THE GOOD BUCK

Tag: Transportation

  • Hot. Damn hot!

    Hi there.

    This beastly weather we are suffering is killing me. Work, though better than being in de-kit, is still a non-stop sweat-fest. I put in four hours overtime on Monday. The manager asked me if I could do any overtime quite early on in the shift. I’d just had the weekend off and was feeling fresh and lively, so I said I would. By 1pm I was done-in, soaked in sweat, had no food, and another five hours in front of me. That was fun.

    Sweatier yet is Taekwondo. Sah bum nimh reckons she’s joined flab-fighters, so were are all getting exercised to death (as misery loves company). The last two nights have been so humid, then on top of that having Sah bum nim cracking the whip. You could literally wring my dobok (gi, fighting suit) out. She had us all lined up doing one kick, step, one kick. Then one kick, foot down, straight into second kick. Then three kicks, then five, then ten. This wasn’t three kicks, rest. It was kick, kick, kick, again! Kick, kick, kick, faster! etc. Then doing mad kicks backwards across the hall. Then we were split into groups (I was with the black belts/ one below black belts, and me! Yeah, see my trumpet. Observe me blowing.) Doing turning kick, into 360 degree kick, into spinning back kick. Not easy, but I was 80% there. One chick who was the grade below black belt (red belt with black tag) and was obviously surprised at my attempts, said I shouldn’t worry about not getting it dead right as this was an advanced exercise for her grade and that I was excellent. Yeah, she wants me.

    In other news the Warrington coppers show an alarming alacrity in dealing with motoring offences. An indecent haste some might say, given their response time to real crimes. Anywho, Wendy posted that confirmation of details thingy back to them on Sunday, I had the reply on Tuesday! £60 fine and three points. Bastards.

    The Wendster is moaning about me typing so I’d better sign off while I dig a shallow grave in the garden.

    Later,

    Buck.

  • Irony. Bitter ain’t it?

    Goddamn it!

    I have a grading at Taekwondo tomorrow so I went to my club last night to get in some much needed practise. I found, by chance, something of a short cut on the way there. On the return journey I was knackered (it’s a 6-2 week and it was about ten at night), stressing about my grading tomorrow, looking for the new found short cut, and though I saw the speed camera I just didn’t register it until I suddenly had FLASH! FLASH! in my mirror.

    Bloody, bloody hell!

    I was reading that new drivers now have a probationary period of two years on their license, within which time amassing six points or above automatically leads to disqualification. From what I can gather it is new drivers per se. I became a driver (well, rider) back in ’85, and passed my car test in ’05, so I’m hoping one of those will be the one that it is reckoned from. I only passed my class II in January though (gulp) and am still striving for my artic license.

    If I can’t get a job for the three years that (I think) the points stay on my license I am going to be gutted. If they take away my HGV license (and I’ve wasted the worst part of five grand) I am going to be suicidal.

    This time tomorrow the grading will be over and I’ll be a lot less stressed. Then I can work up to a new fever of stresed-ness for my next test, then sit around waiting to see if I have picked up the points and the fines and how that will bugger my job prospects.

    I have no idea how long the fines take to come through, so I’ll be on tender hooks whenever the post arrives, for as long as it takes.

    Balls!

    Buck. 🙁

    PS, Day after, done my grading. I made one embarrassing mistake. Grand Master Loh

    (the head of the whole of the U.K., eighth dan, so, no pressure) told me to go into sitting stance with a punch. Those were not his exact words (his accent makes understanding him difficult, and I flap under pressure so I’m not sure exactly what he did say) but instead of widening my stance and dropping down a little, I stepped back into a fighting stance. I knew I’d done something wrong but couldn’t think what I should be doing. Sah bum nim Caroline (who was standing next to Grand master Loh at the front of the hall) had to say it again and do it herself before I got over my flap and carried on. Also I went down onto my knuckles for press-ups, but had my hands in a vertical plane not the horizontal. Like my knuckles cared.

    Hey ho, done now for another few months. Seventeenth of October to be precise.

    Hopefully I will have passed. My poomse (kata in Karate; a sequence of set moves) was right, and showed good spirit, my kicks were higher than some of the most senior grades there (which is more to their detriment than my credit to be honest) and apart from the two simple mistakes above I thought I did alright.

    Grand master Loh was not in a good mood though.

    Lots of people were told to sit down before they had even completed their moves. It was quite brutal. If all of them failed there will not be many people getting new belts from this grading.

    On the bright side, when a pair of the senior grades were grading, they were told to execute Kwon moves (fist, or punch) and some of the blocks and counter attacks were actually good, effective moves. Very reminiscent of the Karate from which Taekwondo is alleged by some to have originated (though not by anyone from Korea, and not within hearing range of anyone who is, I would suggest). Stick at it then. I have always maintained that a black belt in any martial art is more than a match for your average untrained lager lout, but I was concerned that being virtually solely kick based TKD was purely a sport form of a martial art. Looks like it just appears that way to us junior grades. Cool.

    Done now. The driving stuff is a distant threat, so I can relax for today.

    By the by, I forgot to mention; since I’ve been back from my jolly hols I’ve been trying to set up Freenet, a P2P network that is secure and censorship (and government spying)  resistant. In doing so I have successfully forwarded a port all by my little ol’ self. I don’t know what that means, and I was following instructions from a specialist site, but I did it! Go I.T. techie me!

    Still not got the Freemail (secure email section of the site) up and running, and to be honest unless you want to overthrow the government in bloody jihad, or join the Animal Liberation Front’s sabotage campaign, it doesn’t seem that good a network.

    I approve of the principle though, so I’ll try it out for a while. Damn the government and their control of information. Rise up, you have nothing to lose but your chains!

    Later,

    Buck.

  • Day off, huzzah!

    Finally got a weekend off. It’s been six weeks since my last proper one. (My last actual one, three weeks ago, I was dying with that cold and had the sinus pain issues. I would have preferred to have been working and well, than off and in that state.)  I had lots of vague plans about what I was going to do, i.e. gardening and generally pottery about having a good time. Not a bleeding bit of it.

    I had a few chores to do; shopping, nipping to town to the bank (while I was there I wanted to nip to Wilkinson’s to spend my £10 voucher that I got off Iceland for Xmas on lovely plants), and nip my sisters to drop off a (day late) card for her youngest.

    I went to do the shopping at about half past ten. Half past ten, mind you. Not dinner time, not after work on a Friday, not Saturday or Sunday. Half past ten on a week day. It was chocker. Every doddering idiot, coffin dodger, and work-shy chav was in Asda. Why? They were out in force, all determined to stroll around and stop and chat in the middle of the narrowest isles, blocking my  passage (ooer, Mrs.!). Don’t let my attempts to shop interrupt your conversation you bovine, slack-jawed, ignorant, embodiment of the argument for compulsory euthanasia.

    So that went well.

    Then there was the ‘nip’ to town. Some fool in the council has decided it would be a fun idea to block of one of the main roads through Warrington. The joy just keeps coming. It had a knock-on effect of stopping dead all the roads that stray vaguely near the closed one.

    So I aborted the card dropping off mission. I got home to find a letter on my mat from some debt collection agency saying I owe them £80. Apparently the DVLA had passed them the bill for collection after I had repeatedly ignored their letters about registering my Bandit. The last time I did the paperwork for the Bandit I informed them that it was SORN, and that I  had moved address. Sorn declarations are free, but only when the DVLA send the damn reminder to the right address. Oh yes indeed, that lifted my mood still further. I ran upstairs, went online to the thrice damned DVLA, and their website says ‘when changing address you have to send your registration document back to have the address changed.’

    I changed my license details (with the DVLA. A pox on them) and assumed that all my driving details would be updated. Or at least that they would have the wit to check if my license details had changed before hitting me with an £80 bill and handing it over to a debt recovery agency. Especially as SORN is free. A curse on the DVLA and all who sail on her.

    When the rage had subsided, after I’d had time to realise they had me and all I could do was bend over and take it like a man, I moped off to my garden, a broken and beaten man. The sun had moved round, the garden was in shadow and it was cold. Of course.

    I did manage to get the washing done and dry, strangely satisfying. Also I went to Wilkinson’s and got some flowers (mainly dahlias). I went to B&Q as well. It being such a pleasant week I was expecting both places to be chocker block with lovely plants, a cornucopia of colour, a smorgasbord of scents.

    No.

    Bulbs, pansies, trees. Bugger.

    I got some seeds whilst there, and some ‘blood, fish and bone’ plant food for my trees. (And me a veggie, Buddhist-wannabe!) It was a three kilo box, opened it up and shook some around my four fruit trees and put the remainder on my acers. Then, as I was throwing the box away I noticed it said you should sprinkle two ounces per square yard! Damn and blast! I know there are twenty eight grams to an ounce, so in three kilos there are a bloody lot of ounces.

    Don’t know how many grams there are in a kilo. If it’s a thousand, as I suspect, I’ve just put enough food out for fifty one square yards of orchard or whatever. Bugger. If it doesn’t kill them they should be like Jack’s beanstalk by the end of the season.

    The silver lining to this particular dark and lowering cloud of a blog entry is that when talking to one of the night shunters at work I said about that lad putting in his license and being ignored. He said "bald lad, from the freezer, nights?" I said it was he. Phil (the shunter) said he had been banned, and had applied for a job as a shunter whilst disqualified! He has only just got his license back and he still has points. That is why he has been so comprehensively ignored. Phew! Hope renewed. Also today I got the cheque in the post for our holiday in Scotland. Then posted off my V5 for the Bandit. Now I’m going to dye my hair.

    L’Oreal.

    Because I’m worth it.

    Later,

    Buck.

  • And there’s more…

    Goddamn! That Autoglass thing turned into a farce. I was thinking originally of paying for it myself to keep the insurance out of it. To save money I arranged to drop it off at the nearest centre rather than have them come out and do it. After the horror of the £405 quote I promptly changed my mind and put it through the insurance. Then I was told it would be an hour to fit, another hour for the glue to set before it could be driven away. Having no option, I accepted.

    Then later on I thought about it, if the insurance were paying for it, why not get it done at home? So I rang their call centre back to ask if would be possible. The guy actually laughed at me! Went on to tell me how the weather was too cold for the glue to set on a call out, that the light would be failing at my appointment time of 4.30, and in essence, not his problem but it wasn’t happening.

    Again, lacking any option I had to acquiesce.

    Thinking about it on Sunday morning I decided against going to my IAM meeting. Thought they would probably have strong views about driving a vehicle that was one jolt away from having the windscreen fall out.

    So, biting the bullet, I threw my pushbike into the Micra and drove down to the centre. In the snow. When I got there they had no idea who I was, or that I was booked in at all. 15 minutes on the ‘phone later, the guy confirms that I am booked in, and asks me to come back in hour to pick it up. I replied that I thought it needed an hour to set after fitting. He told me it did, but their chap had another appointment (a call out. In the same cold and dark that had made it impossible for me to change my arrangements to a call out!) so wouldn’t be on site. If I could just come back in an hour he’d give me the keys to the Micra, bugger off on call and leave me sat in the car park for an hour waiting for the glue to set! Imagine my delight!

    In the event when I returned to start my vigil the fitter was still at work, and allowed me to stay on the premises while the glue set (for half an hour. He gave me some blag about it not needing the full hour because I only had one airbag.) and then tried to explain how they had cocked up and apologised repeatedly. This soothed my rage, but it was still extremely shoddy service.

    The other news is after talking about my finances the other day I did some sums. The two martial arts I am currently doing, if you add the insurance from both clubs, lessons and gradings, come to £990 a year! That’s without the £100 worth of kit I have to but if I want to compete in TKD, or the £50 for a Wing Chun uniform. So, sadly, I am going to have to suspend the dearer of the two, the Wing Chun Kung Fu, and just do the basic lessons and grading at Taekwondo. Still, as soon as our circumstances change (when Wendy gets her job, or when I get my artic license and a driving job, or preferably both) I’ll go back. I’m not sure whether to go to the club and tell them I will be leaving for a while, or just explain when I go back and flop my wad on the counter demanding the complete package. (That is not a euphemism!)

    Big bummer, but money is getting tighter, and a thousand pound a year is too much of an indulgence. 🙁

    Ho hum, I’ll get there in the end. I can’t help but think that time is against me in this though. I could cut out the years of sweat, struggle and payment for lessons and just invest in an automatic pistol. Or a sawn off shotgun. I’ll go and have a look on eBay.

    Later,

    Buck.

  • Cars suck bottom

    Hi ya’ll,

    I’ve got to go for an appraisal drive and arrange to do the training with the Institute of Advanced Motorists tomorrow, so I’ve spent the last few days ‘pimping’ my Micra. I’ve serviced it; oil, oil filter, air filter and spark plugs (which I’ve already done once in the three years I’ve had it. Talk about overkill!) I’ve put air in the tyres, washed the damned thing, (which I did in 2007) and put the rear-view mirror back up. I had taken it off to get used to using my wing mirrors for my truck training. It says in the literature for IAM that you must have at least two mirrors fitted, one of which must be inside the car. I was thinking of trying to get away with taking it literally ( I had two wing mirrors fitted, and one internal mirror, just it was in the glove compartment) but thought it was probably not wise to start off on that note.

    Now then, when I first started my truck training I just turned the rear-view mirror around, but one time it just popped off in my hand. Thought no more of it, just stuck it in the glove compartment. So today I had a bit of a flap when after freezing my hands off washing the mighty Micra off with a hosepipe (and proving the adage ‘you can’t polish a turd’) I couldn’t find the mirror. It wasn’t in the glove compartment. It wasn’t there, Richard! (Virgin complaint letter reference there. How funny was that letter?) Anywho, after taking the tapes out three times, checking under the seats, in the boot and asking Wendy if she’d had it off it still wasn’t there. In desperation I took to fumbling around above the compartment, and there it was!

    Job’s a good ‘un. Just pop it back on like…,  hmm, really stiff. Shove a little harder…, ‘CRACK’!  The windscreen had cracked. Boundless joy.

    So I rang Autoglass for a quote, as their advert says they can repair or replace. Repair, cheaply please. Nope, that’s for chips. Cracks are a new windscreen which leaves you paying the £75 excess on your insurance. I said "hold on a minute, how much is the windscreen? I don’t want to lose my no claims bonus."

    "£405."

    "Screw that. The insurance can sort it."

    So I was less than happy. Wendy, who has come down with a virulent form of Woman-flu, was a tad grumpy. "What you should have done was just black the mirror out"

    "Hindsight is 20/20. You learn from your mistakes."

    "You should be brilliant then."

    Very droll. She’d better watch she doesn’t ‘fall’ down the stairs again! (Joke!)

    So the pimped Buck-mobile is going to roll up to the IAM place tomorrow with a cracked windscreen.  Bleeding marvellous.

    What else of note has transpired? Well, the word at work is that the new manager of our depot wants to turf De-Kit out and replace us with agency workers. We have a contract on site that is proving a money spinner and is manned (and womaned) entirely by agency. Apparently the Agency geezer was in for a whole shift sizing the job up and was supposed to have put a bid in for the contract a week or so ago. Nothing else was heard, so we thought it had fell through. However, the boss said on Thursday that the agency chap had an appointment with the main manager on Friday. It’s my weekend off so I don’t know if we know how that went. I do know that with Iceland buying those 51 Woolies stores they are having to spend two million quid expanding the frozen section at our site. So they will need a whole lot more frozen staff. It was into the freezer we were supposed to being thrown, if the agency took over our department.

    I will be getting another job ASAP, should that transpire.

    I wouldn’t mind going back into ambient as a picker. In point of fact I might prefer that. I have come to realise that I either need to cut back on expenditure or get more money. There is overtime going in ambient, but none in de-kit. De-kit is unpredictable as well. Some days you are fresh as a daisy after the shift, others you haven’t stopped grafting and are fit to drop. This makes arranging overtime for after a shift a daunting prospect. Which only leaves working 6 days.

    Ho hum.

    Things are getting so tight I’m considering suspending the Kung Fu training. I really don’t want to, but I’ve been going for a while now and still haven’t paid the £30/ £70 pound joining uniform fee.

    Gotta go, tea’s up!

    Later,

    Buck.