A few days ago, Ruth was driving home from the shops and someone pulled her over and told her that there was a nut missing from 2 of the wheels. How did that happen?

We called up the garage where we had done the service and asked them if it was safe to drive with only 3 nuts on the wheels. They said to make sure that the remaining 3 were on tightly, but to bring the car down ASAP.

We took the car down and while we were there, they pointed out that the tyres had dried out and cracked a bit and they recommended that we replace them immediately. A bit annoying, but for safety, we went ahead and bought 4 new tyres, had them put on (and they ended up throwing in the new nuts for free).

This morning, driving to work, I got caught in a tailback on the motorway. I wondered what could have caused the traffic. Stuck in the fast lane was a car with the back right wheel missing. The car was not jacked up, so I can only assumed that it had fallen off while they were driving. The car looked to be in quite bad shape.

I’m glad now that we spent the money going straight to the garage to get the nut issue fixed and new tyres put on.

Tonight, as the kids came out the bath and we came downstairs… Ooooops…. big flood again. Ugh! So I called the nice plumber chaps once more, and it being 7pm, they asked if we could wait til morning. Um, no, not really. It smells, and you fixed it less than a week ago, humph. So, at gone 8 in the evening Mr Plumber Man comes, with his jiggly thing, takes the lid off the drain, er, no, its not a problem here…. looks at the main drain outside and spots a root blocking the exit to the drain.

Now, we should have no more problems with floods (after all, G-d promised Noah) and have spent a small fortune in plumber bills. Hey, who needs to eat, huh?

Oh, and Shira has chicken pox. She is spotty.

Anyway, last night after we bathed the kids Ruth went downstairs to start getting Tehilla ready for bed. As she got to the bottom of the stairs she slipped and nearly fell over. Somehow, (and from somewhere that we didn’t yet know) the floor was covered in water.

We quickly cleaned up the water, but there was an awful lot of it (we reckoned at least 10 litres if not more). But we couldn’t find out where it had come from. We thought that something had overflowed when we emptied the bath, but there seemed to be no sign of a source for the water.

We went to bed and when we got up this morning everything was still dry.

At one point, Ruth flushed the toilet and noticed a whole bunch of water on the floor again. It seemed as though the exit pipe from the toilet was overflowing. We called the plumber who was round within an hour. He got his jiggly pipe (I’m sure there’s a technical term for it, but it really is a pipe that jiggles) and cleared whatever the blockage happened to be. He then told us off for putting baby wipes down the toilet as that was what caused the blockage. Oops.

Anyway, we got back late on Thursday night and plugged things back in that we had unplugged before we went away. For instance, we unplugged our phones on the basis that we weren’t going to be around and there was no point having them turned on all the time. When we turned them on, they both worked properly, but then over the weekend, they were both beeping and the screen of one of them was completely blank. I thought that they were just not sitting properly on their bases which was why they were beeping and the blank screen was just because the battery had run down.

We made sure they were sitting nicely on their bases, but they still didn’t work. It seems that somehow, the screen of one of them no longer works properly (it’s probably been dropped too many times by children). The other phone works okay, but seems to be a bit problematic when you want to do anything.

So that is one thing.

The other is our car battery.

It’s a new battery that we got replaced only 18 months ago because the garage told us that the original one was not very good quality and had also run down in the space of two weeks. This one was meant to be a lot better and on our previous holiday that lasted 2 weeks it was fine. This time, we were away for 3 weeks and when we got back, the battery was dead as a doornail. It didn’t even have enough juice in it to beep when we pressed the alarm button on our keychain. The breakdown people arrived and gave us a jump start and then told us that the battery was no good and needs replacing. This seems very weird to me. The car is due for a service so we’ll ask them what we can do. It gets quite expensive if you have to replace the car battery every time you go on holiday.

Anyway, I thought that I had broken it because there were a bunch of things that didn’t work. You weren’t able to register for the site, a bunch of the links didn’t work when navigating the site, and all in all it was just a bit annoying.

I was going to leave it until the next release came out, but then I thought that since there are forums, maybe someone else has had the same issues that I have had with using the same version of Joomla. As it turns out there are many people who have had the same problem.

Unfortunately, this meant that there were lots and lots of different solutions to the problem (some of which may not have even worked). I tried one of the least dramatic fixes and fortunately it worked. Things worked properly on the site. I then found another fix, which if it worked would have left some functionality in that I wanted, but would still fix the problem. It worked!!!

Very exciting. Now the site is all working properly and looking like I want it to. Now all you need to do is go and visit it: http://thekilners.com

We bought new beds for Esther and Shira last April and the beds had a 1 year guarantee. As you can see, the guarantee for the beds ran out just a couple of weeks ago. I needed to lean on Esther’s bed to reach out of the window to bring the washing in. As I leaned, I heard a big crack. Oops. I quickly checked the bed and noticed that one of the slats (that holds the mattress up) had broken. Now, I realise that I’m quite a lot heavier than a 4 year old child, but I would have thought the bed would be strong enough to take my weight.

Ruth called the shop to find out what could be done. They said that we had two options: 1) bring the broken slat back to their factory and they would just give us a new one, 2) have an employee come out to our house and he’ll replace it for 20 pounds. Obviously we went with option 1. Ruth took the broken slat back to the factory and they gave her a new one.

We also have a problem with a portable DVD player that has barely worked since we bought it. We only just found the receipt and so we got in touch to find out what to do. They responded that we need to send it to them and they would fix it. Unfortunately, we think that the cost to send it to them and get it back again will probably not make it worthwhile. We’re going to see if we can get them to fix it locally! Here’s hoping.

Which reminds me, our car is now just out of the warranty period, perhaps it’s time to get a new one?

This morning, the only morning in the last 2 weeks when they needed to wake up promptly, they decided that it would be good to have a lie-in until 7:30!

Kids, who’d ‘ave ‘em?

Anyway, as the title says, Despair is just off highway 613.