We got a bigger car on Saturday (Zafira) but it was untaxed.  Not only that but previous owner was disabled so we had to go to the DVLA (in Nottingham) to change the tax status of the car. 

They needed a valid MOT certificate (got), the V5 cert (got), and proof of insurance.  Annoyingly the new insurers wouldn’t send a pdf via email so we’d have to wait for one in the post.  Hmm, not a plan with a car with no tax disc sitting on the road.
 
Phone call to insurers. “Oh we’ll fax you a copy”.  As we’re not in the 1990′s we don’t have a fax machine.  “Oh go to the DVLA and ask them to phone us and we’ll fax it through to them”.  Sound idea.
 
So we got  to the DVLA.  “No we can’t get faxes through here.”  So couldn’t tax it.  Grr.  After a think we figured that Ruth’s brother-in-law would have a fax machine.  He did!  So they faxed a certificate through to him.

By this time we didn’t have enough time to get back to the DVLA before I was due to teach a Pilates class in Belper.  So R and J had to stay in Derby while I did that.  I reckoned it would be best if I went straight to Nottingham after my class.  Once there I noticed all the big signs up saying “We don’t accept faxed copies”.  Aargh!

Luckily they’d recently tweaked things to allow faxed copies (but not photocopies apparently).  They also allow pdfs wot have been printed (what’s the difference?)

So eventually the thing gets taxed.  After lots of faff and driving (about 90 miles in all) and stress.

Hint to remember – never buy an untaxed car!

Just resigned from my job. Been here 10 years so it’s as good a time as any. Now all I need to do is find more work for myself.

If anyone wants a physio to look at them somewhere near Derby then let me know.

Have fun

“This iPod cannot be used because the Apple Mobile Device service is not started.”

Well bloody start it then!  Or maybe how about offering me an option somewhere, anywhere, to bloody start it myself?  And while you’re at it how about explaining just why doing something the very same way I do it every other time would possibly mean that NOW it stops.

Once I’ve figured out how to use the new(ish) phone to do everything that the iPod does then maybe I’ll start using this piece of Apple dross for its most obviously useful purpose, stopping wobbly tables wobble so much.  Piece of over-expensive cobbled together shite.

She’s in no acute danger so they quite reasonably wanted her to stop taking up a bed in the hospital.  All good so far.

The hospital got to the point of asking for the best part of £300 a day if she continued to take up space unnecessarily.  Still all good.

The bad seems to be that the family are outraged.  Why?

When I worked in a hospital we had a bed-blocker whose son wouldn’t let her be discharged on the basis of “Well what if she falls again?”  Well if that happens she either gets up and dusts herself off or comes back into hospital.

These people seem to want to use the hospital as a care home.  That’s not what it’s for.  The saddest thing is that this latest story should really be a non-story.  All she’s doing is parading her mental health issues through the media which will likely have 2 effects.

1 is for other people to give unwarranted reinforcement to her delusion thus locking her in to it some more.  And 2 is to allow plenty of us to say “£300?  Is that all?”  I found an Irish study that suggests a stay on a ward in Ireland would be about €850.  A US study suggested an overnight stay in a Swiss hospital would be US$617 whereas one in the US would be around $3600.

I think £300 is pretty good value for unnecessary acute medical care.

Anyway here’s hoping she gets the help she needs.  Best wishes.

I may be stuck here a while.

That’s odd enough but the real kicker is:

There isn’t a ban on smacking in this country.

This is as odd as people complaining about “jaywalkers” and “how come the police don’t do nuffink about ‘em”.  Well mainly ‘cos that’s not illegal here either!  All it takes is a bit of cultural importation and a kneejerk response to assume everything’s going down the pan for people to get all huffty about non-story.

Mind you it does prove the story that right-wingers are thick. (Mind you I half expect that story to be a troll on the part of the Mail just to see what lefties think of it before the reveal)

The ominous weather didn’t stop us.  Didn’t even cause us pause.  We parked up near’t mill and got ourselves ready in a howling gale.  The walk started well with a small hill and tarmac.  Eventually we ended up near some old lead mining houses and passed onwards into a dark wood.

The main issue seemed to be that it was muddy.  Then J started howling.

He was sat in a kiddie backpack thing behind me.  Turns out I was passing under tree branches but he wasn’t managing to avoid the odd snagging.  Poor thing got very upset.

Then we headed upwards to a ridge and exposure to the wind (which had been nicely minimal under the cover of the woods).  The gusts nearly blew N off a ledge at one point and then J just kept howling every time a heavy gust came his way.

Would you believe that we picked now to have our lovingly prepared picnic?  Well we did.  Exposed to the wind and rain.  Was great fun.

But should we return and carry on.  Carrying on meant miles further in the exposed wind and rain.  Returning meant getting J through the thorney trees.  We went back in the end but it wasn’t without incident involving mud and loss of balance.  But we all got back in one piece.

Might do it again on a better day.

Ultra-nerds!  And good for them.

I could have had an accountant do it but the amount of money I earn away from my main (and already taxed) job isn’t massive so I expect I’d end up paying more than I’d save in tax paid.

Now just to worry about whether I’ve ballsed something up and actually owe an awful lot more.  Fingers crossed.

She bought a book called “The Sisters Brothers“.  A proper book by a proper author done properly.

Now the “suggested searches” thingy seems to have been programmed by someone a little bit inept.

She keeps getting suggestions NOT based on content, genre, author or theme.  However she is getting suggestions based on the title.  What this means in practice is that she’s getting quite a lot of suggested incestuous pornography.  Fine you can skip it but it does give a bad taste when it just keeps on being suggested.  Not nice.  The somewhat unsubtle hint of paedophilia isn’t really wanted either.  Surprised that Amazon and Kindle are pushing this stuff without people having to ask for an opt-in.  Surely the “suggested reads” search shouldn’t send this stuff to people who haven’t asked for it.