'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

MOT time! The Alfa passed with only the one advisory: a slight exhaust leak which the garage has patched. Otherwise it's all running fine - no mean feat as its nearing 100k miles. The only other work needed this year was an aircon recharge... and a new pair of tyres thanks to an unexpected flat, but that was technically last year so I'm not counting that :).

Yes! Pasta night is back! (with added American)

Tonight we skipped the voteamabob and went straight for Muffin Time, which is basically Fluxx but sillier and crazier. It looked like being straightforward... for all of two turns, then we completely lost track of what was going on as everything got increasingly bonkers. Eventually Kyle stormed to victory via a combination of me changing the rules to "the person with the largest hand wins" and Kyle playing a card that let him take everyone else's hand.

We had a bit of time afterwards, so Paddy dug out 20 Second Showdown which is pretty much what it says on the tin: there's two teams, a sandtimer that you start with 20 seconds in each half, and a set of increasingly random challenges. First team to run out of time attempting a challenge loses! It's definitely the sort of game that should come with a minimum drink limit 😅

The drive back was something of a magical mystery tour - I decided to head via Petworth (to avoid the Fontwell roadworks), only to find that the south-west exit from Petworth was closed, and a not particularly well signed diversion that took me all the way up to Haslemere before heading back down to Midhurst! Looking back at the route on a map, what I should have done at Haslemere is continued west to pick up the A3 - or ignored the diversion entirely and gone south-east towards Fittleworth and then Bury.

Today's smart motorway hilarity: joining the M27 at Whiteley I saw the front car amble down the sliproad at 50mph, with an impatient Audi tailgating it (having cut across two lanes to take the exit at the last moment). This junction has the lane join without merging so everyone continued the sliproad became lane 1 of the now 4-lane motorway... at which point the three or four cars in front of me all popped out into lane 2 to continue doing maybe 55mph (including the tailgating Audi!). There was a distant car in lane 1 which I swear was moving faster than the cars in lane 2!

Does everyone just not use lane 1 of a smart motorway or something?

You often don't realise just how worn something is until you come to replace it.

Today the Alfa went back to the garage as planned for the clutch, which took less time than I was expecting - on the way to the shops at lunchtime I happened to see my car go past on a post-clutch-replacement road test! And with the new clutch... the bearing noise has gone as expected, but I hadn't realised that it had also been audible when the clutch was engaged and my car is now a fair bit quieter when in neutral. The clutch mechanism itself is also lighter and smoother, even if it does still creak occasionally (it's always done that no matter how much the garage greases the pedal linkage).

Hopefully that's it for expensive car things this year!

Headed out to sainsbury's just now - or tried to, only to discover that my car's battery had run down over the past week and just did not want to turn over the engine.

I suspect it's a combination of very little driving, the recent cold snap, a 6 year old battery... and putting a decent amount of air into the spare tyre last weekend (I've probably not checked it since last year).

Fortunately a neighbour had a set of jumper leads, and even more fortunately this is the neighbour who's parked next to my car! Wiring up the leads was a bit of a challenge as the engine bay of a modern car is basically all plastic and we struggled to find a chunk of bare metal that was in reach of the negative lead and the crocodile clips would actually hold onto... but we found a bracket on the side of the engine, my neighbour gave his car a bit of revs, and mine reluctantly decided that yes, it would actually start the engine.

Once mine actually started it ran nicely, so I carried on to Fareham sainsbury's via Emsworth to put a bit of juice back into the battery - which seems to have worked, as when heading back home afterwards it started happily (my backup plan if I was stuck there was to call the AA).

Driving along the M27 in low gear (to recharge the battery) is a bit disconcerting with the extra revs and power. I normally climb the hill past Portsmouth in 6th gear, but drop a gear or two and the extra power means MiTo will happily keep going past 70mph if I let it!

A nice side-effect of blogging car maintenance is when I end up replacing dipped beam bulbs again, rather than having to puzzle through how Alfa have mounted the things I can just look up my notes from last time.

Last time I put in a set of Bosch Pure something-or-others. This time round, those have evaporated from the market so I ended up replacing them with a pair of Osram Night Breaker Silver's as being hopefully a reasonable compromise between brightness and longevity. Let's see how long they last!

Today's annoyance is my car deciding that the fan now only has two settings: off, and full blast.

Consensus online is the most likely culprit is a pack of resistors controlling the motor speed has failed. Unusually for anything involving Alfas, on the MiTo it's both a cheap part and easy to get at. So current thinking is to have a look at it over the weekend, and assuming it is just that then order and replace it myself (otherwise I'll let a garage deal with it - but I may as well try the cheap option first).

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Not sure what today's Lego creation is (some sort of twin rocket thing?), but on the snowman front my snowman now has buttons, a scarf, and a hat brim. And it's all sparkly!



That's one built, 4 more to go!

These are being written up a couple of weeksmonths later due to laptop fail and procrastination - the posts are backdated to the actual dates.

Work's holiday year ends in August, and for various reasons I had a week or so of holiday that needed using up. So the idea was to find an interesting place and go there for the week. I wasn't actually thinking of Cornwall - if nothing else, I'd been there less than a month before to visit pleaseremove - but as part of searching for a holiday cottage or something I stuck the dates into the English Heritage site and the very first result was the Custodian's House, complete with 20% discount for last-minute booking! I should really find new places to visit... but I'm glad I went back, as I had a great time.

Unusually I also chose to drive down rather than get the train. The theory was that driving should be about an hour quicker, would allow me to stop off somewhere interesting on the way there, and let me visit places that are not really accessible by public transport. In practice... thanks to the A35 it took me 7 hours to get there instead of the 5 hours it should have. Seriously - the A35 was full of traffic jams, slow moving holiday traffic, tractors, people slowly overtaking said tractors, and then an accident somewhere on the approach to Honiton completely closed the road for several hours. I'd planned to stop off at Buckfast Abbey for lunch, but didn't managed to get there until 2:30pm. Fortunately they still had a few sandwiches left.

The Abbey brought back memories - on the family trips to Cornwall, we'd always set off before the crack of dawn and stop somewhere en route for a late breakfast. In earlier years this would be a Happy Eater somewhere-or-other (there were I think 2 different ones we used?), but later on the parents came across the Abbey and that became our breakfast stop. I remember one year we arrived before the restaurant officially opened, but the staff were kind enough to let us in early.

( Buckfast Abbey photos )

Anyway, after that mess the journey was much better and it was pretty much plain sailingdriving all the way up to and inside Pendennis Castle. I didn't expect that I'd actually be parking inside the castle grounds, but managed to squeeze the Alfa through the gateway without leaving any paint behind on the stonework! Then again, they do fit vans through the gateway (the drivers apparently tuck their wing mirrors in and then just gun it).

After unpacking I wandered down to the high street, partially in search of supper (fish and chips from what claimed to be "The Best Fish & Chips in Falmouth") and partially just to explore. It's fun seeing what's changed over the years and what's stayed the same.

( Falmouth photos )

I'd swear the traffic on the roads round here is getting worse week on week. I know the highways folks are doing something to the M275/M27 junction and have stuck a 50mph speed limit through it... but that shouldn't cause issues as before the works traffic was only doing 50-60mph along that stretch anyway (it's uphill and an awful lot of drivers seem to slow down when faced with a hill) with lane 2 mostly empty so it should easily absorb the traffic from the reduced speed. The A27/A32 down towards Gosport has also gotten noticeably worse over the past 6 months or so. Weird.

Anyway, tonight's game was Superfight, a game that is "all about arguing with your friends about ridiculous fights". We did a complete round of the villain ruleset followed by one battle royale. For the villain rules, one player is the judge and plays a set of cards to describe their villain, such as "a k-pop star" "driving a tank" "6 feet tall". The other players come up with cards to represent a hero, for example "chuck norris" "that can clone themselves except each clone is half the size" "swinging a shark on a rope". Everyone then argues over which hero is most able to defeat the villain, and eventually the judge picks their favourite opponent. Battle royale is similar, except it's a free-for-all with no designated villain and we all argue over who would be the last fighter standing. Arguing is definitely the right description - people can get very passionate about their fighters, and without a clear win mechanic it can be quite hard to work out what is a good or bad play. The debating also slows down gameplay quite a lot compared to Apples to Apples or Cards Against Humanity and with nine players we only managed the one round.

I'm typing this post from a train in the middle of nowhere because I can. Yay on-train wifi! Not that it's that fast a connection - I seem to be getting all of 512kb/s out of it.

I can't believe I just typed that. It really isn't that long ago that 512k was a reasonable Internet speed - now it makes browsing painfully slow.

Anyway, so what all's been happening in the world of boggyb? Well, various odds and ends that I've been meaning to post but haven't got round to doing so - so here's a round-up to clear the backlog.


Last month was elemnar's birthday and we ended up going to Reigate for the day (parking in what The Gnu described as the worst car park ever). We followed a surprisingly interesting tour around Reigate that The Gnu had found, taking us through tunnels and moats and into castles and odd side streets. There's even a cave system that's occasionally open to visitors! We then went to Prezzo for lunch wherein amusingly The Gnu and I ordered different pizzas that intrigued us, then both of us spent the meal thinking that we preferred the look of each other's pizza. So perhaps next time we'll swap the order round?

After that we went to the real goal of the trip which was to sample the Monty Bojangles café and enjoy variations upon chocolate drinks (I had a chocolate milkshake, they had hot chocolates - and our drinks were all very nice!). Finally as we had a bit of time left we wandered towards the park in search of a few geocaches. The first one we found was a literal letterbox cache mounted in plain sight of everyone (it even had a sign saying "Geocache" and everything!). The next few were less successful - we found 3 or 4 in the woods, of which most were damaged or missing parts. Shame, really, as they were rather inventive caches - one was a bird feeder, another was a box hidden in a log complete with a very large 'X' to mark the spot.


Hmm, my wifi has dropped down to 128kb/s. That 15MB "fast Internet" cap didn't last long!


Later on in September was the parents' anniversary which we all celebrated as this year is a significant number. The parents had been mulling over various plans and ideas but in the end went for a simple family celebration mainly consisting of lots of board games at which allegramente demolished us all. We played two full rounds of Mahjong which allegramente ended up winning overall with a couple of high-scoring hands (it's all about the doubles). Later on we moved on to the next scenario in our ongoing Settlers of Catan: Seafarers campaign (Through the Desert, I think) and allegramente once again pulled a win out, this time through a strong military (i.e. lots of Knight cards) which defeated my expansionist approach. Finally we came to Ankh-Morpork - this time allegramente won the first round fair and square (possibly as one of the Lords?), and in the second game conspired with the others to pull off a win as Vimes while destroying all my buildings and assassinating all my minions. I think that was the first game that ended with one of us (me!) having nothing on the board at all!


Overheard at Taunton:

Punter 1: "Excuse me, I was booked in that seat"
Punter 2: "Oh, so was I"
Punter 1: "...twat" *stomps off*

Charming.

As it happens I'm in someone's seat, but given that this seat was booked from London Paddington and yet has been empty since Westbury I doubt the real occupant is about to turn up.


What else... car check time! It's been a while since I've blogged about it, though I have been doing the monthly checks and keeping everything topped up. October is MOT/service month as well so I need to arrange all that, along with a few other things - the rear shocks were flagged for upcoming replacement at the previous service and I still haven't got round to getting the exhaust tightened (that's the one which Halford's replaced over a year ago - they apparently didn't do a good job of fitting the new one!). Plus there's the ongoing power steering puzzle though that said, it has been more reliable over the past year.

As to the tyres, well the chap from Kwikfit turned up, checked the tread depth on all of them, and commented that there was loads of tread left (3/4mm on the fronts, 5/6mm on the rear) so they didn't need replacing after all. Except for the punctured rear, and since none of the others are new he suggested replacing the most worn tyre on the other side and moving that to the same axle. So in the end he replaced OSR and NSF, and swapped NSF with NSR giving me two new Goodyear Efficientgrip Performance tyres on the rear and a pair of reasonably evenly-worn boots on the front. And arranged a refund of the unused tyres which was nice. Full marks to Kwikfit mobile!


Anyway, enough rambling for now. Onwards to Cornwall!