I'm ill and other memories

It started with my nose hurting then it spread to my eyes and now I have a full on upper respiratory chest infection, which is starting to clear after I started dosing myself with Penicillin VK left over from another bout of disease one of us suffered there are enough left for a full course, so I'll take the lot ....

Onward and upward.

The other kids are down with their dad for a visit, Xboy boy took his girlfriend, FOMO boy took his Nintendo DSi, and Lauren just took her attitude.... it's only for a few days and although we miss them it's a nice break.... a change is as good as ....eh ? ....Freya is getting a lot of attention and is currently being potty trained which seems to be going well (thus far).....

We've just had what seems to be our monthly delivery of heating oil again, it's ridiculous the amount we seem to be ploughing through, but I guess with the recent cold weather it's all that can be expected....Roll on Global Warming .... sorry.... Summer ;¬)

the only other thing that's worth mentioning is that I have got back in contact via Facebook with a fair few of my old friends from days in the Army (at last a genuinely useful aspect of Facebook !! )

I've even been sent photographs of that time... this one is of the main gates outside the camp, I remember Ibbotson (or Ibbo as he was known) the guy on the left and I remember the other guy on the right but I can't put his face to a name.... (the ravages of time eh ?) you can tell it was the 80's those short denim shorts were all the rage..... I blame Wham! mind you I do remember it being VERY hot in Germany when I was there.....

Unfortunately my photographs of then were left at my ex wifes house and knowing her she has probably burned them or thrown them out, which is a shame because I'd have loved to have looked through them again...... It was really nice to see old faces and talk about times gone by..... We really did have a great time looking back.... it's amazing what some people remember and the things you yourself forget about.... like the time we got the Padre (Graham) absolutely hammered on Radler's (German weissbier) on the way up the Grunewald and when he was medivac'ed to some Austrian A&E when he cracked his skull after flying off the "Death Slide" on the assault course, and Sgt Waters muttering under his breath "he's going to die" ...and when "Stretch" sunburnt his feet and was unable to walk on them and was put on OC's orders for self inflicted wounds .... and a group of us walking up to the Eagles Nest and taking shortcuts directly up the mountain ignoring the winding road and climbing over fences marked with "Achtung Tollwut" and not knowing it meant (Attention!! Rabies) .........happy days :)

There is a God.....

Not only has "Ugly Betty" been canned but today I hear that "Friends" has been canned from Channel 4 E4 and E4+1 !!!

Happy days :)

Friends was ok the first time around it had a freshness to it that you rarely see in American made TV.... but like all things you can get utterly sick of it when you've seen it countless times on the Nth repeat, there is such a thing as a TV station getting it's money's worth but I think Channel 4 has beaten this one to death since 1994....

lets face it 16 lonnnnnnnnng years of the same episodes day after day would stretch the patience of a saint let alone the average TV viewer .... we don't even have to suffer politicians for that long, and besides the original cast probably have been moulded into different people now with frightened rabbit smiles and chins where their noses should be by plastic surgeons trained by the makers of play doh.....

So hopefully "Friends" will be laid to rest to gather dust in the TV archives of yesteryear... only to be dragged out once a year on one of those low budget "Top 1000 TV shows" to fill a gap between peak viewing hours and the insomniac hour.... no doubt though some failing channel will be offered a cut down bargain basement price for the entire series and it will reappear .... but lets hope its on one of those encrypted channels like Gold or the likes .....that nobody watches :)

The only other news is that Xbox boy has finally got himself another job I hope he does well in it ....his sister on the other hand is being BARB tested to join the Army Apprentice College (I have a theory about that..... in that her pocket money stops at 16) ... so good luck to both of them :)

How do you repair a 28 year old dish washer ?

Yes our dish washer gave up the other night..... I mean how dare it !!! it's only 28 years old !!! white goods aren't what they used to be are they ?????

it's an Indesit CCCXX ....(I wonder how many will get that joke) ..... basically it was made in 1982 just after the fall of the roman empire.....(for those of you slow off the mark) .....suffice to say there are NO parts you can buy on the planet which will fit it.... lets just say the kids were getting very nervous of having to wash by hand the amount of plates this family gets through in an average day....

if you click on the photo you can see just above the top bearing of the electric motor the windings which power the motor.... and if you look very carefully you can see what seems to be a copper wire pointing upwards.... Yup it was damaged when the spring that stops the dishwasher door from slamming down on the floor when you open the door snapped.... it whipped back and in the process ripped out a load of wires from the windings of the motor... killing the motor dead.... the dishwasher just carried on filling up until the cut out activated to stop your kitchen floor from becoming a swimming pool....

Anyway I first off had to manage to get a picture of the pump by thrusting my hand under the dish washer and guessing where the pump was and hoping my autofocus worked..... it did .... and I showed the picture to my Father and he said "Yup I think I have one of those motors in my shed" needless to say he rang back and said "when do you want me to bring it down ??" no sooner said than done we had the dishwasher out and on it's back and with some completely inadequate tools for the job, namely a set of mole grips and an adjustable spanner we had the old motor out..... that's when we hit the major problem in that the new pump would only fit in the machine if we compressed it with a 40 ton press and it lost about 3 inches in height....

Obviously we needed a rethink, so on closer inspection and much spatial awareness grey cells firing in unison we eventually concluded that the motor although of a different type was actually of the same pattern albeit bolted onto a different pump..... Ahhhh we were getting somewhere....or to use an old army term.... "we were cooking on gas"

.... No.....we weren't....... it turned out the rotor shaft was a different diameter to the bearing on the existing motor housing (following me still ?) .....


ahhhh but we "could" in theory remove the bearing from the old motor and replace that in the new motor housing..... there followed much grunting and various swear words under my breath.... eventually I got the bearing out and I replaced it......


Voilà .... one rebuilt electric motor using the old rotor and bearing..... being of the wary type I insisted that we test it so sweeping aside all health and safety I cut off a mains cable and bared the wires with my teeth...... and plugged said mains cable into the socket, then gingerly touched the live and neutral terminals.....(I didn't bother with earth.... I live life on the edge I do..... besides I was holding my lucky rabbits foot....)

it (of course) sprang to life.... all that remained then was to put the new cannibalised electric motor and pump housing back into the dish washer, put the kettle on make some well deserved tea and wait for the drain cycle...... as you can see from the picture above on the right we have the old damaged motor and on the left we have the donor motor .... and the offending door spring which caused the failure in the first place......

Get in there...... job done and no screws left over !!!