19 June 2006

My dearest Dennis,
I’m not sure if I told you but I managed to make an appointment last week to see the doctor for this morning. Well who should ring first thing? It was the doctors’ secretary phoning to say he’d called in sick and asking if my appointment was urgent. How on earth should I know if it is urgent, I haven’t managed to see him since I started trying to make appointments four weeks ago – for all he knows it could have dropped off by now! I know what he’ll say when I eventually get to see him and tell him that my arm keeps going numb and getting pins and needles – he’ll say “how long has this been happening?” I’ll tell him “oh about five or six weeks now” and he’ll say, “why didn’t you come in sooner?” and I’ll have to tell him about the saga of trying to make a doctors appointment in the real world, how the first appointment took 12 days from my first phone call, then the secretary talked me out of an appointment as I didn’t know if it was urgent or not and then he was off sick and how I can never get an appointment sooner than 7 or 8 days from phoning. His eyes will glaze over and he’ll go off into his “I have curry for breakfast” routine and I'll have lost his attention for another few weeks.

I cooked a blinder of a barbeque yesterday – we don’t encourage young Charlie to cook any more, not since the episode a couple of weeks ago where the brunette and I ended up dashing to the loo in the night and Charlie was shouting “ROLF!” down the toilet. He of course maintains it was heat stroke and little Saul wasn’t affected at all (stomach of steel that boy) (it’ll be those caterpillar eggs and sharing his breakfast with the cats that does it). Anyway we all sat down on the concrete slabs arranged in a patio fashion and started to eat. I noticed something was missing – my burger had gone! Of course I kicked up a stink and was about to fling a fork at the nearest cat when Charlie pointed out that my burger was sauce side down and stuck to the top of my shoe. The mustard sauce is still engrained in the suede. I’ll put them in the washing machine hidden in a bundle of towels when the brunette isn’t looking. I don’t know what next door paint their fence with but it must be tasty because their bull whatsit terrier was eating great chunks off it while we were having our barbeque. Daft as bat that dog. Did I tell you it climbs their tree and barks at the kids when they play footerballs in the garden? I’ll tell you, if it ever makes it through or over the fence I’ve told the brunette to scoop the kids and I’m diving straight for my shed and my collection of sharpened blunt implements.

The wind turbine is giving cause for concern this morning. I used the Venetian blind slats for the six blades and it all looked beautiful and worked a treat but this morning the wind has got up a bit and the blades get pushed out of shape temporarily by the wind and in strong gusts now thwack on the pole holding the contraption up in the air. Causes quite a noise too. A bit like when we used to peg playing cards on our bike forks to make them clatter on the spokes like a spitfire noise - why don't kids do that any more? I’m going to try shortening the blades little by little but that will then take some of the power out of the system as it won’t have the same inertia although it should spin faster in a slower breeze – I’ll play with it a bit to find the optimum. I could ‘step the pole’ I suppose, to allow the blades to deform with impunity – may be better in a high wind and would act as a feathering device to govern the speed a bit … maybe … gotta go … brunette got hold of my ear …