goodEventually put the bike in to fix the seized caliper arm on Monday morning. They lent me a Suzuki Burgman 650 to replace my Triumph Trophy 900. Um. It's not even a BIKE, ffs. It's a scooter. An automatic one at that. The left lever is the back brake! Oh the shame. Even the staff of Cheltenham Motorcycles were laughing at me.
At least they didn't have the gall to charge me the normal £20 insurance money to take it. Anyway there's good news and bad: the bad news is that the arm is seized; the good news is that they don't have to buy the whole assembly so it looks like the whole job is going to cost around £150 all in.
My bike is being expensive. I want to do some more work on the engine soonish too, in addition the rear disc and chain and sproket set are going to need replacing. At least the saddle is great now :) This is due to
ak67 doing a fantastic job of putting the new seat cover on the saddle over the weekend. Thanks once again :)Well the weekend at least went according to plan :)
stuartl came over at roughly the original time (Saturday) to help with kissycat1000's planned clearout, although he wasn't feeling too well. In the end I spent the first couple of hours breaking up the furniture and clearing the weeds. Later on stuartl and I decided to have a fire to burn all the wood and garden debris. This worked well, except it got kinda big and eventually the paint on the brick wall at the bottom of the garden caught fire and now looks black and charred. All of the other junk stuartl and I took down to the scrap yard in three separate trips, including the junk from out the front that Rob had left there. The garden still needs to be swept up and the wall will need to be scrubbed with a stiff brush and presumably repainted.However the garden is now reclaimed! Not much use during winter, but I think it's a start on clearing the house out. It seemed to inspire
kissycat1000 to start rummaging through The Cupboard, but apparently she needs to take a lot of it to charity shops before any real progress can be made there.I had the idea to have a roast on Sunday as there were enough people around to warrant it;
kissycat1000 tried her hand at cooking an entire roast. Before now she'd only done each thing separately. After getting somewhat stressed out about the quality of her cooking and a slight tussle over the thickness of the gravy, it can be said that a truly marvellous roast was had by all[1].I also managed to reinstall Win2k on the Athlon computer to fix the graphics card crashes. It's fixed, but now is exhibiting other strange problems *sigh*. I will mess around with it some more another time and get it working properly.
We tried to watch Army of Darkness on the repaired Athlon on Sunday night. I got second wind (sorry) and was awake but
stuartl and kissycat1000 were falling asleep, so we abandoned it halfway through.Monday I had the day off and we went to the hospital, after which I drove the Escort that's normally
kissycat1000's back. I didn't ride the scooter for 4 reasons:- I have some dignity left (somewhere)
- It made my arms ache on just the short journey back from the shop
- I wanted to take a load of stuff back including my computer project so I can work on Gateway 2 :)
- stuartl is going to be there with his car until Tuesday afternoon to assist kissycat1000 with any mobility problems anyway..
Looking forwards I have the rest of this week to get some sort of draft version of my program ready for work. I'm going back up to
kissycat1000's on Wednesday evening to return her car and hopefully pick up my bike. This gives me 2 days at home to get a load of work done. Let's see how much I can do![1] - Apart from Jordan, who eats nothing but original Hula-Hoops and drinks nothing but Sainsbury's own reduced sugar orange squash due to his Autism, and
stuartl who had I think it was about half of the components of the roast ;) 