And now for something completely different.
You know you’ve crossed a few lines when you find your garden full of an unholy mixture of pallets, static caravans and knackered old cars with only one lock working. (Let us not speak of the repair bills we’ve forked out this year on Quercus’s sensible car, the car which replaced the avowedly not sensible Citröen CX, which cost a fraction of what this bastard replacement has needed; it is all the fault of said “reliable” replacement that we have had, in the last few months, variously, a multi-coloured Ford Mondeo, a Peugeot 405, a people-carrier thing, and several other semi-buggered courtesy cars from the garage up the road.)
But when you then find yourself contemplating – seriously, I might add – the purchase of a van, you know you’re in trouble.
Yes folks: it looks like we’re going to sell the bollocking car and replace it with a van, size, description and specification thereof yet to be decided. I suppose it’s merely a part of accepting that generally, cars were not designed to haul tonnes of rubble about the place, and, in an ideal world, their lives don’t include queries about just how much timber you can get in the front, or whether the axle can take a concrete lintel without complaining.
We are pikies. It’s simple.
Some day, I really must rediscover the concept of a garden.
Do you need those pallets, though?
Well, um, yes – at the moment, we’re burning them in the stove as our main fuel; they’re actually quite good wood, once you’ve chopped them about a bit, and they burn surprisingly well.
Does that make me more pikey, or less, I wonder?
Less, I think. If you were cutting your smack on them, then that would probably be less meritous. Meritorious?
What you really need, you know, is a log-store at one end of the garden, to shove all this stuff in tidily
Are the knackered old cars propped up on piles of bricks? Just trying to get a mental picture.
wondering how much a vehicle can haul strikes me as practical. i like to be able to haul cat carriers, minor household, furniture, whatever strikes me as necessary, etc. if a car can’t handle ‘haulage’, it’s not worth investing in. vans work for me, as do hatchbacks.
I had a van once. (Well, that’s stretching a bit as I never, never once drove it) It was huge and grey and hideous and absolutely fantastic as it:
1. Drove, without a single incident, from Alaska to Virginia
2. On said drive allowed three young children to sit in relative comfort AND NOT BE ABLE TO TOUCH EACH OTHER.
3. Swallowed without complaint five bicycles and five people to ride them
4. Acted, while sitting peacefully in the drive, as a pirate ship, a moon rocket, a fort, a castle and a desert island, all without complaint.
I called it the HMS Indefatigable, and while I was not sorry to see it go (see huge and hideous above) I might have patted its nose and said thank you before I said good bye.
My daughter is expecting twins, so has just got her van- a VW Transporter, which they are converting.
Eldest son(alias The Oily One)’s advice was get a Transit or a VW.
Others will be a pain to work on, be less economical to run and more expensive on parts!
Do you need a van all the time though?
Isn’t it cheaper to run a small economical car, and just hire a van when you need one?
Vans are expensive to run, insure and tax. Do do the sums first…
At least you don’t haver any near neighbours, so aren’t reducing the value of other properties in the neighbourhood
Actually vans cost about the same as cars to tax and run, and insurance shouldn’t be any worse if you shop around. However hiring a van can be quite expensive, especially if you’re doing it fairly often, and it also commits you to spending a lot of time actually fetching it and returning it. And as far as reducing the value of other properties in the neighbourhood … what kind of nimby attitude is that?
Methinks the Blue Witch was joking….EW you must revel in the pit of your garden and take lots of pics so that you can compare with the fruitful eden that will exist there one day…Just think you used to not have a nice kitchen, but now…
I think BW may have been referring to this story:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1254430/What-load-rubbish-Neighbours-disgust-hoarder-wins-right-garden-junk.html#ixzz0hCQOAM6E
I remember a while back you were having difficulties with your blog and were worried about losing stuff.
Just wandered across this posting on http://www.backcountrynotes.com
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Backup Yer Dern Blog!
DateWednesday, March 3, 2010 at 12:02AM
I forgot to backup, and now I feel like . . . uh . . .Amid complaints that things are disappearing from Facebook — of course they are; Facebook is again in the process of “improving” the site — there have been admissions that some of you-all don’t back up your blogs. Mercy forfend! Back up NOW and regularly thereafter!
I don’t know the procedure for all blogs, but here are a couple I do know, and the other services probably have something similar:
BLOGGER: Go to Settings/basic, blog tools and click on “export blog” then click on “download blog” button.
WORDPRESS: Go to Tools (lefthand column in dashboard), click on “export” then click on “download export file” button.
Right now — backup yer dern blog! ”
Good Advice- I’ve been asking my Geek Wizzard for this for months!!