Today I went off to see Chris and Meriel. Much tea was drunk, cake eaten and Fedora Core 6 hacked. (The more I used it the less I liked it.)
On a less jolly note, I’m coming down with another cold. The sore throat started last night and has now started migrating noseward. Blurgh! It’s not fair, it’s only been two weeks since the height of the last cold. :-/
Hmm.. what can I say other than the day started off grey and cloudy so I started playing Oolite…. I did stop… at 9pm. Ooops! And I’m still only “Average.”
A lazy day. Watched the Grand Prix, Time Team and played Oolite on the laptop. The weather’s still nice but I didn’t fancy walking today.
Quite a quiet day really. Merely a trip to Asda in Penryn this morning and a short (1 hour) walk this evening.
Well, after two weeks i think I can give a reasonable overview of my new car, the executive summary being: You can tell GM has taken over at SAAB.
Overall the car is good and drives well and in general is a good car, however the devil is in the detail and you can tell that SAAB is no-longer its own boss and it is the little things which show. I’m talking about detail fit and finish such as the front grill and the door mirror switch plates being a little loose in thier mountings, the water bottle filler pipe not being held securely and the fact that the fuel filler cap is not tethered. The old 9-3 used GM switch gear but you could see that the engineering around it was good and there had been no corners cut, I can see too many cut corners in the current model and penny pinching (such as making the warning triangle an optional extra and not having a specific storage area for it) and all this on a car in the “luxury saloon” market. It just feels like unnecessarily sloppy engineering.
SAAB is not the marque it used to be.
For today’s walk I first drove over to Church Cove, which is about 2 miles from here as the crow flies but about 9 miles by road, and parked in the National Trust car park. I then marched northwards along the coast path past Gunwallow Fishing Cove and right up to Looe Bar. I stopped in the Gunwallow beachside cafe, which turned out to be based in someone’s conservatory and got rather ripped off.. £3 for a glass of orange juice!
Still, it was a very nice walk and took me about two and a half hours in total.
Upon return I found that a nasty sea gull had bombed my car so after dinner I had to wash down the car again. Grrr… 🙂
After a slow morning I went for another walk. This time I turned south at the Marconi memorial and followed the coast path down to Mullion Cove before turning inland and walking back through the village.
Nothing else to report really other than Trenance Barton farm has a chocolate factory and shop and the cafe latte’s in the coffee shop are quite nice.
Today I went for a little walk north along the cliffs. It was only a couple of miles each way but it was good to get out.
The weather is mixed, as in it’s sometimes sunny but sometimes cloudy. The chilly wind was still blowing which made the walk a bit bracing at times.
Not a lot else occured.
A pretty quiet day really.
I planned to give my new car its first wash (Ihad to leave it at least a week to allow the protective coating to bond to the surface) and so got my dad’s high-pressure washer out and looked for the shampoo. Well, I couldn’t find any shampoo for a start and even worse, after about 2 minutes one of the bearings in the compressor unit seized. So my car was wet but the only thing I’d managed to do was move the clingy, fine, red sahara dust around the paintwork a bit.
Oh well, so we had a trip down to B&Q in Penryn where I bought a chamois leather and some car shampoo and my dad bought a replacement pressure washer.
And so, I now have a nice, clean, shiny car again and it’s not at all pinkish in colour.
As for the weather, it was slightly cooler than yesterday but the wind was slightly less strong and the continuous hazy sunshine brought the temperature up to the mid-teens (or low 60’sF for those still using imperial measurements :-)).
After a lazy morning we drove over to Godrevy as planned yesterday. The weather was lovely, very warm for the time of year (about 20C according to the car’s thermometer) and the Sun was shining. The only fly in the ointment was the wind, it was very gusty and almost gale force it seemed.
My Dad and I both took our cameras with us and I took my big lens.
As hoped, there were a large number of young seals lazing down in the secluded cove below the eastern cliffs. I managed to get some reasonable shots despite the wind. Even laying down and using the image stabilisation it was hard to get a good shot as the camera and lens were being buffeted so strongly by the wind.
This evening I helped my Dad load Nikon PictureProject onto his machine and download the images from, what is now, his D70. (I’ve sold my old camera to him along with the Sigma 28-300mm lens which is best suited to a lower megapixel camera than the D200.)