Car!

Well... Its been a while. A long while... In the intervening time, much has happened, although nothing much worth blogging about. However, I am now in posession of a car. And with that car there is a story.

Early this year I was browsing TradeMe as a distraction from various bad things that were happening, and I found something I had always wanted - a Rover SD1 3500SE (some pictures here on my deviantART page), 1984 model, with the fantastic 3.5 litre V8 engine. Even better, it was at a price that I could afford! I made a quick phone call to the person selling it, and hastily made the decision that it HAD to be mine. The fact that it was 700ish km away in Wellington was no deterrent, so I hit the "Buy Now" button and managed to find a cheap flight leaving for Wellington the next day.

In the intervening time, I stressed. What I'd done had just hit me. I'd shelled out a large sum of money for a vehicle that I had only seen a photo of, in a city that I had never been to, with no way of getting from the airport to anywhere, and nowhere to stay. Thankfully, after a few phone calls, I'd arranged to crash on the floor of a long-lost friend's flat, and the seller had very generously offered to pick me up from the airport. All I had to worry about was the car itself, and the only way of solving that was to actually see it.

The flight down was pretty uneventful, and when I saw the car in the pick-up area, I knew I had made the right choice. It was gorgeous, in great condition, with an absolutely fantastic burbling V8 engine note. Driving it only confirmed those thoughts - it was smooth and effortless, quiet under normal driving, with a superb bellow from the exhaust accomanying a lead-footed jab on the accelerator. I stayed the night at a friend's, and the next morning set off on my epic drive back home. Despite discovering that the stereo and air conditioning didn't work, the drive was utter bliss. The comfort and quietness of the spacious interior, combined with the engine's smooth effortless power, made it capable of eating up the miles with ease, at extremely illegal speeds if necessary. My original plan was to stop overnight and break the trip into two legs, but after a grin-inducing blast along the tarmac playground that is the Desert Road (I'm not going to tell you how fast I was going, but it was FAST), I simply kept on driving. I made it back home at 10pm, after 12 hours on the road. But I felt as if I could just do it again. The drive was just so easy.

Okay, so I'm a student, with a part-time, minimum wage job, and I'm driving a 3.5 litre gas guzzling monster, at a time when NZ's petrol prices have never been higher. But I love it! I can just about afford to run it, and it is just so fantastic to drive that the extra cost in fuel is worth every cent. Sure, its not all plain sailing - the windscreen leaks, it doesn't like to start on cold mornings and there's some rust that I'm going to have to tackle at some stage. But I can live with that. I bought it as a project car, and it has been that and so much more. It is just fantastic.

MUSE!

I have just got tickets to see what has been said to be "The best live act of the decade". Muse is a British group that, to put it simply, defy description. Their songs have an epic, anthemic quality to them that really cannot be found anywhere else. And Ffion and I are going to be seeing them live! OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG!

Current musical obessions:

Hurt - Overdose

Hurt - Falls Apart

Hurt - House Carpenter

Muse - Space Dementia

Muse - The Gallery

This isn't going to make much sense, but I need to write it...

I just want to KNOW. To know for certain what to feel, where I stand. My mind has been spinning over and over things. Some thoughts say one thing, others contradict it completely. I am confused, lost, helpless, frustrated and falling. I just want to find something to hold onto, something that will prove to me that its alright. Something to show that things will be OK. But it just seems to be falling further and further out of my grasp.

Dreams

You know how it feels when you have an awesome dream - something great has happened, and then you wake up and still think that its true? Then you find out that what you were so looking forward to never really existed. It sucks. And its how I feel right now. Except it wasn't a dream. It was real life.

Some thoughts

I'll never let you go,
If you promise not to fade away,
Never fade away

Muse - Starlight

These lyrics mean an awful lot to me. One of my greatest fears is losing those closest to me. There have been so many cases when I've developed a really close friendship with somebody, only to have them "fade away". Often in the case of my female friends, it'll be due to a boyfriend. Often I seem to be treated as a 'pseudo-boyfriend' - we'll be always hanging out, sharing our emotions and become very close. They'll always consider me just a friend, yet as soon as a boyfriend arrives on the scene, I get ditched. It has happened just so many times that I've developed a fear of becoming close to people, and tend to shield myself from people, hiding my emotions and trying to keep my distance.

Recently, somebody has managed to break that shield. She is uncannily similar to me, utterly awesome, and over the few weeks that I've known her, has worked her way closer to my heart than anybody has been for a very long time. We spend a lot of time together, and even more time talking on MSN or by SMS. She has been my shoulder to cry on, and I have been hers. Yet I have this enormous, debilitating fear that I'll lose her. To see her, to talk to her, really brightens my day, yet it is that fear that is cutting me to pieces. She reassures me that she'll never ditch me, that I'll always be important to her, and I desperately want to believe it. But the fact that I've been hurt so badly before is always chiselling away at my assuredness, leaving me in the bizarre situation that I explained in my previous post, where the person who is helping me the most, is through no fault of her own, cutting me to pieces.

This is one of the reasons that I would really like to have a girlfriend. To have somebody who I can talk to, confide in and hold in my arms, whom I know will stay by my side, who won't ditch me when somebody else comes on the scene. Why I don't trust her, I do not know. I desperately want to, and I do believe her when she says she'll stay by me, yet my own worries keep tearing me down.

Grumble

Life has not been good. Got hit by an overwhelming loneliness last night. Its a real fear I've got and I don't know why. By nature I am a solitary type. Yet I have a deep-seated fear of being alone. So many times I have poured my heart and soul into a friendship, just to get abandoned once somebody new comes along. Despite all the reassuring I'm getting, I'm just so scared that its going to happen again. I just been hurt too many times to trust. The person who is reassuring me the most and really giving me support is, unintentionally and through no fault of their own, cutting me to pieces with the fear of losing them.

To top that off, my phone is being a git. My trusty Nokia 6630 suddenly decided this morning to refuse to connect to the network. Its not a big deal - I just swapped my SIM card into my old phone. The problem is getting it fixed. It is still under warranty, but I dropped it about 6 months ago, which left a large scuff mark down once side. From my experience at work, our mobile repair outfit is a bunch of jobsworths who will not only find any excuse to refuse a repair, but will also charge an extortionate amount of money before they give me my phone back if they decided that it has been damaged. Even though the phone worked fine for months after it was dropped. Blah to life and technology.

A rant about work

It used to be that I loved my job as a salesperson at the local electronics store. Sure, there were the hard patches - grumpy customers, the Christmas rush and the odd disagreeable colleague, but in general, the people I worked with were awesome, my managers respected me and I had worked my way sufficiently up the pecking order that I could basically do what I wanted and get away with it.

Things started going downhill just over a month ago, when the store manager transferred to a branch in another city. His replacement was the dreaded Tania. Whereas my previous boss was a lenient type with a great sense of humour and a great respect for his staff, Tania is a militant rule-follower, can't take a joke at all and appears to have very little respect for those under her. Within 2 weeks, the deputy manager, an awesome bloke and a great friend of mine quit. Then over the next few weeks, all the old-timers, with whom I got on really well with, and looked up to, started to leave. Now, at a year and seven months, I am the fourth longest-serving staff member at the store. I feel picked-on and bullied by the new management, that my knowledge and areas of expertise are disregarded (I am, not to brag or anything, very knowledgeable in the field of electronics design and audio, yet until today, was put in charge of printer inks...).

I am in a bit of a difficult situation at the moment. Work makes me stressed and depressed. I feel as if it is slowly and surely sapping me of what little grip on reality I have. As anybody I work with can attest to, by the end of a day at work, I am twitchy, nervous, easily agitated and depressed. I desperately want to quit, but I also desperately need money. I owe my parents $2000 for my laptop. I will need to repeat the calculus paper that I failed last semester, which will set me back another $600. I've got $4000 of university fees to pay next year. I want to buy a car. I simply can't afford to leave a job that despite its difficulties, pays well, is extremely convenient to get to and lets me work in an area that I'm interested in.

Immobile

Last weekend, Dad and I set about a relatively simple task of replacing the needles and jets in the Triumph's carburettors. If you're not technically inclined, it is a rather complicated thing to explain, but basically they are the mechanism that governs how much fuel goes into the engine - after 30 years of use, they were getting a bit worn out and were dumping way too much fuel in, resulting in the car having an immense fuel appetite and a few other related problems. The replacement of them wasn't tricky - unbolt the carbs, take them apart, swap the bits out, put it all back together and bolt them back on.

We put everything back together and managed to get it running superbly - it was less smoky, much better-behaved at low engine speeds, and had a certain get-up-and-go that was previously lacking. The only problem was that in refitting the jets, we hadn't quite got one of the fuel lines attached quite right, and it was leaking petrol everywhere. This, needless to say, was a problem. We managed to get it reattached, but did end up completely mangling the rubber seal. We thought no more of it, and simply cut another one to replace it.

The twin SU carburettors fitted to the Triumph's big 6 cylinder engine are fantastic pieces of engineering - beautifully simple, with a grand total of about 3 or 4 moving parts, and no complex valves or accelerator pumps as some carburettors have. However they are extremely sensitive to dirt - even a tiny bit of gunk can cause the fuel jet to block or the metering piston to stick, both resulting in Bad Things happening.

Of course, with strict adherence to Murphy's law, Bad Things did happen. On the Tuesday, I desperately needed to get into university to pay my fees which were due that day. Naturally, I took the car, not wanting to trust the buses to get me there in time. I backed out of the driveway, and managed to get out of my road, then disaster struck. The engine started spluttering and coughing horribly, lost a huge amount of power, and settled into an uneven "I'm only running on half an engine" grumble. With judicious use of the choke control and a large amount of patience, I managed to nurse it along to university. It would only manage about 30km/h up the hills, and I couldn't afford to lose any speed that I managed to build up - cue rather lairy and downright irresponsible scenes of me hurling it around roundabouts.

That rather unpleasant behaviour had me rather confused. After all, it had been running fine when I'd last driven it. After a bit of experimentation and online research, I found the symptoms to be consistent with a fuel jet blockage. It turned out that a piece of the mangled seal got sucked into the carburettor's float chamber, where it stayed until my rather hurried exit caused it to be dislodged and find its way into the jet, blocking it almost completely. A few squirts down the jet with some canned air cleared it out and got the car running properly again. It was a bit scary though - there are so many things that can go wrong when you're tinkering with carburettors, and some problems can take an age to sort out. I'm just glad its on the road again.

HAPPY!!!

Whoo! XD

What is music? (or why I hate the bands you like)

As a follow-on from my previous rambling about music, I've been thinking about music, people's tastes and why we listen to it. I suppose I am quite a 'serious' music listener - I have a stereo system that, although rather old, I suppose would be considered 'high end', I have first-hand experience and understanding of both music performance and recording and am the kind of person who will put a CD or LP on (I'm a purist - no compressed audio if I can avoid it, and I go for analogue if I can get it), turn the lights off and just listen. I like all kinds of music - all the way from baroque to heavy metal but what really does it for me is music that is not so much just something to listen to as an experience. It is a hard concept to describe, but songs like Bach's Toccata and Fugue, Pachelbel's Canon, Citizen Erased (or pretty much anything) by Muse, Fade to Black by Metallica or basically all Nightwish's songs fit into that category - music that while not necessarily loud, has a the power to stir up strong emotions and send a shiver down one's spine.

One thing I can't quite come to grips with is why the majority of people seem to limit themselves to what is seen to be 'cool' music-wise. Looking at New Zealand's top 50 singles, there is only one song on that list that I even remotely enjoy listening to (Maybe, by Opshop). And to think that that's what most people listen to. At the time of writing, the top 7 are hideous R&B travesties (the next time I hear Umbrella by Rihanna, I'm going to kill somebody), next comes Pink's awful teen-pop Leave me Alone, another generic wannabe-gangsta 'song' (the only thing worse than true 'gangsta') and then Christina Aguilera's slut-fest Candyman. Songs like those should not be allowed to exist. These mediocre tracks 'manufactured' by money-grabbing producers in order to gain a quick dollar or two, and performed by largely talentless so-called artists for mindless trend-followers who just 'consume' them, forget them and come back for more. These "disposable songs" have no emotion, no soul, none of the passion of 'real' music. They are to real music like a prefab building is to a cathedral - one is an ugly, cheaply made thing churned out en masse to fill an immediate demand and is then disposed of, one is a masterpiece, a one-off lasting work of beauty that stands as testament to those that made it.

Make mine a cathedral.

Musical obsessions

As of late, I have become totally hooked on two bands that, I suppose, are at opposite ends of the musical spectrum. However, they are both from Finland. At one end is Eläkeläiset (The Pensioners)... a rather eccentric band that basically do covers of other bands, but in a hilarious "oompah band" style with a fantastically cheesy electric-pianos-and-accordians sound and 'revised' lyrics in Finnish. Now I only understand the tiniest bit of Finnish, but from translations that I have read online, they are absolutely hilarious, and fiendishly clever. In spite of the overt silliness of the band, some of their songs actually have a rather cool anthemic pub-rock sound to them.

On the other end of the scale is Nightwish. The first song I heard by them just blew me away. They are basically a fusion of opera and heavy metal - rather like Evanescence, having a rather attractive clasically-trained lead singer of the female persuasion, but infitely cooler. They do an absolutely incredible version of Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera that manages to be even more mind-bogglingly powerful than the original.

Current musical obessions
Eläikeläiset - Humpaa Suomesta [Finnish Oompah] (The Sounds - Living in America)
Eläikeläiset - Hävisin Lotossa Taas [I Lost the Lottery Again] (The Cardigans - My Favourite Game)
Eläikeläiset - Viinaa Hanuristille [Booze for the Accordionist] (The Buzzcocks - Harmony in my Head)
Nightwish - Phantom of the Opera

Expensive...

Well I've done it. I've bitten the bullet and ordered myself an Apple MacBook. Okay, so it wasn't the cheapest laptop by any means, but its bloody quick for the price, and plus it can double as a lighsaber, as demonstrated in countless YouTube videos (just search for MacSaber). Just the thing for fending off those Sith Lords.

I'm just counting down the days until it arrives now. The Apple website says its due here on Wednesday or Thursday. BUT I WANT IT NOW!!

Current musical obsessions:
Opshop - Helpless
Muse - Citizen Erased
Muse - Space Dementia
Coldplay - The Scientist
Coldplay - Clocks

I have no life

Profuse apologies for the lack of postingness lately. I have no life. Donations of fun-ness would be gladly accepted.

A minor rant

I have just bought a new keyboard (a Logitech Classic 200). I quite like it - they key size is good, the response is excellent and its really quiet. But it drives me nuts. For some reason, many modern keyboard manufacturers see fit to muck around with the layout of the keys. Please note - the backslash key DOES NOT belong next to backspace. It DOES NOT belong next to the shift key. Backslash should be above the return key (which should be called Return, not Enter). The cursor keys should not be smushed up into the side of the rest of the keys and the home/end/pgup/pgdn/ins/del keys should be in a 3x2 grid, not some weird arty layout.

Okay, rant over now.