Zlin

Fabia Went in for its oil change today, garage has checked over suspension and nothing obviously badly worn, happy enough with that. They've ordered up two new tyres, should get them fitted sometime next week. There was a Skoda with Ukrainian number plates there when I went to collect mine 😎

OK, hello again, I haven't been on here for a long time and to be honest didn't think my account would still be active but it is, fantastic. I've had my Fabia Mk3 for a couple of years, it had done just over 4000 miles when I bought it. It's a 1.0 litre turbo, middle of the range, quite a nice spec. I did a round trip to Inverness and home today 228.5 miles. The car has returned 62.5mpg, I know there will be folk that get better fuel consumption than that, but for me, that's good. Real mixed driving - lots of back roads to avoid lengthy delays at roadworks and diversions due to road closures and a chunk of dual carriageway work. I had Skodas way back, Rapid, Favorit, then a few flirts with Volvos and came back to the best, Skoda. The previous 3 cars have been Skoda. Among them all were diesel cars, even they never managed that mpg. I'm not a particularly hard driver but I don't go out of my way to eke out the best mpg either. I haven't looked after this car as much as previous cars, it doesn't get washed or cleaned out as often as past cars, but I'm not too bad, it gets serviced at the dealer, I just keep it 'tidy'. It has it's squeaks and rattles, I don't particularly care nowadays - when I was younger that would have driven me insane and I'd have been going round packing things out or taping things up to stop the unwanted noises. I had a Octavia 2.0PD Lauren & Klement estate - that was a really nice car, I traded it in at just shy of 210,000 miles, bought a 2nd hand Octavia 1.4 TSi, it was thirsty and had expensive tastes in maintenance, traded it in for a Citigo, it was nice too, but I traded it in for this Fabia. The Fabia's ride feels 'as nice' to me as that old L&K Octavia (yeah, yeah, I know the suspension is totally different, but like I say, I'm not a hard driver - steady as I go kind of thing). There's enough room in the Fabia for me and most anything I'm carrying, if something I need to shift doesn't fit inside I hire a van. The Fabia is comfy, it has a lot of nice features, it was quiet on that trip today - had the radio off for once and it was pretty quiet in there. I guess what I'm saying is, I quite like it. Maybe I should have traded in that L&K for a Fabia at the time, instead of wasting money on the Octavia TSi and the Citigo. Did I mention the tyres? No? Well thats just over 32,500 miles on the original tyres, front and rear. Again, never had a car that has been capable of doing that. It's booked in for a service, it is going to need some front suspension work, I'd been advised at a previous service that rubber bushes were starting to separate, it is going to need tyres, they are still legal, but down to 3mm on the front and I'd rather be safe than sorry. It does quite well I think, given the state of the roads around here, if it was in Germany there would be signs everywhere "Strassen Schaden" - broken road. Seriously, the roads around me are as bad as the country roads (and motorways) in what was the former East Germany shortly after the wall came down. Oh, and the floods earlier this year - I'm certain the wee Fabia was in too deep, I got caught out with closed roads in the countryside going home one afternoon and the road I had to take was being driven on by folk in large 4x4 pickups and Land Rovers and they were taking it gingerly, poor wee Fabia. And it gets its fair share of stone chips - folk cutting across the front of me on the way to and from work, or going at some mental speed in the opposite direction. Anyway, I've probably jinxed it now by writing all that and the bill for the service work will likely be sky-high, you know what - it is what it is. Maybe it's time to start showing it a bit of love. If you've read all this ramble - thanks for sticking with it to the end, appreciate your time. I've said too much.

INCOMING !!!!

Relax

Corgi

This should probably be in the motoring section but what the heck....

AdBlue

Owned my Citigo for 14 months and only today I discovered it has a USB charging socket at the back of the mobile phone holder :-) Who knew? (Perhaps I should read its manual more thoroughly.) Anyway, no more long leads wandering across the radio from the 12V socket beside the gear stick. Very happy. As the adverts used to say, "Surprising Škoda".

For no reason in particular ....

I think I may have completely lost the plot, been listening to quite a few of the covers that this group have been playing. I kinda want to learn to play the mandolin now 😂

constant (as in Pi = 3.14 and is a mathematical constant)

novel

Today was spent mucking around again with the Canon EOS 400D that I bought last year, it's 14 years old and the 1st digital SLR I've owned. I haven't used it a lot really but noticed that the colours were a bit dull/dark compared with images from modern digital cameras and phones. I had a bit of a look on google and found some folks saying that they thought the images produced with this type of camera seemed a bit underexposed. I found some settings that people had settled on, so I experimented a bit this morning and tweaked them a little more to get something I'm happier with. So the photos are of a local Pictish standing stone - hope you can see the circles carved into it, and some photos taken in Perth in the afternoon. (The images don't seem sharp as they are shown below, but if you click on them, the image comes up in another window and is a bit sharper. Not sure what I'm doing hahaha.)

Taken over at Arbroath yesterday.