Kevin Carter

Well, I paid enough for it so here are some pictures I took with my new fancy camera. They're not much good at the mo as I'm still getting the hang of the settings! Click for a bigger version (the bigger version were scaled down by me as blogger wouldn't accept them. The ones here are 25% of the original size!)
The Hikawa dam and resevoir, as seen on my way to work.


The village of Izumi, again close to one of my schools.

Who is this handsome beast eh?

Juxtaposition

These last 2 weeks have been a mix of the really bad and the really good. Most of my time has been concerned with the really bad, but when has that ever not been the case?

I sent my car to the mechanics the week before last. They told me that they’d need to replace a few suspension bolts and that the price for said maintenance would be about 50000 yen (£250). It could’ve been worse. Cut to the weekend before last. I arrive at the mechanics and they tell me they’ve managed to fix it without replacing the parts. Great. The price is substantially cheaper; reasonable even. So, I drive away. 5 minutes later I’m back. The problem hasn’t been fixed at all, the noise is still there. After 30 minutes of mucking around they tell me the part will need to be replaced after all, but they can let me drive home as the problem isn’t serious. They will try and get rid of the noise temporarily. After 40 minutes, they come back and tell me that, actually, the noise is gone and unless it comes back I should be OK. Fine.

Cut to this weekend just gone. I had a lovely weekend with Hannah doing not much at all, and the stress of the last week was finally dissipating. The typhoon we had on Sunday had seemingly left my car untouched and I drove home on Tuesday morning after the bank holiday Monday. As I turn in to my parking space, a glint of light catches my eye. I am drawn to the windscreen where I find…a fucking huge crack. Seems the typhoon left me a little present…again. That’s two typhoons I’ve been through, and two car windows smashed. I go mental for about ten minutes before phoning in sick for work and driving back to the city I’d just come from to pay the Audi mechanics another visit.

Of course the whole front windscreen needs to be replaced. The good news is that they have a shipment of glass replacements arriving today, the 20^th. The bad news is it’s going to cost me £400. I am fucking livid. With the mandatory MOT type thing coming up next month and the repair costs for the suspension, this means I’ve spent about £50 shy of £1000 on my car in two months.

What pisses me off the most is that the cars I was parked next to during the typhoon were left completely unscratched. Nothing on them. But for some fucking reason my windscreen was cracked for the second time in a row under these conditions. I knew these few months would be expensive with the MOT and stuff but this is ridiculous. The car is turning into a money pit. What’s worse is that I know, just fucking know, that the suspension noise is going to come back, probably sooner rather than later. The MOT will no doubt spring a whole other spate of problems I need to get fixed on me and the cost of those, on top of the needlessly extortionate £450 it’s going to cost to get said MOT, is going to mean money, for the first time in almost a year and a half, is going to be a worry.

For a while after I discovered the cracked windscreen I was seriously considering getting the car repaired, getting the MOT and then selling it. To be honest, I still am. The guy who had it before said he had no problems with it (and I believe him, I still know him and he’s a very honest chap) but me, as soon as I buy the fucker, am overloaded with the things. I know for a fact one of the ALTs in the city is getting a new car so his K car (small car with an engine of 660cc) will be going cheap, if not for free. It’s very very tempting. I think I’ll see how the MOT goes. If the results are bad then I may have to sell up.

Bugger

Oh dear. My car’s gone a bit buggered, like. I drove down to Hannah’s on Sunday and the mysterious creaking I’d heard coming from the front left wheel changed into a sort of grinding, squealing noise. Obviously this made me a bit nervous. Once I’d gotten to the city I decided that I didn’t want to risk further damage (to myself or the car) and left it at Hannah’s apartment, getting the train and tram home and resolving to walk to work for the next week. Hopefully Froilan (a 4^th year who moved to Kumamoto city from Yatsushiro) will help me take it to the Audi dealership in the city sometime this weekend. I’m just praying it’s not going to cost too much L

At the moment there are several money sapping prospects running through my mind. First up is the mandatory; shaken for my car. This is a sort of MOT that must be done every two years and for white plates (aka bigger cars like mine) it can cost anywhere from 90 – 160 000 yen (£400 – 800). Apparently one of the Yats ALTs known a mechanic so hopefully my costs will be on the lower end of that scale.

Then there’s the…ahem…luxury stuff. It’s over a week since I ordered the new camera from the Itos. Now, I don’t regret ordering the camera but it is quite a lot of money (link ) and when I ordered it I didn’t know that I’d have potential car repair costs hanging over my head (no excuse about the shaken though, I knew that was coming).

Well, it’s too late to retract the order (even if I wanted to, and I don’t really) so hopefully the car is not going to cost too much to fix. Hmm.