I am trying to catch up on this diary / blog. I'll start with this past weekend and work backwards.
Well, what fabulous weather we had last weekend! Cold, dry and sunny, with beautiful hoar frost making our little part of the world look like a winter wonderland. But it is all down hill from then - the rain is back causing havoc on the roads and pavements due to black ice. All very nasty. Thankfully I rugged the Dartmoors last night.
On Saturday, Imogen re sat and passed her Kennel Club Good Citizen's Silver Test. I guess we will have to attempt the Gold test now. Fleur failed her Gold test and was beginning to be fed up with puppy school, so we stopped going to classes. So we'll see if Imogen can beat her on the obedience front! Highly unlikely ... but ... you never know.
What happened in November? Well, I'm driving a hire car. This is a story that actually starts at the beginning of October and has dragged on till now - December. I guess it has become quite a important thing in my dull life at the moment. Well that and the credit crunch.
At the end of September, my beautiful Italian import Alfa Romero 147, 2L T-spark decided that enough was enough, after 97,000 miles on the clock, the head gasket had "went" again. This meant that I had to continually fill the water bottle every few miles as the engine was constantly at boiling point. All rather scary.
Eventually I was persuaded to trade her in rather than have her repaired, which I duly did. I had to wait a week or should I say, seven working days for the cheque to clear and the garage do a mechanical check on the new 147 alfa 1.6 L car that I agreed to traded down to. It is red and has 3 doors. It is a 2004 model with only 35K on the clock. A good deal and it was. Of course, this meant that I had to hire a car for a week before I could take possession of the red alfa.
Two weeks to the day, driving home from Mum's, the car went bang! Well actually it sounded like phiss. And the engine was dead! The AA man thought that the timing belt had gone - and I thought, Oh No, not again! The car was towed away and I have not seen it since. The timing belt was part of the problem, but the valves had managed to put holes or a hole in the engine which means it is useless. So now I'm waiting to find out if the garage can find a reconditioned engine to put into this red car. The reconditioned engine was their suggestion, and now six weeks later I'm past caring any more.
So this car fiasco has been the major event in my life over the past few months. Of course I'm regretting not spending the money to fix the car I had. Ach, well. Life is full of regrets, and no doubt I'll find time to moan at a later date. So in the meantime, the garage has now given me a car to get around in.
