Klimt at the Tate

Went to the Gustav Klimt exhibition at the Tate today.

Enjoyed the exhibition - although at times we felt that it should have been titled "Klimt and a bunch of other stuff by his best mates".

Although I'm familiar with some of his work, I didn't know much about the artist.

He appeared to live most of his life wearing a large, comfy blue smock. We could see that he had several of these, as the designs on the shoulders varied. There was even one on display at the exhibition.

There were a few photos of him in a suit - he looked extremely uncomfortable - probably couldn't wait to get the smock back on.

Pedal to the Metal

Resolution: - I must get back to blogging more often and not let life, the universe and everything hinder leisure activities. (Also I must make time for leisure activities other than falling asleep and snoring zzzZZZZ!)

Stuck in work most of this weekend doing various jobs. Not so bad yesterday as the weather was dismal. Typically I'm on a deadline to finish putting together the boys Stockade Playhouse and I'd planned to do some more work on it yesterday morning when the heavens opened! Today the weather has improved and I've been stuck here for the best part of the day waiting for hardware techies to do their stuff so I can stop and start system services.

The title of this post refers to the latest problem that we had with our vehicle, which is a about a month off being 1 year old. I'd loaded up 4 rather heavy rubble sacks to take to the tip, and had gone about quarter of a mile when an Engine Problem warning light lit up and "Go Straight to the Garage!" appeared on the on-board computer.

Hoping it might be something to do with the weight being pulled, I got to the tip, unloaded, started up again and the fault cleared. It came back again about a mile or so later. Car still going but in "limp home" mode.

Arrived at work and switched off. Later that evening I headed for home and found that I still had the fault, so I parked up and called the RAC, to check it before I did any more damage. The RAC man came and thrashed the accelerator for a bit. His diagnostic kit showed the fault had cleared. He advised me to take it to VW to be checked.

Got the car booked in a couple of days later, which steadily began to get worse - back to limp home mode on starting, with an exhaust problem warning lighting up alongside the first one.

Got the car back on Friday night. It turned out to be a problem with the accelerator pedal. They've fitted a shiny new one and the problem has gone. Apparently accelerator pedals no longer pull on a cable. Mine pushes on a potentiometer (variable resistor) that drives some electronics to tell the car how fast to go. The electronics had failed.

Oh well. At least they found and fixed the fault quickly this time.