There's just never a dull moment here in Swavesey. Last night we had planned on having dinner with a couple from chrch who are in charge of the international student outreach. They just moved here, and were working in Kenya before they came. Very nice couple, and we want to get involved since they are way under staffed. More about that later. I took G to work as usual, came home, planted the garden in the cold, blah blah. At around 7pm I was going to go pick G up from work. There was only one problem though- the immobiliser wouldn't disarm. Many cars here have this thing where your key shoots an IR beam to this circuit inside the car, allowing the car to start. If you don't turn that off, the engine won't start. Well, ours conked. So our new friends were kind enough to give us a ride. This morning I've been researching all the potential problems with immobilisers, and the current best guess is that water is leaking from the sunroof (trickling or just appearing is more like it) into the immobiliser circuit area. So I took out the circuit and as recommended put it near the radiator to dry out. I hope it works. If not, we'll have to get the immobiliser code from the dealer and enter it in manually until we can get the car in to a shop that can fix the thing.
Other exciting events of the day include my losing track of the cable to connect my phone to the computer so I can't put images up today. Also, we finally have deodorant again. :) I can't use anything that has aluminum in it, because it irritates my skin. So I use Tom's of Maine in the US, which is all natural ingredients, and I love it. Tesco had it when we first arrived, but then stopped carrying it. So I had to go online and order from a natural food place. Anyway Tesco only had one type of non aluminum deodorant- Japanese Spa Minerals it was called. I was desperate so I tried it. Unfortunately it does not really deodorize- it just makes you smell like a Japanese man. I don't mean that in a derrogatory way, because every culture has it's own smells and things it thinks smell good. But it just didn't work for me. :)
I hope the immobiliser will dry out on the radiator and work again. Tonight is our first chrch home group which we were both very excited about attending, and although I can take the bus in, neither of us will be able to get home because the bus doesn't run at night.
In other news we finally had our first real sighting of Cat Fiend. He is a brownish sort of cat, about Nelly's size (Nelly looks much bigger due to her fur), and afraid of us. But he tried to wander through this morning, and when he saw us he hightailed it behind our shed and out a hole that we didn't know was in the fence back there. We're currently working on a plan to shut the cat hole in the garden gate so that Nelly can go outside at night without worrying about Cat Fiend. He really seems like a nice cat- too bad Nelly hates his guts. :)
Blocking the hole up was a good idea anyway because we've been thinking about getting a rabbit or 2. The animal shelter mentioned that people who have empty garden sheds (which are about 6 by 5 by 6ft) have a good home for rabbits to live in. They need a covered run to keep them safe from urban foxes and neighborhood cats, but they actually get along well with pet cats. These rabbits are big- as big as Nelly at least. Anyway we haven't decided, but I've never had rabbits and I'd like to have some. :) We're investigating the policies about rabbit importation into the US, and then we'll decide. House rabbits are the most popular pet here- they go in a litter tray and just hop around the house like any other pet. I'd be too concerned to leave Nelly with giant rabbits hopping around the house, even though everyone says the rabbits and cats get along fine once they recognize each other as part of their group. So these rabbits would live in the shed and have their own run (the shed is heated by the way) and when I was outside I'd let them hop around in the garden. The shelter has 2 rabbits which would prefer that sort of life to living in a house, so we may adopt them.
There's a pet shelter near here that is looking for volunteers 4 hours a week, in their vet office. I've always thought it would be interesting to learn more about what vet assistants do, or nurse assistants. We'll see about that as well. It would be nice to interact with the animals without having to take them home with me. :)
Oh, and we think we've discovered why the dishes weren't getting clean. G discovered it really. I'm usually the one starting the dishwasher, and the previous guy left a bag of dishwasher salt under the kitchen sink. Everything here has a strange name, so I figured that was their name for dishwashing detergent in powder form. I've been loading that up in the dishwasher to wash the dishes with. Well G actually read the bag (bonus points for him) unlike me, and discovered that it isn't detergent at all. It's for softening the water in the dishwasher, and it goes in a special place, sort of like Jet Dry. All this time the dishes haven't really been being washed with soap- just hot water. Oops. :) And the drying element in the dishwasher works when the heat in the house is on- we have hot water heating, so there's some kind of link there.
I hope your week has been less eventful so far, and that your cars are all running. :)
Update: I was just able to get the immobiliser to deactivate! Praise Gd- I had to go to 5 different websites, download and use this diagnostic tool which is for renault mechanics, figure out where the "central locking button" was, which I got wrong the first few times I tried this, and then I had to push the button in and out to enter this code to bypass the immobiliser. Whew. The car started right up. This may be a temporary fix, at least until I can discover why it stopped working in the first place. But I did learn how to tell if an IR device is working- point it at your digital camera (one that has a viewscreen) and push the button. The camera can see the IR light coming out of the key, which we can't see with our eyes.
Anyway now we can drive again. To those of you who pr'd, thank you!
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