Our first adventure in February was that we put an offer on a house! It’s a lovely 4 double bedroom house with 2 reception rooms, a loft conversion, a conservatory and a garden with a fig tree. (Adam’s already looking forward to making fig jam in the summer.) Our offer was accepted and so we had lots of exciting things to think about on our second February adventure…
Maria, Dim, Adam and I all woke up very early one Friday morning to leave for Geneva, Switzerland!!! (One of the most lovely countries I’ve visited.) Once we arrived we spent part of our day checking out the shops and restaurants and settling in to our funky B&B. Adam and I had a bigger room so we invited the girls for breakfast the following morning – we took photos (of course!)but it was a bit early… We then headed into the mountains to a hotel where we met up with the rest of our family.
Switzerland is truly an absolutely beautiful country. The snow was soft (as it should be) and was thick on the tree branches.
Unfortunately for me, being pregnant, I’m not allowed a large amount of the Swiss delicacies. So, no soft cheeses, none of the cured meat (viande de Grison) that’s a specialty of the area. I also chose not to even sample the wine!! :o( But, all is ok because I still got to play in the snow (even though I wasn’t skiing.)
Maria and I spent lots of time with Mum, Dad and Alexander while Dim, Adam, John, Henri and the boys practiced their skiing techniques. Adam loved it!! He learnt to snowboard and looked very cool and dashing, I must say (not that I’m biased or anything…)
We also had a Valentine’s dinner at the hotel we were staying in which was great! One of the perks of going on the family holiday was having so much time to spend together enjoying each others company. It was a wonderful holiday and fantastic time with family.
March 2010
In March, we finally found out what was wrong with our car – here’s where authorship of this blog changes… :-)
For those of you who do not know, Kate and I converted our car to run off pure vegetable oil (not bio-diesel, but the stuff you get in the supermarket and cook with – yes, it CAN be a fuel). It can actually run on veggie oil, diesel, or any mixture of the two, but for environmental reasons, we really wanted to run on pure veggie oil. (Below is a photo of Adam and Mum filling the car with said veggie oil…)
Everything worked wonderfully with this conversion for several months and then suddenly, one day on a long trip to take lunch to our sick friend’s family (melodramatic music, please), the car mysteriously stopped. The engine just cut out and we drifted to a halt by the side of the road. It would not start again! We called the AA (our roadside assistance company) and they came to our rescue and got it started again by spraying what I’ve come to call “magic car starting stuff” directly into the engine. Unfortunately, a few minutes later, the same thing happened. We discovered that we could travel at 50mph (about 70kph) but no faster, so at this speed we hobbled home.
That was all about a year and a half ago. We discovered that a wire had become loose and caused a whole chain of events to occur inside our poor car. The main issue was: a fuel heater had shorted out and wasn’t working. Vegetable oil is thicker than diesel oil and it needs heating to become thin enough to be pumped effectively. The failure of the heater caused the fuel pump to have to pump thicker fuel and this wore the fuel pump out. If we drove fast or (later on in the year as it got worse) drove up a hill, or even had passengers, then the car would stop. We would have to wait for 15 minutes before we could start the car again. Whilst this was good in that we didn’t get any speeding tickets, it meant that we needed to borrow a car if we ever drove out of London, or if we wanted to give people lifts. However, somehow, we lasted for a year limping along like this before the pump got really tired and started cutting out at about 30mph (50kph) or below. Sometimes it just stopped at traffic lights. Then one day it just didn’t start at all.
We towed the car to our local garage and I watched as they investigated the problem and worked out a way to get the car started again. For the next few weeks, the issue seemed to go away - mind you we weren’t driving much during that time. Then suddenly the car didn’t start again (this was at the start of March). Using the technique that the engineers at the garage had devised, I started the car and limped to the nearest petrol station. The car stopped 3 times along the way, and once more in the driveway of the petrol station. Each time I needed to go under the bonnet to get it started again. At the station, I filled the car up with diesel and (after paying of course) started the car. It suddenly it started working again and hasn’t had a problem since!
The end of this very long story is that we have complained to the people who did the conversion, who have contacted the fuel pump supplier in Germany, and they have agreed to fit a replacement pump free of charge – as it was their loose wire that caused the whole problem in the first place. *phew* It’s not been changed yet, so we’re running on diesel for the moment until the pump gets sent from Germany. But, now you know what was wrong with our car! (and that was the
short story!)
I’ll give the computer back to Kate now, I tend to waffle on…
We had our 20 week scan in March and THAT was also really exciting. The baby’s grown so much since the last scan that their whole body doesn’t fit in the little photos they give you. It’s at this scan that you can find out the gender of the baby – we chose not to. Anyway, Adam and I are very excited because it looks like young Joey (get it? Adam’s an Ozzie, I have a pouch like a kangaroo…) is going to be athletic (unlike his/her parents) as its feet are over its head!
April/ May 2010
Adam is still working with Mike as an electrician’s mate and really enjoying all that he’s learning and practising. Below is a photo of Adam up a ladder looking serious and with all his proper PPE gear on (Personal Protective Equipment.)
Adam’s year of training to be an electrician is coming to a close …and as such he has lots of exams coming up. He’s very calm, though, which is great! The exams do seem to coincide with the purchase of our new house so that could make things a little busy! But, he’s feeling quite confident for the time being which is great. The reason we have photos of him up a ladder with all his gear on is that he needs to use photos like that (along with written assessments) to produce a portfolio which will enable him to pass a certain part of his course.
Baby-wise, we’ve also started to feel so much more movement in the last few weeks. At first it felt like I’d eaten something dodgy and had bad stomach cramps but now I feel proper hits or kicks as the baby wiggles around! It’s so cool!! Adam can even hear its heartbeat sometimes when he puts his ear to my tummy. I’m in maternity clothes now and now that the weathers getting hotter and I’m not in so many large sweaters I finally look pregnant – hooray!! Adam recorded the heartbeat at one of our mid-wife appointments and it’s so fast it sounds like a train, or as my Dad said, like a marching army!!
That’s most of our news for now – who knows when we’ll next update you all! Maybe it’ll be late July after we’ve met Joey or maybe (hopefully) it’ll be before :o)
