We are not buying the gold plated tow bar!

The number of readers has crept up again – I think Merisi must be in visiting hourly.

This is certainly not due to the quality of the Blog and indeed Cate berated me yesterday for the turgid drivel that I have been sloshing about.

When I said I would write a Blog I did not say I would make it interesting. I am sure she thinks my life is much more interesting than it really is. She could ask Muffin what happens here during the day and confirm that the answer is ‘bugger all’.

The only chance I have of a conversation is with a delivery person and as this person has usually just walked up six flights of stairs they are not in the mood to listen to me mangling the German language.

But where in the name of the Gaspar the Patron Saint of Beagles have my Blog commenters gone. Where is everybody out there?

I have been talking for some time to Herr Schmutzigewäsche at Mercedes about a bicycle rack for Billy Benz.

He initially offered me a roof rack plus bike racks - which would cost about €600 but we are not sure about this as the thought of hammering along the A2 with two bikes on the roof makes me a bit uneasy.

Can you imagine a bike flying off the car at 150 kilometers and hour? I can.

Hang on – I will be in our car – not the car behind us – so that’s probably OK.

So I asked him to let me know how much a tow bar and rack would cost.

€3,050 is the answer. Excuse me?

This was expensive even by Wien/Mercedes standards (I mean you can get a perfectly nice meal in Meinl Am Graben for that – well – not really nice – well barely edible actually – and there won’t be much of it - AND a bottle of Wachau Valley Gruner Veltliner).

So I went back and said – Excuse me – did you say €3,050?

‘I know it is expensive’ he said ‘ but they have to make some alterations to the car’. What does this mean? Don’t you just bolt a tow bar onto the bottom of the car – perhaps the alterations are done in Ouagadougou by the dry cleaners?

Even without the gold plating it is too expensive so we are back to roof racks and will have to take our chances. Without this we cannot go flambling around the countryside so it has to be done.

I am due to have my second FSME injection which is to protect me against the ferocious ticks which infest the countryside hereabouts. They are apparently the size of kittens and Rozalin has warned me that they can do immense damage and possibly take a leg off if they get you unawares at the right angle.

I am not confident that that FSME will be strong enough so am taking a 5 Iron to deal with the more aggressive ticks many of whom were apparently enraged by the AC/DC concert on Sunday and are out for revenge.

You can tell these ones – they have cotton wool stuffed in their ears.

Rozalin went to this concert and as she can no longer hear anything at all except a faint buzzing in her ears she carries a slate and chalk so that Cate can write her messages.

Incidentally – I saw Angus Young being ‘interviewed’ on TV and I can tell you that 40 years of prancing around in a school uniform playing deafening music and consuming many strange substances – many of them probably illegal – has not done his powers of speech or comprehension any good at all.

But he seems happy because he smiles a lot. I imagine he also has buzzing ears.

But – say what you like about Acca Dacca – it is the greatest Rock and Roll band in the world – and always has been.

Lunatic of the Month Award

There were some moments of great excitement last night when I rendered the OzCon website totally useless. It took me a sweaty 30 minutes to get it going again.

There are still some bits that are not quite right but at least people can use it while I figure out how to fix it.

The software I bought (and for which I paid twice) looks OK but it will take some getting used to so I need to go slowly.

Theoretically the software converts everything from and to html but in practice it often does not always do it all – so manual intervention is required – usually with unfortunate consequences.

The problem with stuff like this is that you only have to make a very small coding error and everything goes wobbly – or disappears.

I have changed all the lights that were not functioning and have taken the ladder to its new home in the basement. I am dreading the day when one of the really high lights goes out.

Apart from the fact that I have to carry the ladder up 6 flights of stairs I am not looking forward to scaling the heights necessary to reach the lights.

The problem with the ceiling is not only that some parts are so high – but that others are very low. In the kitchen – for example – the ceiling slopes so that near the large storage cupboard it is only about 5 feet high. This means that I keep crashing into it when I go to this cupboard. This leaves marks on both the ceiling and my head.

We are going to visit Moni and the Kätzchen on Friday – this is the first time we will have seen them. Rozalin is going with us to commence the negotiations for the release date. It is proving harder to get these cats than to get a terrorist out of Gitmo.

We hope to have them by mid June so that we can bed them in before we go away. We hope that Gretchen will be able to stay in the apartment to look after them – and if not we need to find another resident cat minder.

Gretchen is apparently not as young as I thought she was and is in fact going to university. She doesn’t drink coffee so may be a little bit suspect but I am prepared to overlook this. We have made her an offer and she is thinking about it.

You will have noticed that the moving pictures of ducks have not yet materialised. This is simply because I have not had time to take the pictures and then work out how to use the software to edit them and load them onto the website.

My days are absolutely crushing and it is often hard work to cram in coffee, lunch, coffee a bicycle ride and an afternoon nap. In fact I haven’t been for a bike ride for a week or so – I missed the last couple of days because it is simply too hot.

I know it is not quite the end of the month but I can safely make my “Lunatic of the Month Award”.

There were a couple of right wing Austrian politicians in the running early but they were blown away by an old favourite.

The winner is Kim Jong Il of the Democratic Republic of Loopy Land. In fact it is hard to see anyone beating him for the Annual Award for 2009.

Of course if he declares war on South Korea he gets to keep the trophy forever.

I am guilty of multiple accounts of perjury

It’s all over for Frau Almhupfer – the gravy train has ended. I received my BIPA card yesterday (they must have worked overtime) so can now buy things for which I get the points.

The ladder arrived but as a special punishment for not being home the first time he called the delivery man made me go to the front gate to collect it and then I had to carry it up six flights of stairs.

He also (probably after the Friday phone call) appears to have attacked the ladder with a sledge hammer and the bottom rung was bent and detached from the other thingies.

I had to make a decision. Do I ring them and go through the agony of trying to get another ladder - or do I fix it myself. A no brainer really. I straightened out the rung as best I could and reattached it with my rivet gun.

If you don’t have a rivet gun you should get one – it is the most useful thing I have ever bought. Tell your SO you would like one for your birthday – you won’t regret it.

I have had my first foray into the stratosphere of our lounge room ceiling. I moved the table then stood the ladder on the table and then climbed to the top of the ladder. This enabled me to change the lights at the second highest level.

Cate went into her study and put her iPod on so that she could not hear any screams or thuds.

I really do not know how I am going to get to the highest lights. I have spoken to Muffin again and she has absolutely no interest in being attached to the end of a broomstick. She says she gets vertigo.

I had to buy a piece of website software from a US company so that I can more easily change the pages of the site I am looking after. I bought it as a download - and they charged me for two downloads.

I sent them an email and suggested that they might like to give me a refund.

This would have been far too simple so they sent me a ‘Letter of Destruction’ which I have to fill out and sign to say that I have destroyed the second item of software (that I didn’t download) and have done many other things which include destroying the (non-existent) documentation.

Then I sent this off and perhaps after 30 days I may get a refund.

A normal person would fall off their trolley and shout about this but I have now been in Austria for 9 months and have nerves of steel. Minor obstacles like this are but ripples on a pond.

I have filled out the form (committing about 10 different counts of perjury) and sent it off and will wait quietly for a refund – and arrest when we go to the USA in July.