What's made you smile today?

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What's made you smile today?

Had a nice chat with the engineer from my insurance co today and we’ve agreed to write off the punto.

Car is worth £1400 the repairs would have been about £1400 and given that it has 176,000 miles it’s not worth anyone putting the time in for it to be scrapped in a year or two’s time.

Also I only paid £1500 for it and given that I’ve had it 3 years I’m fairly happy with that outcome.

Maybe someone will come pick it up from co-part or whoever for a couple of hundred and put it back on the road again, Someone repairing it themselves could probably do it without a great deal of work, new foglight and indicator, squish the bumper back into its mounts and put up with the scratches and dings
 
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Car is worth £1400 the repairs would have been about £1400 and given that it has 176,000 miles it’s not worth anyone putting the time in for it to be scrapped in a year or two’s time.

Also I only paid £1500 for it and given that I’ve had it 3

That's a illustration of how mad the car market has gone...176k mile Fiat 1400 quid. I know its a top spec diesel but damn...that's strong money.
 
That's a illustration of how mad the car market has gone...176k mile Fiat 1400 quid. I know its a top spec diesel but damn...that's strong money.

Mad isn’t it. As I pointed out it was £1500 when I bought it in 2018 over 3 years ago now. To say it’s lost £100, to be fair I never haggled when I bought it, and I didn’t haggle with the insurance company so had I done both the insurance co could have been paying out more than I paid 3 years ago.

Sadly I don’t think it will go to co-part and find its way back onto the road I had a missed call this afternoon from a local breakers yard so my guess is they just want it scrapped. Someone might save it, but the likelihood of that just dropped massively.
17” alloys, leather seats etc there are quite a few bits on that car for a scrappy to make a few quid from. Once it gets to the scrap yard it will be a cat something write off making it worth even less
 
Wonder if Mrs J would settle for that? I was getting heartily fed up with airports before the pandemic and now it seems to be very much worse.

As someone who has just completed his 67th flight of the year, I feel your pain. I almost hate say it but I miss the days of lock down flying.

On to the good news for the day, my employer made an offer to me to hang about until the end of June that I couldn't refuse. I can honestly say I heard my boss choke up a bit when I accepted.
 
As someone who has just completed his 67th flight of the year, I feel your pain. I almost hate say it but I miss the days of lock down flying.

On to the good news for the day, my employer made an offer to me to hang about until the end of June that I couldn't refuse. I can honestly say I heard my boss choke up a bit when I accepted.

And a bonus of starting your retirement in the summer, instead of the winter.
 
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Today, when I got into the car - Ibiza - to start the drive home, I was watching the dash display, as I always do, when starting the engine to be sure all the lights were behaving etc when I noticed the recorded mileage was standing at 22222! What's the chances of actually seeing that? A small thing but I am very pleased I actually witnessed it!

Turned up when I was looking for something else...pulled over at the side of the super highway we have here..

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You guys were posting pics of odometers reaching milestones. I knew I had one somewhere of my 1995 Ford F150 reaching one but it took awhile to find but here it is.
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Yup, 345678.9 miles. I had my wife take the pic. I sold it with 365K on it to a co worker for her son. He pushed it to 400K then sold it. I don't know what happened to it after that but it was the best pick up I ever had.
 
These was yesterday.
I got together with three of my best friends for a bike ride and breakfast afterwards.
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L to R: Weasel, 55 and retired; Terry, 80 and retired; Me, 65 and still working, and Carls, 66 and retired, unmarried, no kids, and head full of hair.;)

Because life happens when you've made other plans, this was the first time we'd gotten together since 2012. I remember that day because wet leaves on a wooden bridge and use of a front brake caused me to wipe out and screw up my knee. Badly.

Anyway, the weather was nice, if a tad breezy. We took the route I've been riding the past few weeks with no incidents other than Terry getting into some soft stuff and kind of just falling over. He got back up unscathed and laughing. And me hitting a rut at speed and still having the innate skills to pull out of it and managing to keep the rubber side down.

Breakfast was good, and honestly, we spent more time catching up there than we did riding.

How I got to the start. That Aluminum framed Trek is a lot easier to lift up on the rack than my 50+ year old Raleigh 3-speed.
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Having spent lots of time whinging about broken cars..

This made me smile...bit niche but given I been debating an atmospheric DV on the C3 for years if it sounded like like this I'd be ecstatic..spin to 18 minutes if you don't want to watch the whole thing.

https://youtu.be/DonZIMcSLCg

Just think 3 cylinder noise growl + DV is so good...

I'm a fan of the Kei tipper anyway...and Kei cars in general but cheeky dose is great.
 
Last weekend was an Edinburgh local holiday with the Monday being a holiday day. We - Self, Mrs J, younger boy and his family, older boy and his family plus his wife's mum all took cabins at Fort Augustus at the southern end of Loch Ness and had a family weekend away. In fact the first time Mrs J and I have been away anywhere since the Covid scourge struck so at least 18 months!

We had a lovely time and the accommodation at the Loch Ness Highland Resort was excellent.

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We went all round the village and took a boat trip on Loch Ness in a boat which had asdic to look for "Nessie"

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- very exciting for the kids, and "big kids too! Also exciting was the canoe/paddle board challenge to race from the south to north of Loch Ness in the shortest time so there were a lot of folk shooting around in canoes and, somewhat more slowly, on paddle boards

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This one was being very enthusiastically cheered on by the lady in the foreground who seemed to be a relative. We visited Urquhart Castle, from where that picture was taken - that's the one you see in all the pictures standing on the wee hill beside the water.

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Mrs J and I also took a walk round the lochside for about an hour or so on our own which was very nice and peaceful. We thoroughly stuffed our faces with some very good food and had some great times in the evenings in the hot tubs and just sitting around and chatting (I'm not a hot tub person).

This morning I've been sorting out the pictures I want to keep and filing them on my laptop and NAS when I came across this:

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Perhaps not the most flattering picture of me ever taken? but the wee chap always looks cute, especially in his new "tractor" boots. Someone must have grabbed my camera without me being aware. I think it should be captioned "C'mon Granddad, do keep up!"
 
Should've posted this yesterday, but nevermind...

Had a superb time in Cardiff, went there with a few friends, 1 of whom came with us to meet up with 1 of her old uni friends. We got to Cardiff just after 5pm on Sunday, and once our other 2 friends arrived and relaxed for a short while, we went for a walk to a restaurant, and loved seeing the city at night.

On Monday, the university chap turned out to be great company, and was able to show us around Cardiff, including the good shops, an excellent tearoom, excellent pubs, and a great restaurant. That evening, 4 of us went to see the Manic Street Preachers at Cardiff Motorpoint Arena, who put on a superb show. [emoji2]

We all came back home yesterday, and I must admit, I was immensely impressed with the car. By far, the furthest I've ever driven, and the car didn't miss a beat. It was very comfortable, and despite carrying 3 adults and rather a lot of luggage, at mostly motorway speeds, still returned 47mpg. [emoji846]
 
One of the Panda's headlamps is yellowing. (The other got replaced a few years ago, so not succumbed yet) I also have two friends with very yellow headlamps, so a bit of work to do.
Headlamp restoration kits seem to vary in price and contents, but all seem to make a lot of mess, and require some hard work. (Don't like hard work, never did)

Yesterday, I caught a vid on YouTube, where an American was using an alloy wheel polish and a rag, and getting good results. The polish is called 'Mother's Mag and aluminium polish', but is expensive, and not easy to find in the UK.
https://www.demon-tweeks.com/uk/mothers-mag-and-aluminium-polish-481788/
https://motherscarcare.co.uk/shop/mothers-mag-aluminium-polish/
Beware the delivery charges.

Then I had an idea. What about equivalents? In the garage, I have some Solvol Autosol, chrome cleaner, from back when we had chrome, so quite an old tube, probably last used on a motorcycle, sometime in 2003.

Half an hour with that and a piece of old cotton bedsheet, and the yellowing is gone. The lens is not looking new, and woudl require some serious buffing, or sanding to achieve that, but for zero outlay, a very good result. We'll see how it lasts.
 
I got the Huffster up and riding today when I probably should have been working on work stuff, but hey, their loss.
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The 56 year old Sturmey Archer AW 3 speed hub shifts like it's new.
 
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