Yay For Technology in Scottish Meanderings

So just as I was starting to go for little jaunts in the car this happened.


Luckily I noticed it as Ian was taking me back home in his car one day when they were over. Unfortunately they had to leave for home at 10 the following morning as he had an appointment in the afternoon so he said “Well it’s not as if you need the car urgently - I’ll sort it out next time I’m through.” Which was going to be the end of March!! Apart from the fact I could sort it out myself, there was no way I was waiting SIX WEEKS to regain the little bit of freedom I’d recently grabbed hold of! So I stressed about it for a bit then had a brainwave. My breakdown policy is with the AA but I hadn’t added ‘At Home’ to it when I renewed in November trying to save money. I checked online and discovered you can add it on at any stage throughout the year and it becomes valid within 24 hours.

And on the moneysavingexpert forum, it said that the AA are apparently the best organisation for giving discounts and they advised NEVER to accept the first price offered and always haggle to get the price down. So armed with a pot of self-confidence, I picked up the phone one Saturday afternoon, got through and made my request, all set to come out with “Oh that’s steeper than I thought it would be - is there any way I could get that down a bit?”

In answer to my request the very nice man at the other end said ”That’s no problem at all Ms. Skinner - let me just check and see what that would come in at - there’s actually a promotion on at the moment so I’ll see if I can put that through for you as well.”

2 seconds later. “That’ll be £22.50 in total Ms. Skinner - how does that sound?”

Seeing as it's normally around £90 I could hardly come out with my spiel after that!!

So it was added on and on the Sunday afternoon I used the AA app to report the puncture. Couldn’t have been easier. I was so impressed. Just a couple of buttons, pop in your postcode and Bob’s your Uncle - they knew exactly where to come and there were very handy updates on a regular basis letting me know when they’d arrive. And you could actually see the little AA van icon moving towards the house on the map which was quite cool! (As you can see it doesn’t take much to amuse me these days ......).

The guy was here an hour later (obviously I wasn’t a priority because I was safely at home) and the whole thing took 10 minutes tops. He even checked my other 3 tyres to see if they needed replacing and let me know the other back tyre was just within the legal limit so would need replaced soon (handy to know as there are often discount deals if you get 2 tyres done at the same time).

So now I’m back on the road although the car is making an ominous squeak plus a slew of weird noises and one of them may well be the exhaust so I should really get that checked out pronto. It’s so frustrating not to be able to just nip to somewhere to get something taken care of!

I’ve been experimenting recently with trying to do 2 activities in the same afternoon but it seems it’s a bit early for that yet which is frustrating. If I go for a walk for example it knackers me so that I’m fit for nothing afterwards but I feel I have to go when it’s still light to get the good of the day. This means that my day is sometimes ‘done’ by 4 p.m.! So occasionally I’ll try a bit of shopping after the walk or do some housework before I pop out for a ramble but I’m always completely knackered afterwards and feel quite ill. So I’ll just have to be patient.

I DID manage to cope with my a visit from my sister, Lorna, her youngest, Caroline, and Caroline’s 2 boys (8 and 10) on Tuesday afternoon though and managed to go and see Lily swimming afterwards so that was progress - a month ago I would only have managed to do one of those. They very kindly didn’t come round to mine until 4 p.m. (Nikki and the girls were here as well) so that helped a lot and as they also had to go and see my niece, Cat, who lives about 10 minutes away from me, and hadn't arrived until after lunchtime, that worked in well.


I love the trails and pathways you can sometimes get embroiled in when mooching about on the Net. Someone mentioned Lady Isobel Barnett the other day and that led me to find out what happened to her as I remembered she used to be on the popular British panel show ‘What’s My Line’ for years and had a feeling she committed suicide after being found guilty of shoplifting. On checking that out, it led me to YouTube videos of ‘What’s My Line’ and I discovered that there was an American version which I hadn’t realised so I started watching them. That was quite fascinating just seeing that whole different era of show - the way they spoke, the old-fashioned way it was conducted, the game itself (brought back memories of playing it and 'Twenty Questions' on long family car journeys) and the way any British guest spoke in clipped ‘BBC’ tones no matter where they came from!

I always love reading the comments beneath the clips and was intrigued by some relating to one of the panel regulars - Dorothy Kilgallen. She mysteriously died the day after one of the shows while only in her early fifties and because she was such a prolific journalist who had covered many famous murder trials and wasn’t afraid of speaking out - and also was apparently on the brink of having a book published on the JFK assassination - many believe she was ‘taken out’ so to speak because what she knew was dangerous. This was very intriguing so I tootled on down another path and discovered the whole thing about her death has recently been revived courtesy of a guy called Mark Shaw who has written a book about it which came out in 2016.

Isn’t it wonderful what opportunities we have for education and widening our knowledge nowadays? In the old days that whole trajectory would have stopped at “Oh yeah - Isobel Barnett - didn’t she commit suicide or something?” End of thought.

I often find even being on Prosebox so enlightening. Many a time I’ve scuttled off to Google to further check something out which someone has mentioned and become embroiled in a whole other area I knew nothing about beforehand. And just reading about other cultures or ways of living can be quite fascinating. We're such an interesting bunch!

Speaking of this place I’ve found a little project which will keep me out of mischief on better days. Before I left Open Diary I printed out all my entries (with notes) at work one week when my boss was off on holiday and I wanted to do the same with Prosebox entries but realised all the ones with photos were now full of those horrible ugly squares courtesy of good old Photofucket. I thought it would be a major undertaking to delete them and try to upload the photos again using Imgur but decided I would perhaps do it for the more recent entries at least - and discovered it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought. Imgur is so easy and quick to use - that part of it was pretty straightforward - but I thought I would never find the actual photos on my pc as I pretty stupidly captioned them all with some smartalec, witty title instead of describing what or who they were and what date they were taken! Then I discovered if I went into the edit mode of the entry, the photo title was in the source code so I just stuck that into my search facility on my Mac and bingo there was my photo along with which folder it was in!

Dead handy because in an attempt to be more organised with the girls’ photos in particular, I had started making subfolders for each month and year at one time but hadn’t got the length of sorting all the photos into them with the result I’ve now got photos all over the place and no clue which ones are in the folders and which aren’t! So I've managed to print out a couple of years' worth of entries already - although that's not saying much as I havem't exactly been what you'd call a prolific writer of late!!

In a conversation with Ian yesterday about the flats stayed in before we moved to the house we were living in when we were finally a family of 6, I remarked that I don’t remember seeing any photos taken inside these flats (I have all Mum & Dad’s old photos). I was checking with Lorna to see which flat they were in when she arrived on the scene and mentioned the same to her, asking if she thought it was because there possibly wasn’t a camera around at the time. She agreed that was the most feasible reason. In this day and age of taking multiple pictures at any time of the day or night with a device which you can slip into your pocket it seems incredible to imagine that!

And I’m old enough to remember the excitement of getting my first camera (not new of course - passed down to me) - a Kodak Box Brownie - which took pretty decent photos if my memory serves me right. Taking pictures was a much more restrictive affair because you only had so many per film and it was costly to get them developed then. A far cry from the situation today where my poor phone struggles to do anything because it has a gazillion texts saved on it and almost 5,000 photos, half of which I don’t even remember taking!!

It’s now refusing to hold a charge at all which is probably a good thing as it dies every time I go out so stops me adding to the photo count. A trip to the Apple shop is needed methinks to see if they can sort me out and tell me how to get my photos and texts transferred to my computer to free up some space. The shop is in town though and I haven’t attempted that far yet so that’s my next goal - I might try going some Sunday when it may possibly be less busy trafficwise.

Off for a nap - the forecast is snow tonight and the next couple of days so I took advantage of the lovely weather we had this afternoon and went for an hour’s walk in the University’s lovely botanical gardens. Photos of which I’d love to share - except the phone had done its dying swan act by then so I have zilch!