UK to Slovakia

Of course mans best friend will always be his dog. There’s something very special and unique about unconditional love and affection; something we humans just can’t seem to master.

However, this post isn’t about dogs, it’s about ‘the next’ mans best friend i.e his tools.
Electronics has been a hobby of mine for a very long time, so although I’m quite adept at juggling a printed circuit board, soldering iron, solder and sub-miniature components between two hands, I have never really been known for my finesse or dexterity.
When it comes to repairs, home improvements, DIY (call it what you will), my wifes tells me I’m completely useless. Apparently I revert to some Neanderthal Man state and ‘the job’ always involves the use of;
a) Hammer
b) Silicon Sealant
c) Hot glue gun
If it involves the tightening of nuts, the wrench has to be 6 metres long and I have to be swinging on the end of it to make sure it’s ‘tight’ enough.

In fact it is something of a standing joke now that if Zoe needs anything ‘fixing’ she just asks me “fetch the silicon” or “heat up the hot glue gun” or some such piss taking remark.

Why not though? Everyone has a hammer and it should be compulsory to have the other two items in any real mans toolbox.

Before we left the UK I put laid a new wood laminate floor and the required me to fix some pretty architrave to make a seemless joint between the floor and the wall. I calculated the cost of screws, the effort required to drill, plug and then screw in the screws and it just didn’t make any sense. For a couple of 99p I bought big tube of silicon sealant and use that the fix the architrave into place - no unsightly screw heads, no sweat, blood or tears and the job was completed in about 15 minutes!
Of course you can now get a product called ‘no more nails’, which like silicon sealant, comes in a tube thats excreted onto the surface and acts like a glue, purportedly with the strength of a normal screw fixing. The only drawback is it’s 5 times the price of silicon sealant and of you change your mind and want to disassemble the joint, one or both items gets completely destroyed. If it’s joined with silicon, you just stick a sharp Stanley knife between the two surfaces and pull them apart as you cut - any residue you can peel/rub away and unlike ‘no more nails’ you don’t need a hammer chisel.

If you don’t think silicon sealant is very strong, your wrong! My old 6 foot (tall) x 2 foot x 2 foot fish tank was nothing more than quarter inch glass and silicon. The gravel weighed over half a tonne (500kg) and the weight of the water (500 gallons) was around 2 tonnes (2000kg). The height of the tank give approximately 2.59 psi per foot of pressure.
In short, it strong enough!
It’s water proof, usually doesn’t deteriorate when exposed to sunlight like a lot of glues etc.

I’m also partial to my hot glue gun - perfect as a silicon sealer substitute if you don’t have time to hold the bonding surfaces in position to wait for it to harden. The last time I used mine was when I installed Zoe’s stainless steel kitchen utensil bar in our new flat. The things six foot long and although I had drilled and plugged the wall at one end for the mounting bracket, I couldn’t penetrate the wall far enough at the other end of the wall to get a rawl-plug in. I think there was some metallic object in the way judging by the way the drill bit was glowing cherry red, a water or gas pipe most likely so I didn’t force the issue. Normally I would have done the job properly and re-sited the bar after using my metal detector but this isn’t our flat, it’s rented, so I was committed to using what I had or risk complaints from the owners about holes in her wall tiles
No problem though, squirted some hot glue gun glue into the shallow depth hole and on the back of the mounting bracket (after making sure the wall tiles was clean), tightened the screw fixing at the other end and then to support the dodgy end with the shallow hole, wacked in a plastic rawl-plug to take the vertical wieght.
Once the glue had set (about 15 minutes) I just used a sharp chisel to slice of the protruding bit of plastic rawl-plug and the job was finished. I did give it a tug to make sure it was OK but it’s currently holding utensils with a combined weight of about 15 kg with no effort at all.

I haven’t written for a while (again) so thought I had better catch up.
First and foremost, Happy New Year to all our readers. May you live long and prosper, may the Force be with you, may all your troubles be little ones etc.
The exception to this is for certain religious extremists - may the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits and may your purported 79 virgins be men.
When I first heard about this ‘79 virgins’ thing I was almost tempted to become a member of that religion but I think I would sooner have 79 dirty slappers who know what their doing. After all, if your dead, a sexually transmitted disease or ten, isn’t really a problem.

As punishment for writing the above, I had to spend New Year on my own. Well it was actually me and the pooch because Zoe flew over to the UK as her father is very ill.
So New Years Eve, me and the pooch sat at home, watched the fireworks out of window and drank a bottle of fizzy wine and some beer to celebrate the New Year. Now before any one starts jumping up and down shouting ‘animal cruelty’, I should point out that Tatzen only had a bit of beer. I didn’t offer him the wine because I know when the bubbles from fizzy wine goes up his nose, it makes him uncomfortable.

So far, the winter has been kind to us, compared with the rest of Europe and elsewhere. We have only had several feet of snow and the lowest temperature I remember seeing was -26C (thats roughly -14F). Everything here is pretty much business as usual and even the older generation are still shuffling about in the snow and ice with their walking sticks/zimmer frames whilst carrying their shopping.

Sadly, the UK failed once again to deal appropriately with ‘winter’ and millions of people were stranded at airports/stuck in the Channel tunnel/stuck in their cars on motorway for days…………

Thanks to an email from scorpion42 in which he asks me about the Pajero’s MOT and what the winters are like here, I have a good enough excuse to write another post - thanks JP.

My wife drove the bus on it’s 2 day (each way) round trip to from Slovakia to the UK on her own this year. Apart from some personal things she needed to attend to, she taught in a Summer School in the UK for 6 weeks to supplement our income (or lack of it as her boss had not paid her for 4 months).

The bus passed it’s MOT with flying colours, not a single bit of work needed doing, not even a blown bulb. I suspect it might be a slightly different story next year as the Yokohama All-Terrain tyres are starting to show signs of wear. They would be good for several years in the UK but the Police are more than a bit keen here on ‘winter tyres’ and they like them with plenty of tread. We only get away with not having to use winter tyres because the tread looks so meaty.
I know what your thinking and no, it’s not a con. Winter tyres have a much softer rubber compound, so much so, the cars pretty much fly around in the snow as fast as they do on normal tyres in the rain, in summer.

I don’t really do anything special to prepare for winter. The locks do have a squirt of WD40 but thats really just as a lubricant more than anything else. I haven’t used the door locks, except for checking they still work, for over two years as I much prefer the remote central locking. At -20C and below, even WD40 will freeze so the lock slot and the lock mechanism itself gets an annual, pre-winter splatt of petroleum jelly. Most greases I experimented with will freeze well before petroleum jelly.
When I say freeze, I’m talking about grease having the consistency of toffee and thats not something you really want near moving parts.

Believe it or not, the most annoying problem in these sub zero temperatures is the door seal itself icing up.
You trudge through the snow to the car, drive down the road with the heater on that causes the snow to melt and be suspended as moisture in the air. When you park up for the night, the moisture in the air sticks like shit to a blanket, to the door seal and freezes solid. Luckily I haven’t managed to rip any of the door seals to shreds yet but it has been close a few times and it wouldn’t be the first time I have had to prise the door open gently with a very large flat headed screw driver.
I have tried ‘oiling’ the door seals with WD40 but it’s a waste of time, the stuff just evaporates. The best results I have had were with silicon sprays designed for shining dashboard plastic etc. That seems to work really, really well on door seals.

I have no idea what the anti-freeze mix is as it was done for ‘mates rates’ in Poland but I would guess it’s a 50/50 mix as that seems to be the norm here. I cannot account for wind-chill but at a recorded outside temperature of -35C there is no sign of problems with the coolant and no signs of seepage on the rubber hoses. I will have to renew it next year, I don’t want to risk bad anti-freeze at these silly temperatures and let’s be honest, the stuff costs peanuts compared to replacing engine parts.

I do have some sheets of polystyrene I use to help insulate the battery - I don’t honestly know if it makes any difference but it’s a water, lead and sulphuric acid battery not a solid or gel battery so to my way of thinking, at minus (insert any two numbers here) Celcius it’s way too cold for water.

The sat-nav, rear view camera and DVD player stops working at about -15 to -20, or more precisely, the LCD screens don’t work at those temperatures until the cabin has warmed up a bit.

De-icer
Forget it!! 99.9% of all de-icer sprays actually contain some water. Usually the cheaper they are, the more water they have. So don’t waste the money. Halfords do an expensive de-icer in a plastic squirty bottle, thats the best stuff you can get but as I haven’t found a Halfords here, I use the more traditional method; a yard brush to get rid of most of the snow and knock all the icicles off and thats it. Trying to scrape the ice off the screen is a none starter - trying to scrape off inch thick ice with anything other than a hammer and very substantial chisel is going to take forever and windscreens don’t kindly to being pummeled by a 5lb lump hammer. The screen usually clears in about 15 minutes any way with the fast scrren clear turned on and the heater on.

Some of you will remember my last post about All Saints Day 2008 and how I got a little emotional.
This year we revisited the ‘old’ cemetery in Kezmarok armed with our carefully selected Candles of Remembrance; hats, scarves and gloves to keep the chill of the winter fog at bay.

I won’t recount my thoughts again but it was a very moving experience. I don’t hold to the belief that there should only be one ’special’ day to remember loved ones and other individuals as it’s something most of us do almost every day of our lives but I do think that retaining such a ’sense of occassion’ is important to the next generation to make sure that specific deeds; groups and individuals are never forgotten.

The photo accompanying this post was taken with a cheap digital camera and to be honest didn’t really capture the scene very well so I have used some GIMP magic to lighten the image a little (the photo was taken at around 2300hrs and the only light source was that of the candles). The scene depicts several hundred small candles placed at the base of a small concrete plinth, which in turn is home to a small cross, close to the entrance to the old cemetery in Kezmarok.

The lights you see in the background belong to candles placed on or near graves.

Actually, winter arrived a couple of days ago after several days of rain.
We were watching the rain fall, wondering if it was going to stop when all of a sudden, it changed from water droplets to snow flakes.
We were greeted with another 4 inches of the stuff overnight, which meant I had to don hat and coat to de-ice the bus at the crack of dawn so Zoe could get to work - well it was the least I could as she was busy cooking something hot for breakfast.

I was actually quite thankful that the temperatures had dropped for the last few days because apparently, the general rule for these apartment blocks we are now living in is that the average temperature has to be below 10 C for three days before they turn on the heating. Never the less, it was still something of a shock to think that only a few weeks ago we had been enjoying temperatures in the low 20C’s.
I have come to enjoy and appreciate the ‘real seasons’ of Poland and Slovakia but it is still somewhat surreal how the can switch from one season to the next with only a few days warning, unlike the UK where they seem to blur together for months on end. My wife and I had only just been talking about the prospect of winter and here we are in the midst of it.

As I write this, the snow has stopped falling but there are still several inches to be seen in places and several nearby trees are heavily laden with the winter coats of snow.