Overpriced mower drive belts...

Couple of weeks ago, I was cutting the lawn on my Murray Sentinel sit on mower, when the drive belt snapped and I drifted to a halt with 4/5ths of the lawn still to go.

After much scrabbling about underneath, I found I had an old fan belt of about the right length, so fitted that. It was a bit small in width, but enabled me to complete the lawn, but obviously I needed to get the correct size of belt in the near future. Looking up prices (on Ebay) was a shock, between £10 and £25 including delivery. I thought that was a bit much so did some investigation. Turns out the belt I need (Murray size 37x65) is the same as a completely standard A28 belt.

£2.30 + £1.30 postage from bearingseller on Ebay. Since I bought it I have found places even cheaper for the belt, but postage can be a bit high!

Fitted it today - a perfect fit (and fitting is pretty easy). Mower running well, and now for some reason the brakes work a bit better.

Well chuffed!

Grrr. Subscriptions text message services

Really really really ANGRY. Received my mobile phone bill (From o2), which normally is at most a couple of quid a month, to find it was over a tenner. Reading the itemised bill, I received three text messages for which I was charged £10!!!!

Two ranting phone calls later to o2 and still no nearer what happened. On the second, the call centre woman hung up on me, despite not a single swear word being spoken, although I was rather rude after her condescending attitude tipped me over the edge !! I appear to have subscribed to some service, which I didn't do, so I think when my eldest was playing games on the phone, he may have accidentally tried to turn on the full game, rather than the demo. It's a bit shoddy that a 7 years old can accidentally run up a bill without any form of checking by the subscription service that it was intentional. I'll try and get hold of them and see if I can get the money back - after all I haven't received any service in reply, so why have I been billed....even the games are still demo's as far as I can tell. Grrrr. I can honestly say I have never been angrier.

Haddenham Steam Rally 2009

Thought it was a really good turnout when I went on the Sunday. Loads of steam engines, even more vintage tractors and some nicely restored commercial vehicles. Hmm, sounds a bit geeky that. Weather on Sunday was must colder than I had expected, so walking around in a T-shirt wasn't the best idea. Did get to try out the new camera so have 150 shots of the above on the PC. Because light was a bit iffy, it was all pretty standard stuff really, and didn't really get to show its full potential.

Even Elliot wasn't bored, even after 3 hours, although he did request to go on the Wii when we got home! No surprise there.

New Toy - Canon DSLR

After a recent spell in the hospital, on a ward with a load of people who didn't have much longer in this world, I decided that life is too short to wonder whether to get stuff, so finally purchased a Digital SLR camera. Went for a Canon 450D with the 18-55 lens. Not had much chance to try it out, but so far the images had been pretty impressive, even compared with my Fuji Finepix S5600, which I think is a pretty good camera.

Went for the Canon as it was a bit cheaper than the equivilent Nikon, and Canon's are apparently very good for astrophotography when attached to a telescope (I have a Celestron C8 SCT on powered GE mount).

Got a good price from Comet (would you believe), they were on offer and I got another 10% discount. Quite lucky as a couple of days later (before it had been delivered!) the price had gone up £25! Now looking for a zoom lens in the 70-300 range, or perhaps 55-250!

I highly recomend the http://www.camerapricebuster.co.uk website. Very useful.