Repairs Repairs

Dear oh dear, I have a poorly car at the moment. I'm lucky its not worse than it is though. Driving to band practice last Thursday I knew something was up because the car was behaving irregularly. The temp gauge was fine so, I thought (wrongly) that everything was ok there. Lifting the bonnet, the expansion tank has water in it, however, I discovered that the radiator was empty! Knocking on the door of a local house, I managed to get some water to fill it up and watched as it boiled up, filling directly from the radiator cap. I've certainly had experience of this in my past from some of the dodgy old car I owned as a young lad. Anyhow, I have a busted and leaking radiator, that means I can get away with short journeys up to 3-4 miles, but no more. I'm in the process of getting quotes for a replacement at the moment. Seems to come out at around £50-70 supply and deliver. I might just get the local garage to do the whole job if its not too expensive. After all, they'll likely get the part at trade price.

Talking of repairs, I was really pleased with myself yesterday after managing to fix a friends PC. It had a broken motherboard. After ordering up a new one from Ebay, I spent a couple of days rebuilding the PC and got a bit frustrated. First of all I bought a motherboard the would not fit the case, so I order another that was identical in spec to the old one. It fired up ok, but I couldn't get it to recognize the hard drive. Finally, yesterday I worked out that I'd got the wiring wrong and finally fixed it. It was a real boost to my self esteem. I'd never build a PC from scratch before.

News seems to be full of the hurricane hitting New Orleans today. My nephew is on a six week tour of the USA at the moment and he is in that area. I'm relieved to see that he has avoided the danger. John seems to be having a great time. He writes a good blog too. Here's the site of his exploits if you are interested.
www.sixweeks.co.uk
The repairs needed on my car pale into insignificance when I think of the damage the hurricane will do to folks homes in the USA. Kinda brings things into perspective, doesn't it.