’t rack up a huge cost. All lighting is CFL, and comes to about £5 a quarter max. The TV/Wii is about the same. The “background” electronics that run 24h (Fridge, cooker display, answerphone, router) should be at MOST £30/q. We both use laptops (70w each approx)-£5/q. Even my new dual core desktop has a 35w low power chip, and that’s rarely powered up. We turn everything off when we’re not here too..standby is NOT a word I like.

I’ve turned off the storage heaters at the mains board, and I’ve invested in a “Kill-a-watt” meter to show me realtime power usage/costs for things we use, to keep a check on it. Npower want me to do a daily reading for a week and see watts watt. (see what I did there?). I reckon we’re paying FAR too much.

UPDATE: Using the readings from the 24th/25th and today (27th), we’re using an average of about 77p’s worth of electricity a day (including cooking, showers and water heater!) @ 11.6p/unit. So, yes..about £67-70 a quarter on that basis. Now, lets see what the rest of this weeks readings average at, shall we?

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 2:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.