Category Archives: selina_dave

Saturday 10th September 2016 – NOW THAT WAS MUCH MORE LIKE IT!

In bed at a reasonably early hour and despite the odd trip down the corridor it was totally painless and I didn’t feel a thing until the alarm went off at 06:00. I wouldn’t mind doing that again. I felt much better after that.

And we had a slow start to the day seeing as how not much was likely to happen here. Darren and Amber went off to the tyre depot, and after a somewhat late breakfast Rachel and I spent the morning doing stuff and having a long chat about this, that and the other.

But these insurance problems are never-ending, aren’t they? We went to print off the proposal form – and the printer ran out of ink. It’s almost as if I’m destined not to take out this insurance, isn’t it?

However, as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed … we don’t have problems, we have solutions. So I forwarded the e-mail up to the tyre depot and they printed it out up there and brought it back when the place closed. So what’s going to be the next hitch now?

For lunch I had a couple of wraps filled with vegetables and my vegan cheese, and then we we had a little task to perform. The golf-cart had broken down and so it needed to be looked at. After quite a few complicated manoeuvres and procedures, one of which involved a rather large hammer, we came to the conclusion that the starter solenoid had failed. That’s a mail order job for a later date.

But while I was down there I washed off all of the small plastic storage boxes that I had taken out of Strider the other day and forgotten to clean off. They’ve come up nicely and are sitting there drying out now, ready to go back inside the pickup.

We hadn’t finished yet either. The air-conditioning unit in the living room had packed up a while ago and a new replacement had arrived. We decided to fit it, and that involved cutting a new wooden blocking panel as the new unit is larger than the old one.

We had already made a start when Darren’s brother-in-law turned up. He’s a joiner by profession and had all of the right tools with him in his truck, so he took over the work and the job was done in half an hour. Having the correct tools doesn’t half make a difference to a task like this.

By now it was tea time and we were quite numerous – Amber had a friend round and there was also Darren’s sister and her husband (he who had helped us with the air-conditioning), so tea stretched out for a good couple of hours while we sat around chatting.

garden fire centreville new brunswick canada september septembre 2016It was a beautiful evening and as a rather large pile of rubbish had been gathering all around the place, we decided that we would have a garden bonfire.

This was really quite pleasant, all of us sitting around outside toasting ourselves by the flames in the warmth of a September evening, and it’s a shame that the photo hasn’t done the scene very much justice.

You might remember back from March that the big Nikon D5000 has now officially ceased once more to function, and I’m having to work with a cheap one that I bought in Quebec in 2012 when I had a similar difficulty. I was planning on buying a much better camera but I’m not sure whether there’s much point in spending a shed-load of money on something like that, given my state of health.

I wasn’t out for all that long. It was soon bed-time for me so I came inside, ready for an early night and hoping that I would have just as much of a good sleep as I had had the previous evening.

Saturday 30th October 2010 – TODAY HAS BEEN QUITE CIVILISED …

… and hasn’t it been a long time since anything like that ever happened?

In fact we had a recycling day today and with Darren’s big pick-up truck, Rachel, Hannah and I did a tour of the neighbourhood picking up glass bottles, plastic bottles and aluminium drinks cans.

Once we had a full load on board we went off to a recycling plant in Bath about 10 miles away from here where we weighed it all in.

The plant was quite interesting – it was a simple hand-sorting operation where you tipped out your containers onto a kind-of counter and two people hand-sorted the cans and plastic and they also weighed the glass bottles, not by scales but by eye.

And having seen the price is on offer for scrap over here, not only do I now understand why in several cities that I’ve been to and down several roads that I’ve travelled I’ve seen gangs of people picking up the litter, I’m also going to bring over the scrap aluminium off the two caravans that I dismantled and weigh it in over here.

giant inflatable pumpkin blown away by wind centreville new brunswick canadaIt was quite a windy day over here too and so the highlight was definitely this giant inflatable pumpkin that was busily making a bid for freedom down the highway in the general direction of the USA.

What you don’t see in the photo is the guy from a nearby house who was giving a rather desperate chase after it. 

Thanks in no small measure to the long piece of rope that was tethered to it the guy managed to restrain it but it was touch-and-go at one stage and my money was definitely on the pumpkin.

cadillac convertible centreville new brunswick canadaI was also taken out old-car spotting too.

Darren took me to see his brother-in-law who lives just down the road. He has an old Cadillac convertible that he has restored from a rusty heap and had taken it out for a run-around this morning. And so we headed off down the road to catch him up.

pizza hut houlton maine usaThis evening we all went out for pizza to celebrate Halloween and a good time was had by all. My pizza is the one in the foreground – the vegetarian one without cheese.

If I’m very lucky tomorrow I might get to spend some time with my great-nieces but the trouble with teenagers is that they always seem to have a much different agenda to any agenda that anyone else is ever planning. So I dunno.

Mind you, I have an important decision to make. Do I go out trick-or-treating with Amber and Zoe tomorrow night or do I stay behind with Hannah and hand out the candy?

But all three of them have decided that once Halloween is over I can take off my halloween mask. I don’t seem to be able to convince them that this is my REAL face.