Hand Care, (stop laughing this could be serious)
today (by the way the last post was ment to be done 3 days ago, I just forgot to hit the submit button) was a kind of interesting day and a lot of fun. I know If it was just another boring run of the mill day I wouldnt be writing about it but every page needs an opener and that was it.
The lot of us (Swmbo Alex and me) were down at the shops getting some stuff for the "we're about to go on holidays" cleanup and the weekly groceries. Alex got to see santa for the first time and got himself a free book, a balloon animal and even a free photo. I got distracted by some cute blonde with superb bump stops who was trying to sell some kind of metrosexual hand cream and was giving away free samples.
But all of that was after his kindies xmas Pagent thingy where yet again Ive been told many times that everyone can see how Alex is just so much like his dad. I usually take it to mean that he looks like me which apart from his little pot belly I don't get as he's a blue eyed blonde and I'm a hazel eyed brunette. After last night I'm not so sure that they mean his looks but his mannerisms, they were giving away free helium balloons and lolly bags with the tickets for the door prize (some really nice xmasy hampsters) they had bouncy castles and the usual stuff that you'd have at a kids xmas do.
With his lolly bag lollies eaten, the balloon tied to his shoulder and the ticket in my pocket we did the father and son thing and generally had a ball with me throwing him in the air him punching at the balloon on the way down and laughing saying again, more and higher every time I caught him untill he wanted to go on the bouncy castle. Over to the bouncy castle we went and as we got there a little girl clutching her balloon sort of half slid, half fell off the entrance pad of the bouncy castle, let go of the string on her balloon trying to arrest her fall and due to the laws of buoyancy lost her balloon. Tears and crying go-on.
Before I could get up from taking his shoes off in the line for the castle he was over helping her up, asked her "you Ok?" and was handing her the ribbon to his balloon and trying to take it off his shoulder. The parents came over we met talked and all was good. Alex got on the castle played ,got his fill and about half an hour later I got a touch on the shoulder, the little girls mum had been called to work so they had to leave and they gave me their door prize ticket. By this time SWMBO was there playing with Alex so I was free to do that other thing that men do when theres lots of kids with young mums around.
20 minutes after that and they called the door prize while SWMBO was getting Alex's xmas prezzie from the kindy and sure enough we've won one. Next thing I know when we're looking through it Alex has grabbed the dolls and has given them to 2 little girls whose parents have started looking around for whoever owns the strange little arian child thats just given their 2 girls dolls.
So while waiting for alex to go through the rigmarole of getting to see Santa or for SWMBO to get the shopping done some bit of tidy has come up and asked me about hand care products and being quip I said yep, oil my hands pretty much every day and that leads to what do I use as this new product contains about every yuppie/hippy thing known to man. oh is that all its got in it look id love to use some but well I use many different oils on my hands and I dont think their product could stand up to what mine is, she asks what Im using and I tell her while shes trying me out on a free sample and commenting on how nice my hands are.
"Well the oils blend into OMD 115, RX-Super, OEP 220, Aus OX 8, XG 274, OM-33, Dex III and IV, occasionally I'll put Caterpillar Oat and either Afloc or tek 50 on them. Often some of the oils will contain trace elements of zinc, copper, aluminium (pronounced the american way) magnezium and iron." She gets all doey (obviously someone who really knows about hand care products) and explains that shes not yet met a man who oils his hands so regularly or knows so much about what hes putting on them. The rapture is spoiled when some bloke tells her "Darlin all that means nothing, hes a mechanic for the Defence force and thats just the oils you put in and take out of a vehicle when you service it"
I dont know who it was who dobbed me in as hed done it in true Airstrike style but the look of dissapointment on her face was worth it as was the look that followed it when she realised I was still raptly watching her rub cream into my hands and that the way she'd positioned herself ment I was getting a great view of her bump stops. Now weather the aircon had chilled her mental capablities or she was just normally that not there she asked me If I had just been talking her on so I could keep staring at her chest I said
pretty much and she looked shocked untill she asked the next question of "was I going to buy anything". I replied "nope" at which point she looked like someone had just given her a cute cat only to take it outside and let her watch as they fed it to a rabid pitbull as I picked up Alex who had run over showing me his book and balloon puppy that santa had given him. I left her finishing the sentence with "but thanks for brightening my day"
its funny but, as I walked off, If I didnt know better I'd have sworn the officer from the school kids recruiting day was there..
Lucky you.... (3 in a day)
just a quick one.......
Fozzy fixed himself yesterday afternoon while I was doing my "deliver the xmas hamper that we promised the QT help a family at xmas deal" that we'd subscribed to but for some stupid reason they made the drop off times times that every normal working person works during"
one stall and out of control 2 wheel lockup (still havent put the front propshaft on) followed by a clutch start when whatever the hell stopped me gave out with a BANG and its a case of "Fozzy Heal thyself"
no noise drives like a charm.
dropped the oil and theres half a syncro ring in the bottom of the box half hanging out of the drain hole... oh and Ive lost 3rd gear syncro which since I double clutch all the time bothers me about as much as keeping a promise bothers a politician post election time.
A quick drive past to the bloke whose been rubbishing fozzy and he wants to know how I fixed it so fast. Told him I asked nice and it fixed itself, Landrovers are like that, Reliable when you need them most. Got told unkind things when I asked how much longer it was going to take him to get his car fixed.
the human race will not survive climate change.
judging by what I saw today there is no way the human race is ever going to survive any kind of global climate change...
from home, to the tip to alex's kindy and back home a round trip of lets say 50K's to be generous and including stops, the time at the tip and picking up alex a total of 2 hours worth of time I spotted 17 cars on the side of the road with their bonnets up with the drivers looking at the engine scratching their heads.. I managed to help 3...
the 4 that I stopped for all had over heated, one had siezed the first one I stopped for had pulled over and was checking his battery.. I pulled up to help and asked him what the problem was he said the battery went flat and the engine stopped... I got him to jump in and try to start it. At this point the masses of heat coming from the engine lead me to believe otherwise I could hear the starter engage but not turn over... a quick what lights are on on the days and whats the temp gauge say reveals the engine temp light is on the temp gauge is buried in the red...
sorry mate, its seized solid, nothing I can do. and its at this time that the cops show up wanting to know who hit who which was weird cause I was parked a good 10 meters up the road but apparently there was an accident where a small car hit a 4x4 with a trailer on this road but with the cops satisfied Id just pulled over to help out we were all on our way. Well most of us were.
the next 3 that I helped followed the usual pattern a car stopped with their bonnet up with somewhere I could safely pull up and yep over heated, low coolant so I just tipped in some water from the jerry to get em moving to a servo or at least more out of harms way and after the 3rd car that I could help there was no point in me stopping I was out of water, 22l's worth.
2 cars had the ominous puddle of coolant making its way down the kerb from a blown hose/tank/radiator/plug.
if a slightly hotter than normal day in summer which is a season that comes round every 12 months or so puts that many cars off the road from poor maintenance how the hell are we supposed to believe that we can survive a permanant change in the weather....
Does make me wonder tho, whats the worse sign of impending doom by ignorance, the sauna of the steaming radiator in summer or the ballet of the bald tyres on the slippery roads with the first rains of winter?
Dipswich to Wagga... What a trip....
Its trips like these that make having to put up with living in ipswich almost bareable.
1400 odd K's to run in 3 days with a belly load of fuel food and water in Fozzy, Country music and HHGTTG on the MP3 player a course to go do thats got the potential to make me more employable outside of my current job with the ADF should I ever want to get out. Not only do I get paid for this, I got a bonus......This ladies and gentle men is living and could life get any better, only slightly, and I mean that in the kind of way that winning a free car would only be slightly better if only the colour was the same as your SO's nail polish. IT would have been nice if some of the tracks that I was trying to go down hadnt been illegally closed some 7 or 8 ks from the only access point to the track. But taking the good with the bad, IF they hadnt been I might not have done and seen some of the things that happened... a lot of them I wish ID remembered that Id left the camera in the electronics bag for. Lets start with the bad, the inevitable breakdowns that your landrover is always going to have and leave you stranded in the middle of nowhere to die a horrible unsightly vulture feasting death.....
The exciter wire came out of the spade connector for the alternator............
ok so now that my 1970's doomed to fail and kill me landrover has failed to get on and forfill the predictions of all the mitsoyotasan drivers I can get on and talk you through some of the fun stuff things I havent done in years and some things Ive done as recently as just before chistmas.
I saw bueatiful sunsets with cloud lightning in support not once but twice, I recovered a nufty who forgot to engage his freewheeling hubs after the inevitable “how did you get up here” conversation had an escort by a flock (what is the collective noun for galahs?) of galahs, did the whole drive stop open gate shunt forwards, stop, close gates, drive on and repeat at the next gate thing, followed a track so disused it was little more that an occasional hint of rut and gap in trees, did engine bay cooking, had jaffles and coffe for breakfast, tortured the donk a bit, woke to bird calls and sunrise generally had a damn good time and a lot of “Alex would have loved this” moments.
One of the first moments that Alex would have loved was the flock of birds incident, I was zapping along one of the backroads between a pair of paddocks on fairly open flat ground sort of half watching the road I was on and sort of half watching a cloud of galahs that were doing their thing just up ahead of where I was I spotted the drop in the road where a small creek ran through it. After working out that the road through and beyond the causeway was straight I let my attention wander to the birds... and just as I was thinking how well Fozzy cruised through the causeway I spotted the dead roo in the middle of the track, slammed it and kept on going...
Next thing I know Ive got an escort of whats essentially a whole flock of galahs which went for about 8 minutes with a couple of them staying fairly close to the front of the vehicle but just above the height of the roo bar. Magic nice shady trees on a bright sunny day birds in escort and everything running just right..
The next big event was the first of the 2 “disabled” vehicles I got to. Again back in the middle of no where on some “sort of” road quiet unexpectedly I came across a running stream going over a causeway, not real deep, maybe 40cms or so not a real drama, brakes, gears select first walk it through and keep on going, about a K later after a fair down grade run, the “sort of road” became “sort of less” road and more “sort of” mud. Not enough to be problematic just enough to make the steering somewhat less accurate than usual so slowing down to maintain control was the order of the day.
At this point Im comfortabley plugging along in second high 2wd when lo, what whiteness off side of road has broke, Tis a toyota and with a rear wheel in the air. Doing the righty I pulled up and asked if he needed help, he did so I did and once he was out of the drain I asked what the deal was and apparently a dams broken and the road is impassable because hes been having all sorts of trouble getting through. I asked what the roads were like and he said they were much the same as this slippery as all hell and he was here to close the road for a couple of days this kind of puzzled me and I had time to spare so I did the usual Q/A thing.
Turns out hes from the council and he was sent out to make sure the roads in the area were ok and to close them if they werent which he wasnt happy about because hes now got to put up the road closed sign on this end, drive the long way back to the other end and put the road closed sign up on that end and then come back the long way. Sensing that opportunity was about to knock I made a suggestion. IF we were to team up, we could both drive to the other end of the road, he could place his signs, drive back the long way put the other sign up and then head back from there. Yes hello, opportunity, Come right in, grab a beer make yourself comfortable. He agreed that was a marvelous idea and we set off, for about 30m...
once again yota in drain. Hrmm thinks I, somethings not right here.... I reversed up pulled him out and started to pay attention to the vehicle and the tyres.... H/T's on the front, A/T's on the rear and freewheeling hubs in the unlocked position and road pressures in the tyres. Deciding not to drop the pressures as the track was only covered in an inch or 2 of mud and any wheelspin generally dug the tyre down to the hard stuff in short order I locked his hubs and away we went. Some 10k's and plenty of damp causeway crossings later I was treated to the whole flashing of lights thing, we pulled over he thanked me and mentioned that he wasnt going to close the roads and to have a nice day.
Suited me so off I trundled into the sunset to find a place to swag up and call it a night. In all typicality I found a nice place, swagged it up had a great nights sleep with the all the sounds of the isolated bush to keep me company in the swag with a sky full of stars to lull me to sleep only to wake the next morning do the breakfast thing, drive 300m and find a designated camping place with toilets and tank water. Duh... Thinking back on it at worst the mud seemed to be right where I found it in the natural low of the land and a little bit on either side of the cause way crossings where the creek had obviously carried the water.
The next day bought about the next recovery and a lot of running on farm access tracks, the kind that dont have grids but gates, Im not going to bother describing them, Im sure youve all done one or 2 at one stage, if you havent, picture it as a rough dirt track a single vehicle wide and often just a set of wheel ruts and where you'd epxect to find a grid theres a gate that you have to open, drive through, stop, close and drive off.
The second recovery was somewhat more stressful, I'll admit Im not much on being able to identify vehicle but the stuck vehicle was a fairly early type of ute sort of like a rodeo but older anyway this thing was stuck in the middle of the sandy bit of track I was on and had been overnight. It didnt seem to be bogged just motionaly uninterested could I give him a tow... Easy enough it was only 20k to town. I know what you think Im thinking and no, I dont know why if he knew where the town was and where he was that he didnt walk the 20k to get help and to be honest I didnt think of it at the time, so tow rope on and away we go.
For those of you who read the other post this is the one that toasted the donk. It only took about 10 minutes fo dragging that thing through the softish sand and uphills to get it to happen but like a trooper Fozzy soldiered on until I stopped him at the top of the hill to let him cool off and check him over. I think but cant confirm that the reason it happened might have been that ole mate in the ute had been riding the brakes to keep the line taught tell the truth Im not real worried about it I learnt that even when I push harder than I like that the donk in Fozzys got more heart that I have any right to ask it to have.
Which leads me to the last bit thats really worth mentioning on for the trip down, The kangaroo escort.
Now we all know that driving while tired is a bad thing, your reflexes lag, your judgement isnt as good and thats how people die. That said its not an on off thing you dont just feel all perfect one minute and then fall asleep you tend to gradually get more and more drowsy and less alert. If you know what to expect you can feel it coming and its time to do something about it. Personally when I feel it coming I slow down and start to look for a good place to pull over, have a rest, change drivers or camp for the night if Im going solo. Usually I slow down to the point where Im comfortable that my reaction time is sufficient to let me avoid nastyness If I get to the point where I have to change down gears Its stop time.
The other big indication is when I see a roo bouncing across the same paddock as Im driving through and its coming in on the drivers door turns in the direction Im travelling at the last minute and runs a parallel course to me. Thats what happened, less than 10 feet away in line with my drivers door bounced said roo I swear it was looking at me and if it could have talked would have had a conversation with me before chunking up its paw and waving before veering off into the paddock...
IF you EVER get so tired when your driving and youve slowed down to the point where a roo can not only catch up to but intercept and bounce along side of your car AND you think the kangaroo waves good bye before veering off but after failing to have a converasation with you because you cant speek kangaroo pull the car over, shut it down, get out the swag and have a sleep.....
Anzac day briefly, a moron and multiple wet morons.
Ok IVe finally calmed down enough......
ANZAC day, pretty important. Apparently not to a couple of our shoe leather coloured brethren. Apparently it is a display of force, of oppression, of course Im not going futher the language gets rather more slurred expletive laden and abusive.. Let me be subtle.
if you are one of those dim witted bean brains (the forum wont let me use the full range of my derrogations) Dont bother to turn up at anzac day, Stay at home and addle your brains with whatever rot you use to make your excuse for existance bearable. Let me explain.
We at the parade are there showing respect to those who did their bit to ensure that we now speak english and not some freaky jibberish (although I could handle german, they have a very very precise language with lots of really good defiinitive engineering and mechanicing terms) The fact that they did their bit means that you can normally comfortabley sit at home and get free money every fortnight or free cars or whatever else it is you leech out of society. Without the efforts of those that did what had to be done and gave what had to be given youd most likely not be here or if you were by now youd probabley be in prison or a pine box.
Again if you are one of those idiots that turn up to ANZAC day with the intent of not going with the theme of the day and you're reading this (or more likely having this read to you) I do not need my day of reverence disturbed by idiots Given my way you and your kind would be silenced in swift and brutal fashion and given that so far even the media havent had the audacity to display so much as one frame of your actions I think that it should be come apparent that even if my desires were enacted you wouldnt be missed.
Morons.....
Speed limits, ok so they arent really a real limit or law of life, not like gravity or the speed of light, sure you can go faster than them but, as a word of warning for those rice boys who have exhaust diameters higher than their IQ's
If you're going to get into a drag race from the lights with someone who knows the traffic patterns and is timing the lights so he doesnt have to stop for them or slow down below 40. make sure you know where the speed trap at the top of the hill round the blind corner is as well as how much further up the same road the chase car is.
That way when you blat past me doing chirpies and puffing your blow off valve, get flashed by the speed camera guy and pulled over by the cop further up the road I dont have to worry about slowing down and steering wide of the officer writing your ticket.
Wet morons..
As much as we wont survive global warming we're not going to make it past much rain either.
For those of you who dont know today was the aftermath of what was described as "a rain period" which as near as I can tell is what someone at the weather station tells the weather guy when he really means "god wants to see a new ocean"
aside from the long delayed "bridge that wont go under water" going under water (again) causing me to go the long way round to work I should have figured that it was going to be a bad day after the ricer cut me off on a round about. When he then caused an accident not more than a k later by trying to cut up the inside of me on a right hand turn at the lights forgetting that there might be other cars on the road while having a severe lack of talent I should have been well and truely dialed in to how bad the rest of my trip to work was going to get.
when Id gotten out of that and was crawling along on a back road lamenting how I should have stayed home for another 5 minutes and had another coffee how much better my life would be when I noticed the unmistakable trajectory of a car doing the no traction descent down the hill towards the stop sign which was followed by the charming sound of rending metal as the car spudded into the vehicle in front of me.
more sighing, more handing over of details more reversing and keying the GPS for an alternate alternate route to work.
slow traffic again, but its moving and its all going the same way... Nothing can go wrong now Cmon admit it you'd think the same thing wouldnt you, cut off, miss one accident, miss another NO way can there be another accident to slow me down today.
WRONG, Wronger than chocolate coloured edible undies with licorice shavings.
Instant brake lights 2 cars ahead, mash mine and BAM the car 1 in front of me has ploughed into the back of the car in front of it thats pulled up hard to let one car out of a carpark so the lead car in the following cacophony can park. Which shortly he'll be able to do really easily because his car is now a good 6 inches shorter after the car in front of me finishes tail ending it. Being the concerned driver that I am I used up as much space as I could to come to a halt with the indicators on. Cue Crunch. The car 2 behind me has hit the car immediately behind me which has come to a stop about an inch clear of my back chassis member. Not as in horizontal distance as in Vertical as in If I hadnt taken the tow plate off with the foot and tow ball Id have a nice new shin protector in the form of his radiator.
With a turning circle thats only envied by super tankers and less than about a foot of free space do you want to know what I did? I went and had a coffee from the shop whose door was adjacent to my now gridlocked rover. I even got to give the idiots involved the "NOT till Ive had coffee" line..
