Blog Entry: 10 the angry Miss Nugget!
October -November 2021
I have had an Audi, Porsche, and a tuned 5L Mustang, but never in my life did I envision buying a 1999 Honda CR-V. To be clear, I’m not 80 with an unhealthy desire to garden and a constant lingering smell of TCP! Neither do we have any annoying offspring. Meaning we don’t qualify for, nor do we need a CR-V. The issue is the Outlander was letting us down.
“REALLY!!” I say this to myself as I try to turn the Outlander over repeatedly, willing her to start. We had been invited to a rugby party, hosted in an area where Jess and me had liked all but one of the properties on the way, and all of them had lots of land. At 01:30 in the morning we left, the temperature was -13 degrees and now of all times the fuel pump decides to fail. After an hour of trying to do mechanics with no tools or working light I realised my efforts were futile, and in the insistence of my tired, cold, and now deeply fucked off wife, we got a taxi. The next day me, Paul, and a small tapping stick kicked the fuel pump back into life. It was at this point we started looking for a slightly more reliable steed, well that was the plan anyway. A few weeks of searching for a reliable cheep Jap steed was proving harder than I had hoped, as prior mentioned the second had market was disgustingly overpriced and the selection woefully under maintained ….. we did however find one, a 1999 CR-V in silver. It had AC, AWD, cruise control, a built in picnic table and a starlit head liner…….yeah, that last one was not a standard fit from factory, just in case anyone was thinking Honda beat Rolls Royce to the idea. It had minor rust and was very clean, with nice wheels, an uncracked windscreen and clear headlights. Unfortunately, I would soon start to find issues! The wide, nice looking, alloy wheels scrubbed the lowered stance had torn all bar one of the bushes and the slammed suspension and ‘stanced’ camber meant it road on a ¼ of the available tread; when I say tread, I mean the area where tread used to be. This once treaded part had disappeared and in its place was the rapidly wearing cords of the tyres main structure. The adjustable rear camber bar bushes had separated so much the components should have been given individual post codes, and the fucking cat rattled like a10mm socket dropping in an engine bay and hitting every fucking part on the way through. No doubt caused by the battering it got sitting all of 10mm from the ground. It drunk oil like some of my friends drink alcohol and the lowered sports suspension seemed to have lost all rebound control on the rear and now bounced like a tripping raver on his first E!. The issues and failures didn’t stop here, but we will expand more on this as time goes on. First job, new tires and luckily the old wheels were a standard size and, accompanied with my parts discount from work, I managed to just about afford some decent winter tires, these would come in very handy!
So back in blog 6 I said my record player was giving me a little issue. I had got round the voltage differences but overlooked that it was an A/C motor and thus, frequency/speed affected. I initially toyed with the idea of increasing the diameter of the platter drive gear or using a frequency modulator to alter from 60hz to 50hz. But this is an entry level audio file turn table, all the efforts made to reduce interference and noise and all my solutions were a bodge at best. I eventually found a Rega upgrade 24v silent drive motor and this was made for 110v 60hz. So, the next question was do I buy a temperature-controlled soldering iron and heat draw, or do I find a company that I can trust to do this for me. After a shot time I found a small specialist in Calgary, I had dropped it off the previous week and now I was on by way to pick it up. This was big for me, music is a massive part of my life, when things have gone well, I put music on. When things have gone bad, I put music on. I have music I use to focus and music I use to relax, music has pulled me from the lowest points in my life and vinal played on a precision record player connected through a valved amp and projected via high end speakers, this is my therapy! So you can imagine the disappointment when I got it home and it started in reverse …. luckily, I didn’t place the needle down! And there was more, when I checked the rpm, it was not holding consistent.
The silver lining is all that work I did to get a company I felt I could trust had paid off! I contacted them and they fixed it, and by fixed it I mean the give me an extremely generous reduction on a P3. Now going from a P2 to a P3 is like going from an MX5 (Miata for the North Americans) to a Porsche Cayman S. Yes, they’re both sports cars but in very differing leagues! I’m not the easiest customer to deal with when I’m fucked off, but these guys knew instantly how to rectify it! And the best part was Rega had a deal where by they automatically upgraded the cartridge to an exact (yellow), I really can’t fault them they will be my go to for hi-fi from now on! So fast forward 2 weeks and I’m on my way to exchange my P2 for a P3. This was so integral to my happiness at this point, I’m very logical and this leads me to not spend unnecessary. I must justify everything, to the point I hardly go out as I normally can’t justify it.
I forget how you need to occasionally buy something that doesn’t have a practical application or is not an investment, you just want it. In the store I had indulged in all the speakers and amps I so badly wanted, but that will definitely have to wait. Even hooked to my 1998 Sony minidisc and cd hi-fi system and playing an original press of Portishead’s Dummy album, the difference was night and day. The clarity and warmth was a sizable step up, I can’t wait to hear what it will sound like connected to a complementary system.
Since our move Jess had been desperate to re-home an animal, we are huge animal lovers!! I don’t know a time when we haven’t had at least one. We have had ponies, fish, rats, gerbils, hamsters, guineapigs, a tortoise, and even a pigeon at one point! So I knew it would only be a short time till she stopped hinting and moved onto more insistence. This day had come, she had found a moody, grumpy, middle aged tuxedo cat named Donut! When we went to visit her, it became obvious she was coming home with us. She had been returned a few times and had a low amount of trust, not to mention she did not like unwanted guests or small humans, which is us all over!! But within 5 minutes, she was on my lap getting her tummy rubbed and purring. I can promise this won’t all go smoothly but we knew she had a forever home with us, Donut, or ‘Miss Nugget’ as she has become called, will make multiple appearances in this blog!
So, when we moved in, we were eating at a tiny metal and plastic wrapped chipboard table, with matching chairs. It was left by the previous renters, and Gwen our awesome landlady, had left it for us to use as a decking table or a garage bench. She had underestimated the disposable cash we were willing to spend! This prime example of repurposed furniture had been our main table for 6 months!! And the time had come, Jess had broken the rules and spent a fucking eye-watering $25 on a solid wood 8 seater table. But she did redeem herself, she only went and found 8 nearly matching solid wood chairs that were 100% free, she is like the fucking Robin Hood of Facebook sales! That is if Robin Hood was very short, asked politely instead of taking and couldn’t use a bow and arrow for shit. The only similarity would be both look terrible in green tights? The one detail she had left out, the place we were picking them up from was more God fearing than if Salt Lake City fucked Texas in the centre of the Vatican City. Let’s just say it was a little intense for a sceptical fellow like me…….after that last statement, if there is a God, he had defiantly hexed me for it. The next week we had the dishwasher fail. It pissed water all on the floor but luckily not enough to cause damage. That said, due to the dishwasher’s miserable attempts, 48 hours later the tap had a fucking go at it as well. Luckily, we also caught it quick and most damage was avoided!
The next week was Halloween, and you can’t comprehend how excited my normally disgruntled wife was. She had been planning our first Halloween in Canada for the last 3 years and coupled with the fact we finally had a street facing door and we might get our first trick-or-treater! It was like a hyperactive 5-year-old me on RedBull. Now I had said we didn’t have a street facing door in the UK but that an understatement. We were two floors up in a flat complex with another door at the bottom of the stairs, one which exited into a private car park. So how the fuck Jess fathomed we were ever going to get one of the 10 kids in Dunmow that partake in this mostly American supported tradition, to actually knock on our apartment door, well your guess is as good as mine! But don’t let this stop Jess from buying enough chocolates and sweets to turn our house into Willy Wonker’s fucking factory every year….. I do love Halloween as it’s my time of the year to overcomplicate the simple task of pumpkin carving. This is absolutely no exaggeration; I use 200 bobby pins, 3 versions of a stencil, and 2 types of scalpels. There is masking, drawing, cutting at varying depths, and smoothing to be done. On average it takes 3-4 hours, opposed to Jess’s tried and tested two eyes and a mouth that takes 15 mins and she even refuses to scrape her own pumpkin. I usually take pride in telling her months in advance that Hocus Pocus 2 is coming but after at least 5 years of complicated contrived lies she has stopped believing me and now sees through my bullshit, although this year I wasn’t lying. They announced that for next year, 2022, there would be a sequel, I had to show her proof and even then, she was still sceptical, I can only imagine how big next year will be with that in mind.
The end of this instalment comes with the news I will be moving companies. There was nothing terrible about Venture Motorworks, as previously stated Vicchi and Shawn had been awesome, but I was really heart set on moving forward with the company and I knew losing 10 hours a week in just travel would not help this, I wanted to be closer to Cochrane. The company Jess had found worked on European cars and were 20 minutes less travel a day, so I gave my 2 weeks and would be gone the 19th of November. I just wish they had been in Cochrane, but I don’t fear change and if this is what I need to do to achieve the end goal, then it’s all just necessary steps.
Next time, November 1st to January 1st. I move companies we celebrate our first Christmas in Canada, I get minor hypothermia, I help work on an old BMW, we get real Stollen made by a German, the coffee machine breaks. Oh! And most importantly, we pick and put on hold the company name!
