Nice day, if a little cool, 18degC. But wow, I wished for rain last week and wham! We’ve had rain. We’re only nine days into June and already we’ve exceeded our average for the month. And cold to go with it! I’m sure people from really cold climates would laugh at my complaints, but it feels cold here.

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One of the casualties of my kitchen ceiling collapse in February was the dishwasher. It just started making a lould hum when I turned it on, and the repair guy said it would cost more than the price of a new one to fix. So this beautiful piece of machinery, made in Germany (Miele) is rendered worthless, junk. It’s criminal the way companies plan for obsolescence. It’s a beautifully built stainless steel machine, simply needing a new motor, but no, can’t be done. I cry.

Anyway, the insurance company, NRMA, accepted that its demise was caused by water and insulation getting into the motor and agreed to replace it. Whacko! A rare win in the insurance game.

So I’m just waiting on the repair guy to get back to me about installing the new one and how to dispose of the “old” one. I’ve been thinking about the logistics of how to manouver these big devices when it comes time. Luckily my floor is all big ceramic tiles, so I can just slide the boxes around. I’ve got a big sheet of cardboard in the garage to slide it on. On the other hand, the installation guy will probably make it easy. No need for me to worry about it.

I’ve specified that I want a white one, not stainless steel. S/s shows fingerprints, whereas white devices clean up with a quick wipe if needed.

I’ve been without it for four months now and I sure miss it. I don’t use many dishes and pots and pans, only needing to wash up about once a week, but the dishwasher does such a great job, especially getting glassware so completely clean. Hand washing doesn’t do such a good job.

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Damn, hard drives! I’ve got all my Europe 2008 photos and especially video clips, around 1,000 of them, stored on two hard drives, and both of them have died! One is completely silent and stone cold, so I think the disc motor has died, not the discs themselves. That means the data should be recoverable in a clean room.

But my “backup” drive is making the ominous clicking sounds, which means the heads are searching for data and not finding it, hence the repeated back and forth clicking. It’s possible that it may be recoverable, but I doubt it.

I have a full pro backup program that backs up my C drive at 9am each weekday morning to another drive. This is mainly so that if I’m ever subjected to a “ransomware” attack, where your C drive is locked up by a hacker until you pay to have it unlocked, I can just tell them to take a running jump, reformat my drive and restore all my stuff.

Of course, what happens if my backup drive containg the C-image fails. Maybe I should have a backup of my backup. This gets crazy. I have complete copies of my “Images” folder (10,000+ images) and my “Music” folder (1,000+ CDs) on solid state drives sitting on my bookshelves, but again, SSDs can and do fail. maybe I should have backups of those? As I said, crazy.

I’ve been thinking about getting a multi-disk RAID array, where the failure of any one disk in a group of three or four can be rebuilt once the dead drive is replaced. But the enclosure costs around $450 and each drive costs about $100, so it mounts up. One o’these days, Norton, one o’these days.

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My headline title for this post refers to my history of having to deal with dragons, that is, females. While going through old documents the other day, I came across my documentation of the hell I went through from 2006 to 2008 with my female next-door neighbour in the Trigg house. I shouldn’t have read it all, but I did and it upset me all over again. What a pity it was. I used to have aneighbour who was a PhD in psychology, very intelligent, I mean. For several years we got along great, talking over the fence, doing each other favours. I even got to know her father until he died.

But around 2006 she changed. She busted up with her girlfriend (yes, she was gay) and seemed to throw herself into her work as compensation. But she overdid it. I could see the fatigue in her face. She was drooping. From then on, for some reason I became the enemy. She wanted a high fence between us, so no more over-the-fence chats. The fence became a huge limestone wall extending up to the front property line, completely enclosing her house.

But in having this “Berlin wall” built, she wanted me to pay half the cost, which was going to be around $2,500 as my “share”.

I had never agreed to this wall being built, I hated it, and as I had no contract with the wall builder, I only paid him $500 as my half of a “sufficient fence”, i.e. the cost of a Colorbond fence. She refused to pay the wall builder the full cost of the wall, which meant he came after me for the $2,500. I refused, saying I had paid my share and I had never agreed to this monstrosity. That led to him putting a debt collector onto me, and I had to see a lawyer for a “cease and desist” letter, at a cost of around $120.

This infuriated her and she started accusing me of shifting dirt to the nature strip on the other side of the road; she wrote to the Stirling council about it, accusing me and telling them that I was sick. She made threats against my dog. She came to my front door in full confrontation mode, and when I refused to listen, she shouted at me through my window. She wrote a pseudo “legal agreement” and demanded I sign it, which I refused to do. It was nearly three years of hell. This was a woman scorned. I became afraid of her.

Luckily in 2008 she disappeared. She seemed to have sold up or something and I never saw her again, which was fine by me. There’s a LOT more to this story. You wouldn’t credit it.

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Model railways – I keep buying bits, but will I ever make a start on actually building? I’m beginning to wonder. I’ve got boxes and boxes of bits. I’d guess I’ve bought around $3,000 worth of stuff, and I’m wondering if I should just sell it all to one of the many companies that advertise that they want to buy collections, and quit the game.

But to do that I need to catalogue it all, and that’s a huge job in itself. I don’t even know what I’ve got and what it’s worth. Maybe if I stopped wasting time writing blogs like this.

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I’m not sure if I mentioned this, but – The Diplomat on Netflix. What a magnificent show!! Only eight episodes unfortunately, but it ended in a cliff hanger so I hope for a second series.

It’s about a female US ambassador to “the Court of St James”, i.e. the UK. Her husband accompanies her and as he’s a former ambassador himself, he has expertise, but he’s at a loss as to how he fits in. He has no official role but he can’t help sticking his oar in at times. Sometimes successfully, sometimes blundering. There’s a monumental argument between him and his wife on one occasion.

But the thing is, the dialogue is fast, intelligent, believeable, erudite. The characters are charismatic, appealing, even though it seems as if the writers felt the need to conform to current ideas of diversity, in colour, race and sexuality. It doesn’t intrude.

But as I said, the dialogue is crackling good. I was so entralled that I was watching two one hour episodes in succession, unable to switch off. It’s a magnificent program. More, please.

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I’m hoping I might get my Mitsubishi Verada back “sometime soon”. I lent it to a friend after he had a crash in his car, but that was in February last year! He’s had it for over 16 months and seems reluctant to return it. Yet although I’ve asked him several times to either return it or buy it, he doesn’t do either.

I’ve got him to reimburse me for the registration and insurance that I continue to pay out, but I’m upset and worried. When he took it away last year, I knew the rear tyres were well worn, almost certainly illegal then, and I offered to get them replaced, but he waved me away. She’ll be right he said. Well, if there was an accident, she wouldn’t be right! The insurance wouldn’t pay out. It wouldn’t matter so much about my car as it’s only worth around $4,000, but damage to the other party wouldn’t be covered and that could be tens of $thousands. That would come back on me as I’m the licenced owner. Grrrr.

As well, this friend is not the tidiest or most fastidious person and I shudder to think what the condition of my car is like after 16 months of his use as his work car.

So I’ve put it to him that he has to make a decision: either buy it or return it. But if he returns it, I want it to be in the same or better condition than when he took it. I suspect he won’t be able to match that. The thing is, I want to sell it and I feel it’s suffered 16 months of depreciation in his hands. It’s not worth as much as it was at the beginning of last year, and so who bears that loss? Grrrrrrrr!