Day 754

Day 754...

After a lovely weekend away it was time to return home today.

But first we enjoyed breakfast in the hotel before stopping by to see Molly before we headed home. We took her out for 'coffee and cake' and then hit the road.

Unfortunately, we hit a little bit of traffic not long into the journey which set us back a little but we arrived at our first planned charging point and plugged in the car while we made use of the Starbucks on site. Just as we were about to head back to the car I checked the app on my phone and it said that the charge had been interrupted. We weren't too concerned as the app isn't the most accurate or reliable, but on reaching the car we could see that there had been no charge added to the car!! So we moved the car into a new spot and plugged in again...twenty minutes later and we were back on the road.

It was then a straight forward drive to our next charging station and this time we made absolutely sure the car was charging before we went in search of coffee. Another twenty minutes later and we had a car almost at full charge and ready for the last leg of our journey home.

Our approach to long car journeys has definitely changed and is now a much more relaxed affair. We now know that it will take some time and that we will need to be patient and accept that there maybe some waiting around. But also splitting a long journey into chunks makes the drive feel so much easier and way less stressful.

It was lovely to be back home and catch-up with Ethan and now it's time to catch up with this weeks RuPauls Drag Race and get ready for another busy day tomorrow.

See you then.
xx

Day 752

Day 752...

Today was road trip day as we were off to see Molly and Dan for the weekend.

So we had a relatively early start...not mega early just a purposeful getting up, packed and out on the road. And we had the exciting adventure of electric car charging ahead of us!!

Our first stop proved to be a bit of a challenge. Despite multiple chargers being on site most were in use and the one that wasn't being used was not working! We went in search of coffee in the hope that by the time we got back to the car a free space would have appeared. Although I did have to contend with the age old problem of motorway services...the stupidly long queue for the ladies toilet!! Why does that happen?

While waiting for our coffee Simon popped back to the car to see whether we could plug in yet. I found him chatting to another electric car owner who it turned out lived just a couple of miles away from us! But unfortunately there was still no free spaces. We then had a little charging station etiquette to contend with. A space came free but we let our fellow driver take the spot as it had the correct charging cable for his car as we knew the spot next to us was almost at full charge.

The couple next to us disconnected their car and motioned to us that we could have their spot...or at least that's what we thought. So we waited and nothing, no movement, no attempt to move, nothing. Thankfully Simon was able to reposition our car such that the cable would stretch (just) to our car...phew! We now decided it was time for food while the car charged.

And our quest to find a good low carb option was made possible, surprisingly, by M&S food. Picking up small packs of cooked bacon, cocktail sausages, flavoured chicken and a couple of hard boiled eggs - win! With our keto picnic consumed we headed back to the car to find that the couple who had been parked next to us had only just moved. This meant they'd sat there with a fully charged car and not moved...meaning no one could use their space which appeared to be rather rude! Anyway with an almost full charge we were able to get back on the road.

Our next charging stop was a lot smoother; four free spots and a Starbucks! Boom! In twenty minutes we were back on the road and heading towards Bournemouth.

Once checked in at our hotel we met up with Molly and Dan in the town centre and headed to a greek restaurant; The Real Greek. Another chance to have a suitably low carb meal by picking all the most appropriate, and mainly meaty, dishes! 

Afterwards we took a stroll down towards the pier and had a short walk along the seafront. We then headed over to Molls and Dans house to spend the evening over there and some time catching up.

Time for bed now and I'll see you tomorrow.

xx

Day 720

Day 720...

Today was a stay at home kind of day as today we had the flooring laid in our upstairs bedroom...the room formerly known as 'Molly's bedroom' and soon to be our study/craft room.

This gave me the opportunity to catch up with a few online based jobs; not very exciting but unfortunately needed. 

With the impending changes to energy prices I had received emails from our energy companies of choice advising of the extortionate increases that will be coming our way from April. These are horrendous jumps in prices. I think we all expect to pay a few more pounds each year but when they are quoting increases of 54% it is horrific to think about. The impact for all of us is going to be so significant and there is nothing we can do about it. So I had a look to see whether there were any better tariffs around to get ahead of the upcoming changes but unfortunately it doesn't seem that there are!

I then ventured into the world of mobile phone upgrades...ugh! It fills me with dread every time this rolls around although I hadn't realised just how long I'd been putting this off. Our contracts expired eighteen months ago and so we have been eligible for an upgrade for a bit of a while. But as our phones are working perfectly fine and enable us to do whatever we need we hadn't been in a rush to upgrade and now I remember why. Too many choices and not enough information made easily available to make decisions. The information to compare models of phones seems to be hidden with just the colour and the camera mega pixel details displayed prominently. Then we seem to have a mixture of 'plan' options from the 'ok I can live with that' to the outright ridiculous! And when prices seem to be going up left, right and centre I really don't want to be increasing any more costs. Having become bored very quickly with searching I decided that the best thing I could do was the ironing! At least with that I could actually achieve something!

Next it was another easy job to buy online a couple of tickets for the next Dr Sketchy's event in Nottingham. This is a few weeks away, taking place on Easter Sunday, but I wanted to get the tickets bought while it was in my mind.

It was then time for more research! We are wanting to attend a food festival in June called Real Food Rocks and as the tickets have just gone on sale I needed to look into hotels. Whilst the event is only about an hour and a half away we have decided to make a weekend of it and book a couple of nights away so that we are not having to contend with early morning and late night driving. But as we now have the electric car I am not only trying to find a hotel close to where we want to be but one that also has EV charging points. As this has proved to be a little difficult I also looked for charging points close to the area that we will be in.

Well after much research I have found one hotel with it's own chargers and another hotel with a retail park opposite that has a number of chargers. I have also discovered a small service station not far from the location of the festival that also has a couple of rapid charging stations. So it's now just a case of deciding which hotel we would prefer (as there is no difference in price), booking it and sorting tickets for the festival itself.

By mid-afternoon the flooring had been laid and the room looks great. We will leave it for a couple of days before we start to move things back into the room. I think our first purchase is going to be a filing cabinet so that we can start to clear our existing Welsh dresser of paperwork as ultimately we will be getting rid of the dresser. The paperwork will then be stored in the new 'study' and once the dresser is no longer needed we will be replacing it with some new cabinets to display all our Disney and Star Wars memorabilia! It's like we are playing one giant game of Tetris!

We then played host to one of our neighbours who needed somewhere to escape to while an estate agent was showing some prospective buyers around their house! And later with a little daylight left I made sure to take some time to move some more jigsaw pieces around. I'm making pretty good progress but as there is so much colour I'm finding it's just as easy to place recognisable pieces into place rather than try and out sort a particular section of the puzzle.

Throughout the day Simon has been working on a commissioned piece of video game art for a contact who produces retro games and needed some cover art producing at short notice.

And then because we had some chicken to use up (thanks to Asda providing products with a pathetic use by date!) I decided to make Keto Chicken Curry Pie - yum!

See you all tomorrow.
xx

Day 607

Day 607...

After a busy weekend we arrive at Monday and despite it being a non-work day for Simon and I it turned out to be another busy day!

First job of the day was to clear the bookcase that has been living in the hall of our remaining books. We had cleared out a lot of books earlier in the year but still had a couple of shelves full that we weren't too sure what to do with. So I found a safe place for some of my large sized Disney books and Simon boxed up his comic collection; too good to throw away but in need of a new home. But with the shelves cleared we could now disassemble the bookcase and once done it was yet another trip to our local recycling centre.

At home Simon was able to put the first coat of paint on the radiator in Molly's old room as the paint we had ordered arrived this morning. I was able to place an online butchers order ready to be delivered later this week. And then there was a small amount of sweeping up of garden rubbish off our patio; Simon had discovered weeds growing around the roof window in Molly's old room and in dislodging them they had all fallen onto our patio!

The afternoon was spent in Derby to have a little down time. We needed to buy some birthday cards as well as make a little start on some Christmas shopping. Having stopped for a coffee and a piece of cake (shared between us) we popped into Primark looking for a specific item (which they didn't have) but instead I came out with this rather big bag...

...well I just couldn't resist these two beauties...

...and then I decided to see if they had the coat I'd seen in their Sheffield store a few weeks ago and hadn't picked up when I should have. I'd previously looked in both the Derby and Nottingham stores and hadn't found it so didn't really have any hope that I'd find it today, but....I did!!

A lot deeper purple in real life, and very soft, and very fluffy!

But throughout today we have been trying to sort out getting a charging point installed for our new electric car which is waiting for us to collect. We have told the garage that we can't take delivery until we have a functioning charging point installed. 

The garage recommended Pod Point to us and initially everything seemed to be going alright if a little slow...but that was okay as we were in no particular rush and were told it would only be a couple of weeks. Everything went very quiet until I got in touch with them and was told that I'd not filled the forms out correctly. So alarm bells should have rung then...why hadn't they got in touch with me to let me know that. When I re-looked at the forms I could see my mistake which was due to a section stretching over two pages and so I'd effectively completed it twice with my second entry overriding the first which led to the 'error'. I was told 'oh don't worry it happens quite often'...so why they haven't they changed the form then?

Then because our garage, where we want the point installing, is not attached to the house we had to prove to them that the garage was actually ours. This meant digging out the deeds to the house and scanning in plans and emailing them over...all went quiet until I got in touch again. I was told they were waiting for the grant scheme to be approved; in the UK to encourage people to move over to electrical vehicles they are offering a substantial amount off the cost of your first charging point installation. 

A little while later we received an email saying that the grant had been approved and that we had an install date of 4th November...we had ordered the car on 27th September! Part of the form filling had also involved submitting a load of photos which covered where the electric meter was, the type of cabling coming into the electric meter and the route between the meter and the garage which quite clearly showed the distance involved. Neither Simon or I were hopeful that the install would go smoothly on the 4th and sure enough the engineer arrived, took one look at the situation and said 'well that won't work'!

So basically the supply we have going into the garage will not support a charging station as well as the other items we are running in there; we have lights, sockets and most importantly a freezer! Which means that we need a separate cable from the meter to the garage to run the charging point and here in lies the problem. Despite Pod Point's T&C's clearly stating that they will support non-standard installations (i.e. something like ours!) they basically emailed to say that 'groundworks' would need to be completed and for us to let them know when that had happened....err...what? How? Who?

This then left us in a quandary; what did they mean by groundworks? Whose responsibility was it? Who would do the work? Did we need a specialist in charging points? Did we need to get the power company to sort it out? I then started by contacting our local power company who were really helpful and told me that there were two solutions; one being for them to lay a new mains supply which would cost thousands and result in a separate meter and separate standing charge or we speak to an electrician.

So over the weekend we contacted a couple of electrical companies and then today I finally found a phone number for Pod Point to find out exactly what they could or could not do...as they had failed to respond to my last email asking for advise. The result of a five minute phone call was that they couldn't do the necessary work for us because the contractor in our area didn't 'do that sort of work' and that we would need to get a trench dug and a conduit laid so that they could come out and feed the cable through said conduit. At that point I decided to cancel the whole thing and get my money back! 

It was a completely ridiculous situation as they still left us with so many questions; how deep did the trench have to be? Where should it go across the property? How big would the conduit have to be? And how do we coordinate between the groundworks and the charging point being installed? All getting way too messy and complicated and at that point I was ready to ditch the whole idea of having an electric car, it was all just too much for me.

But having found a few local companies online that will do a complete charging point installation, including the point itself, we are now trying to sort it ourselves. The result as of tonight is that one company has already visited to survey the site and we have another company lined up for tomorrow. The chap that visited tonight was positive and recognised that there were a number of options for us and is going away to see what solutions they can come up with. Things are looking brighter but this isn't going to be a quick resolve! And the moral of this story is avoid Pod Point and find someone local to do the job for you.

And then just to make the day even busier we had our financial advisor visit this evening to talk all things finance...obviously!

I'll be going to work tomorrow for a rest!

See you tomorrow.
xx