Busselton 1993   © PJ Croft 2019

As I write it’s raining steadily, with no wind. It was bit cool (17C in my house) but with the aircon on heating mode, made possible by solar power, it’s very comfortable. I like a nice sunny day but this is great. Admittedly, there wouldn’t be much solar power being generated, but my two-monthly bills are down to $45 now so I can afford to be warm.

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Over the past five years or so I’ve bought several capsule coffee makers from Coles and Woolies when they’re on special, usually around $60 or so. I say several, because they have generally not lasted long, failing for one reason or another. Coles were good in exchanging one which failed and the replacement is still working.

The point is, they all use different types of capsules. I know of five different types (shapes) which are all incompatible. I always resisted Nespresso from the start because I wasn’t prepared to toe their line and only buy on-line or from their snooty shops.

However, getting to the point, because I’ve had three different types of machine I’ve now collected boxes of four of the five types. The machine that took my favourite type died a few months ago (leaking more coffee into the reservoir than into the cup). I was reluctant to buy another machine of the same type and thought I might finally switch to a Nespresso compatible machine, since nearly all the capsules on the supermarket shelf are now “Nespresso compatible” and quite reasonably priced.

But browsing eBay I came across this:

Coffee madame?

It’s an Ovation multi-capsule machine. By having exchangeable, insertable holders, it takes four different sizes of capsule. The red one at the top is Lavazza and down below, right to left are Caffitaly, Nespresso (Coles equivalent) and the brown one at the left is espressotoria, the only one it can’t take. The one not shown is Expressi, Aldi’s type which I don’t use.

It’s made in Italy, but oddly the eBay machine sold is refurbished, i.e. not brand new. The supplier is in Sydney. I wonder why they’re refurbished? It’s fine though, except that due to poor packaging, mine arrived with a hole broken in the water reservoir. Luckily it’s high up so I can nearly fill it with no leakage. The price was $75 with postage from Sydney included. The one I was going to buy, the Philips Nespresso, was $139.

It comes with four different capsule holders (one shown exposed at the top) and a matching base (grey oval button in the opening at the front) for each type of capsule. It works well and I’m very pleased. It means I can use up my stocks of Lavazza capsules and buy Coles Nespresso compatibles which come in a big range of coffees and are very reasonably priced. I also still have my working espressotoria machine so I can offer five types of brew. Coffee anyone? Feel free to drop in anytime.

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I never cease to be amazed at the carelessness of ABC newsreaders at times. I heard one Sydney reader talking about “Glysophate” recently. I think he meant Glyphosate.

I reckon I’m the only one left on Earth who knows how to use correct tense or matching tenses. I’ve been collecting examples of mixed up tenses and I’ve collected about 50 or more so far, plus other grammatical atrocities:

I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, but once a pedant, …

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Speaking of which, I advertised something for sale on Facebook Marketplace last week and dealing with the enquiries is painful. Most people can’t be bothered with capitalisation or punctuation, and spelling and syntax are optional. I kept having to repeat myself when answering their questions. I found myself getting annoyed and had to discipline myself so as not to give offence. Luckily I made the sale last night so it’s over. I have to deliver it on Tuesday as the guy sounds as if he’s a bit housebound.

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I’m having fun at the moment:

That’s the Honda’s electronics bay, awaiting the installation of my new Pioneer A/V DVD/radio device. “Car radio” sounds a bit inadequate these days.

That’s it at the bottom.It’s a pity about the gap between the upper and lower units. I’ll have to do some jiggling to make them meet better, I think. Those holes on the right don’t match up.

All the buttons and knobs on the old CD/cassette/radio have been replaced by that one touch screen and the few buttons on the left. That’s the way electronics is going – replace mechanics with electronics. I have to re-wire the harnesses to match each other yet.

The unit has provision for a reversing camera, but I don’t have one yet and a connection has to be made to the reverse gear, or the reversing lights. It also has a wire marked for the parking brake. I assume that’s to prevent DVDs being played while the car is not parked? It has a USB input too, but the socket is at the rear, so I have to run the cable somewhere so it can be plugged into from the front. That’s going to be tricky and ugly.

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All these photos (except the Busselton one) are from my phone camera, by the way. Damn this is neat – take the photo, nice big screen to frame it, autofocus, auto flash, send it to Dropbox immediately, then go to the PC, retrieve it from Dropbox onto my desktop, fix it up a bit (rotation, cropping), use Ctrl-Alt-E for my preset resizing and it automatically places it in my Bloggers folder, bring it into WordPress and here they are. So easy. You couldn’t do this with film. No way.