This really spooked Olivia.

Olivia started yelping last night when she went to grab some washing that had dried, I believe it's another Scrub Python and a splendid example, I'm hoping the clever rodents that currently plague our lives are scared, real scared.

90 today.

I just popped over to my parents to wish my Father Fred a happy Birthday, later a little party is planned.

An easy ball joint job that wasn't.

I noticed Oscar had a torn ball joint boot when I was checking out the DPF arrangement the other week so ordered a pair to sort things out, this should have been a really simple job as I'd also ordered a long 40 mm socket to enable simple removal, it wasn't.

After not being able to get the socket to grip I decided due to my lack of strength and agility that it would be easier to remove the hub and take the job inside, naturally due to the old Jimby luck the driveshaft popped out and dumped a fair amount of expensive gearbox/diff oil, bugger.

I had to use the pipe wrench plus a metre extension to be strong enough to pop the joint but I did manage it. The new ball joint is in the background here.

Postmortem stuff here, I like the idea of the screw in fitting, although I'm old an frail now so life is harder. The long socket I'd bought needs either another 3 mm of depth or more length in the square drive fitting, this was only obvious after removing things and checking on the bench, hindsight is such a wonderful thing. I might weld a couple of beads on it and use it with the pipe wrench to pop the other side.

Of course I noticed doing the job that the tie-rod end on the left side also has a torn boot, so that's another job on the soon to do list, I'll wait for them to arrive before doing the RH side, then of course the alignment will be a concern, it is already despite the shop claiming it'd just been done, which brought a groan from Jimby, dunno why but I have a deep seated distrust of wheel alignments, in my mind they should never need to be touched unless the bits I'm currently doing here are played with, shops always find a reason to adjust but often folk kiss their lovely steering goodbye once it's been molested.

This ball joint was still functional and no cause for any alarm but without a functional boot it's a time bomb, and in this age a new unit costs little or no more than a new boot, and happily my time is worth nothing.

If I can have an offsider for the other side the job will be a snap.

A patch up for Oscar.

On the drive bringing Oscar home a noise was heard for a while, it appears the front RH inner splash shield was somewhat loose and rubbed itself into destruction against the tyre. I've had it off for a while and even tried to buy another one but with the timing belt now done it's best I sort things out.

I cut some donor plastic from an old oil container.

Then used some clips to hold things in place.

Now I just hope it holds together for a while.
BTW the brake pads are near new with close to 12 mm of wear left, and there's plenty of meat on the rotor. The brakes are lovely on Oscar so I don't have much reason to swap the padsfor Protex Blue's which I like, but I may yet.

Oscar again.

I visited Grace at the cemetery this morning so I took a piccie of Oscar since John has correctly picked me up for being slack lately.
I'm also as sore as buggery today from changing Oscar's timing belt yesterday.

It started off as a simple enough job  but it soon degenerated into the job from hell due to a lack of room and the new belt being a very tight fit and very difficult to get onto the sprockets.
A keen eye will see the water pump has a trace of seepage, I'll have to replace that soon but without knowing Oscar's history I wanted to get a new timing belt on ASAP, although Oscar's DW10BTED4 engine is a clever design that sacrifices rockers in case of a snapped timing belt rather than destroy the engine, for me it's still urgent to try to prevent that sort of damage.
Golly I'm sore today.

Introducing Oscar.

I haven't actually got a better photo yet but to satisfy the curious here's a piccie I took getting Oscar home.

A special tool for Oscar.

To relieve the tension on Oscar's serpentine belt it requires a number 15 spanner, I've had this broken one laying around for a decade and despite it having the ring end broken, I decided I'd endure the irksome use of the open end if it worked sufficiently well, happily it did and the extra length provided by the wood lathe tool which I had no use for helps the job a plenty. The rusty welding rod is what I bent (unseen here) so it could fit into the locking hole for the tensioner.

My new ultra small and cheap stick welder works a treat too, highly recommended compared to the old brick sh!thouses.
Brother Mega may be pleased to know that Oscar's trip computer can be set to km per litre, me I'm happy enough with litres per 100 km, but maybe I could become oriental and try it.

Regrowth

My father Fred seems to be getting hairier on the top these days, no drama though as like me he has a minimum of vanity about it.

And a shot for a family album, here he takes in what in a very limited view of the world going past. It's the real down side of his current abode as he really misses having a good view of life going past.

Daisy's last day.

Daisy is leaving us today, somebody came to us after word of mouth got around that I wished to sell and they liked it, it'll be for their daughter so hopefully the Hello Kitty stickers I put on the mirrors will stay.

Only 30k km in 5+ years, that's what happens when your health has issues as well as a dose of blindness due to cataracts, since solved.

Before and after

This is approximately how I saw things without spectacles until my recent cataract operation. Actually that was just how the myopia and astigmatism affected things, the cataract effect made things even gloomier.

This is about how I now see things, although my right eye is still recovering and finds light to be a rather painful thing yet, dark sunglasses are the go, plus they give me a Roy Orbison look. Argh what am I saying, nothing I could do would make me look like the Big-O, sadly as I age I look more like Arthur Brough (Mr Grainger in Are You Being Served) than anybody more desirable.

First time for me.

I saw Olivia had bought a bare cake that had instructions so I decided to make some icing and cut up some strawberries that have been affordably priced of late. My icing began as my usual runny mess shown here, it's something I abandoned many a year ago due to being consistently bad at it.

Then after some more cooling I had another go at whipping it and I received the shock of it looking like icing. Now I hope Olivia doesn't get mad when she returns from her well paid casual job that is keeping us alive.

I'm getting pretty happy with my sight now, it's a real joy to see how bright my photos are, cataracts sneak up on a person and I waited far too long to do anything, not helped either by the hospital keeping my name at the back of the pecking order.

Cataract operation, done.

Things went pretty well, it's a simple and quick operation so I didn't expect any drama.
The downside is at this point it's astigmatic, but maybe that might change, otherwise I may make up a set of fancy reading specs for using the computer.

Under the cover was this, they don't like us punters doing this so don't tell them.

When I got home Olivia noticed it was bloodshot, but it did have a bit of work done to it so only to be expected.

Useless tomorrow.

These good old specs shall be useless to me tomorrow, they're already half useless as I'd already taken the left lens out six months ago, tomorrow my right eye (fingers crossed) will have cataract surgery and hopefully except for closeup things spectacles will no longer be needed for Jimby.
We're blessed with an excellent health system here but be warned that you have to be very patient I've been graded category two which means being done within 90 days but they're quite a bit more cunning than to skip along at that pace, in my case after they did my left eye I then had to wait almost 90 (the actual 90 days would have been on a weekend and the hospital doesn't work on the weekend) days for them to inspect their work and then put my right eye into wait mode, another 90 days.
At least my mind can rest easily knowing I haven't jumped a queue, although to some respect I did when I had advised them that according to legal standards I was blind in my left eye then (sub 6/60) which now my right eye is pretty well as bad. That raised me from category three to two which lends me to believe that category one (30 days) must only exist for important people and girls under 16.
It's a gunna be nice to see properly for about the first time in my life after a lifetime of astigmatic myopia.
I sat on these specs a couple of months ago and went meh, just glue them together it won't matter.

Rodent deterrent.

We've been under attack by rats for a while now and are at wits end, we have to concede they're smarter than us and are probably more literate than human Aussies, so I bunged some poison labels on our rice, which will hopefully deter them from chewing their way in.

Also on this new bottle of lovely sweet soy sauce, as they had chewed through the old bottle's top, remnants of which remain in this photo.

Even the dishcloth copped a chewing. We've tried a few different traps, all of which work splendidly.....once, then word gets out to his sisters, and his cousins, and his aunts! His sisters and his cousins, Whom he reckons up by dozens, And his aunts!  Thank you G&S

Toothy Jimby

Don't worry they're fake, or at least were deliciously sweet, but I may have finally nailed a photo that shows a bit of cloudy cataract.

My lucky left eye was done and looks nicely clear, it also looks very well from the receiving end, 6/6 according to the medico at the hospital a week ago but I think that was a bit optimistic despite me being overjoyed by what it's now seeing.
Jimby's right eye is getting close to what the left one was six months ago but at least I have one good eye now until I move along the queue to be done, hopefully inside 3 months.

Still a few dark ones left.

Jimby had a haircut today, a fancy one thanks to Olivia, we're trying for a more sophisticated look with some longer hair on top to help ward off the winter cold.

I just hope I can comb it decently as I haven't had hair long enough to comb since I was in my twenties.

Frail old Jimby says ouch.

I visited pathology this morning for them to take a blood sample, and it hurt more than usual. I seem to always have bad luck there of late with barely any blood being retrieved despite a hectare of pain, at least I bruise like an old woman now and can show it off.
The mess on the right of this piccie is from the little operation I had last July, it still hasn't healed properly but since my arm hasn't come good either I suppose it's only to be expected.

Peter's mower now has a name.

After being underwater a few times too many and having Jimby flush out the engine and bring it back to life poor Peter became sick of headaches and now gets a mowerman to cut his grass and he gave Jimby his yet again waterlogged mower, and it was in very poor shape, but now the misfire has gone and the transmission is working again, so it shall be known as Lazarus.

In a sea of bland a splash of colour.

I hate how cars have become merely shades of grey these days so it was lovely to see a car with an actual colour in the car park at Coles this morning. Daisy sits blandly in the background here too.

Elmer's going again.

Elmer our self-propelled mower has been out of action for a while due to being underwater from that last flood and then inactive long enough for the bearing in the self-propelling mechanism to seize.
I had flushed out the engine after the flood but didn't consider the bearing, silly Jimby.

This is the new bearing in its housing, it's a type 62201 and needs a little bit of searching to obtain one, the pity for me is it took 6+ weeks to be delivered from of all places Dumaguete in the Philippines, more proof perhaps of it becoming a province of China.

The bearing sits inside the housing that I splashed a bit of gold paint on. Elmer's ready to have the blades refitted here.

These can be serviced.

I went to use the mower last week that Peter let me have after last year's flood, and with this year's event that makes three times (at least) that this transmission has been underwater, and sadly it didn't work.

It's a hydrostatic unit and despite it being claimed that they're unserviceable I figured I may as well open it up and have a look. I didn't really see anything amiss, just some murky oil which was only to be expected, but I suspected the filter screen at the bottom centre of this piccie was clogged, naturally I had to remove the pump engine in order to simply unclip the filter but my time is worth nothing so I did that and cleaned it.

The screen was rather clogged when I finally could see it, so I just bolted things back together and happily the mower which needs a name, hmmm Lazarus might do it. is now functioning again.
The bad is because it's a USA things they use weird sized fitting so you have to dust off your imperial sockets. I do have some respect for these hydrostatic units now as it's quite a brilliant design.

A repair for Daisy.

A few weeks ago Daisy's fuel cap wouldn't open, the villain was a snapped off plastic tang that pops the door slightly ajar. My fix has been to glue a little strip of an old inner tube to replace the tang.
The white spot on the left is a dab of fingernail polish to cover the damage from me trying to open the flap.

Continuing my fairly recent ANZAC Day tradition.

I popped out to the cemetery to check on Grace and change her flowers.

Then got a bit indulgent and used the timer to get a shot of Jimby, Grace is dead centre beside me here.

Then said hello to the service folks graves which as usual had nobody about.
There's a lack of new graves appearing now, a product of the time period no doubt, WW2 veterans have few alive now and that was far more major than any engagement since.

It was a nice house.

Not any more, it was my parent's house at Walgett, NSW but now is just another layer of stress for them, although it may be easier to sell a vacant block of land.

Because it happened on a Sunday (over a month ago) I haven't been able to find any mention of it online, the media, fire, and police must limit reporting to important things on weekends, or be at places where someone on duty knows how to operate the company computer.