Post 335: Changing Seasons ....

It's been an 'Up & Down' kind of week, mostly up and down ladders because the house building has reached the roofing stage. Not too shabby for three guys in 8 weeks, but more of that later. Anyway, I was over in Ukiah last weekend, another excuse to ride 'California 253' but I also needed to visit a proper bank. My Nationwide ATM card was twice declined here at the gas station in Boonville and the automated advice was ... 'Please contact your card provider'. Well, the card didn't work in Ukiah either so I had no alternative but to telephone Nationwide in England. Nationwide confirmed that my ATM Card had indeed been declined in both Boonville and Ukiah and they asked if I'd received their letter. Of course I hadn't received their letter, I left England on the 10th of August .... "No".....  "Well Sir, in order to improve our services for the benefit of members, we've provided all of our members with replacement ATM cards and cancelled all existing cards". "I'm in California, my improved replacement ATM card isin  England ...... and I'm really not feeling those lovely new benefits".   

With my financial predicament temporarily resolved, I turned my attention to fixing my Dell laptop computer. A little while ago the 'Windows Defender' icon started appearing and I thought very little about it. It's an anti-virus program and I figured that it'd arrived in some under-the-radar Windows update.  Sadly, although it looked like 'Windows Defender', it is in fact a naughty little virus that's proving very difficult to remove. At first it was just annoying, but now it's taken over my entire PC. I can't open any applications and it's embedded itself so deeply that I can't even manually kill the bloody thing. It's disabled my existing anti-virus software and wont let me access anything within 'Task Manager' or 'Registry' where the root of the problem lurks. Eventually I'll find a way to kill it, but until then there'll be no photographs in the posts.

As for the house build, well as I mentioned above we've just reached the roof stage. It's a 'Barn Roof' with a 'Clearstory' for additional light, but just as we'd completed the short roof-line, the rains came .... and then they just kept on coming. The house currently looks like a weirdly shaped blue wedding cake with blue tarps covering the roof, but at least it's keeping the internals dry. Or at least it was keeping it dry until today. The rain is getting heavier and the tarps are beginning to stretch creating a line of small swimming pools across the roof. Sadly, swimming pools were never part of the original design and we're currently running relays up to the property to empty them. That's not such good news for my brother but for me it does have certain benefits. Before the rains came the 5 mile road up to the house used to be a mixture of sand and gravel, but now it's just a slippery winding mess. That's not so much fun in a Ford F150 pick-up truck ...... but on a KLR 650 it's an absolute joy .... so I'm off to empty the pools    

www.justgiving.com/geoffgthomas