Trips and traps

I had an “interesting” week last week! It started off with my encountering all sorts of problems getting some book layouts to the printer. The layouts have to be sent to the printer as pdf files and the trouble was that the photographs being used would degenerate in quality when I converted the layouts into a pdf file. This meant that all the photos looked so blurred one would think that one had accidentally donned someone else’s glasses. Or emptied someone else’s glasses.

And since the man I was dealing with at the other end of the Internet was a Chinese gentleman who was about as helpful as a second bellybutton, life was getting frustrating.

So I rang a local printer and spoke to a lady expert there who told me to convert all my picture files to a special file format. Aha! The answer!

So I did that and tried it out. The result was worse than before. ~sigh~

However, I kept experimenting (and swearing) and I think that I may now have solved the problem.

All this is par for life, of course. To get things right, you just have to keep trying different techniques and combinations. Which is why, of course, us older men are such good lovers. Whatcha mean, where are my certificates to prove it?!

Anyway, late in the week I took Murray’s mid-sized truck from Palmerston North up to Hamilton to bring some furniture back to Palmerston North from Hamilton. It was an education.

Until you have driven an unloaded truck on New Zealand roads you do not realise just how many poor sections of road surface there are on these fair isles. Now, to be fair, overall New Zealand roads are of very good quality. Our back roads are far better than the back roads in other countries. But the quality of our main highways often leaves something to be desired.

I learnt that fact in particular when the unloaded truck hit some washboard bumps on a corner and bounced onto the wrong side of the road. Since nothing was coming the other way at the time, this was merely an entertaining rather than pants-pooing situation.

Should you rush to point out that an unloaded truck tends to bounce a lot and the driver should allow for this, I would point out that on the way back in the now-loaded truck I hit some more washboard bumps, thankfully on a straight stretch of road. I immediately felt as though I was attempting to ride a kangaroo on steroids. The only thing that kept me from reshaping the roof with my head was the fact that I was wearing a seatbelt.

But there is always a silver lining to any cumulonimbus. The experience has taught me to keep a weather-eye on trucks rounding a corner towards me in case they should hit a poor surface and float onto my side of the road. Because if there is one thing a selfish motorcyclist/driver like me hates, it’s sharing my side of the road with oncoming trucks.

Other than that, my truck-driving experience driving was relatively benign. Of course, the opportunity was regularly taken to stop off at cafés and sample their wares … and carry out a critique on the café for my planned Kirk Café Critique website.

Ah, it’s interesting carrying out secret assessments of cafés. The assessment has to be secret, of course. If they knew what I was doing I would never have encountered, as I did yesterday, the young girl serving in one café who didn’t know what Earl Grey tea was. ~gasp~

Or have the staff at another café forget to bring to bring the purchased (expensive) piece of cake with the tea. And when one politely asks a nearby waitress whether they had forgotten the cake, she rushes to point out that she hadn’t served one. Aaaaaargh! The customer doesn’t care *who* served him. He just wants the problem put right!

And do you know how many different types of Earl Grey tea there are? On Friday, in one café, I encountered a weird type of Earl Grey tea I had never tasted before. It was like taking a bite into a muffin only to find that it tasted like tripe!

Ah yes, café critiquing can be very entertaining. I was in Ruddies café in Taumaranui when a customer walked out wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed: “Nuttier than a squirrel’s turds”. When I took that mouthful of weird Earl Grey tea, I had to agree that that was also an apt description of me.

And last night, I proved it. When I was in Pak’N’Save in Hamilton on Saturday night, amongst the bulk food bins in the store was a bin full of “Nuts (no peanuts)”. So I bought a small amount because, although I’m allergic to peanuts, I like nuts and don’t seem to be allergic to cashew nuts or walnuts.

Last night I ate some of the nuts. Very nice, they were.

Today, I have one hell of a headache. Allergies are no fun!

Afflicted by my headache, I have now arrived back at my flat from my truck-driving adventure to find that, in the three days I have been away, the landlord has ripped out the cottage garden at the front of my flat and replaced it with an imitation, sterile, rocky Japanese-type garden. Eeeeeeek!

Although I loved the sensuality of the cottage garden, as a tenant I have no say in the matter, of course. But I guess it could have been worse. I could have been growing marijuana in it…