Saturday, November 04, 2006

"White House My Arse!" / No Charge

:-) Evening in
Got a quiet evening in planned tonight. Nothing to do but sit in my comfy IKEA chair and watch some quality TV with my feet up. If truth be told I spend a lot evenings in my comfy IKEA chair watching TV with my feet up, but tonight I've got an excuse because of my torn calf muscle.
Because the TV's such rubbish here we spend most of our viewing time on DVDs, and fortunately the Embassy DVD library is well stocked with box sets of popular series. A situation like this is great for catching up on those TV series you didn't have time to get into when they first came on, or to enjoy again those classics that you loved first time around.

At the moment for example we're splitting time between The Royle Family box set (all three series): a great comedy series that we're watching again (and that I'm copying onto my Archos PVR), and The West Wing: a superb political drama series about the President's senior staff in the West Wing of The White House. We missed this completely when it was first aired on British TV, so since we've been here we've been going through it right from the beginning of series one. We're now just a few episodes into series five. The writing and performances are superb -- but then, you've probably all known that for a long time.


:-( Car Trouble
Car wouldn't start this afternoon. It turned out to be simply a battery discharge (Elliot hadn't closed the door properly yesterday so the interior lights had been on for 24hrs). Quickly and easily solved by a friendly driver with jump leads, but nevertheless it made me feel uneasy. It's the first bit of car trouble I've had in years, and while today it happened in our own driveway I couldn't help worrying what about what would happen if we had a similar problem while on one of our desert trips: no AA here!

But then, that's why we always go in convoy.

Spoke to the Embassy's mechanic today also for advice on getting the car serviced, and he says the oil and oil filter should be changed every 5,000km! Can't believe that.

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