and less good news!

The less good news is that i'm really struggling with my writing, well lack thereof which is of course affecting my income stream somewhat, i'm gonna have a couple of really lean months by the look of things. Today i've posted the sum of my output since the Spring, Parental Consent was meant to be the opening to a somewhat longer stand alone story but i've stalled, i knew what i wanted to do but then someone put sand in the engine and i ground to a halt. I thought the issue was purely what was going on in my world but clearly there's more to it.

Moving on, it's been an interesting few days at Chez Bell. Monday started off with a list of jobs as long as my arm, i dragged myself up earlier than usual to get a good start on things. Laundry is easy enough then it was on to more 'technical' stuff - replacing a broken toilet seat! What i had imagined would be a five minute job ended up taking an hour but eventually it was done. Then it was on to giving the bathroom a bit of a clean, somewhat overdue i'll admit, but apart from the limescale which needs a chisel to remove, it doesn't look too bad!

Next up was assesing the problem with the bike, would it be a quick and cheap fix or an expensive nightmare? Well turns out it was a snapped cable, in retrospect the signs were there some time ago but as it was all working i'd ignored them. A search about supplied a new cable (note to self, buy some more before i need them!), it needed a bit of a fettle to fit, i wasted half an hour looking for my files which were hiding in plain sight of course, another couple of minutes threading through the closed system with its kinks and turns, et voila, Foxy was returned to a multi gear machine, huzzah!

That done it was time to open the parcel that arrived from Germany, okay i splurged a little on my main hobby, The current exchange rate means i got @ €135 of models and carriage for under £90. That doesn't get you very much, the price of vehicles in particular has risen by up to 3000% since i started collecting 45 years ago, a single car in 1979 was maybe £0.80, they are generally between £22 and £30 each now, by comparison, buildings have only seen a quadrupling of cost. This package contained just two road vehicles and two buildings, components of my fictional mid European walled town that i'm working on, in this case a city wall segment with a lean to building and another with a half timbered corner tower. Of course, commercial kits will only take you so far, i do some scratch building and kit bashing too, after all, who wants a diorama filled with the same stuff as Josef down the road?

After that it was a trip to the supermarket to get something for my tea - pizza, my regular Monday 'treat', this week it was Pollo e Verdure, chicken with vegetables if your Italian isn't up to scratch which for some obscure reason was dosed with a sweet bbq style sauce, yeuch! Well it wasn't the worst but it would have been better without it. Why do they think bbq sauce needs to be so sickly sweet? On a side note, a vid came up on my feed this morning, a US couple complaing about UK Maccy D's, complaining that the standard drinks were a) too small and b) not sweet enough, the full sugar versions cost extra, shock horror. Yup, outside of the US we do things in a bit more moderation and in the UK there is actually a significant sugar tax applied to soft drinks and some other stuff, its an effort to restrict over consumption of sugar which has direct health implications, but there you go.

With the bike fixed, Tuesday was to be a regular ride day but i just wasn't feeling like going very far despite the sunshine. In the end i did just over 51km exploring the streets around a 'burb called Stoke Gifford, think private housing built @ the turn of the century smothering the older communities in the process. It might seem a strange thing to do but you get to see some interesting stuff, yesterday that included a homage to a long departed railway line and a very clean DeLorean sportscar. On the way back i stopped for a hotdog with chilli, yep i live dangerously!

Back at the house the unkempt 'lawn' drew my attention so once Foxy was safely stabled it was out with the mower to give the grass only its fourth haircut of the year, no mow May became leave it for the bees June then my absence over the next weeks meant it was looking more like a jungle than a patch of grass! It hasn't had a tuppeny all off but it does look better, i may take a bit more off next week ahead of the cooler months, at some point the veg beds will need clearing too although there are a few bits of veg still cropping.

So there we are, Aunty Bev's 'new' car comes today, i'll have a walk after lunch and i'll tell you about the rest of the week on Sunday when i will post the next Gaby chapter.

Tschussie,
Madeline Anafrid

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