Drove to work this morning as I am going to go to Safeways later. The car struggled to reach 30 on Penglais hill in 3rd gear and I ended up dropping to second and revving the hell out of the engine to reach 30, then jamming it back into 3rd and holding it there. Poor little thing has only got a 1.4 litre (Diesel) engine.

Followed one of my colleagues up the hill and so flashed my lights at her. Thought I'd dazzled her, so when I got in I apologised. Turned out that she hadn't even noticed - shows how much attention she was paying to the road. She thought the car that had followed her all the way from town was a red one. Errr, no. Getting to Safeway is going to be interesting, what with Primrose Hill being closed. I'm going to have to go out of town, round and back again.

Anyway, the weekend in full: Saturday morning the insurance cover note arrived at 7:30am after I paid nearly £4 for it to be delivered next day. I had the car taxed by lunch, and decided I would take the opportunity of my parents being out to move it off the drive onto the road. They came back while I was moving it, and my Mum came running out of the car towards me yelling something incoherent. I went to open the door and this seemed to make her even more frantic. So I sat tight and waited.

"Don't open the window" She yelled

"Why?"

"Just don't" *sigh*

So I carried on moving the car, and there was a sickening juddering and groaning from the back right wheel.

"What was THAT?" I yelled at my Mum who could see.

"I don't think the wheel is turning" She called back "Carry on". This didn't seem like the best plan to me, but I carried on anyway. "No, your back wheel isn't turning." Great.

The rest of the morning was then spent removing the wheel and trying to get the handbrake to disengage correctly. Problem was that the Peugeot 106 wheel hubs aren't designed to be removed unless you've got a replacement - you have to destroy them to take them off. So we had to just spin it and hope it disengaged itself. We loosened it a bit, and then put the wheel back on. We also took the opportunity to top the oil levels up, the windscreen washer fluid and the engine coolant. We worked out how to get access to the spare wheel should we need it, and pumped it up, and we even found the jack (which is inexplicably placed in the middle of the spare wheel).

With the car all ready to go I took it out for a short spin. It seemed to just want to GO on the country roads, but struggled a little on the "A" roads.

On Sunday I pumped all the tyres up to the correct pressures (somehow that got overlooked on Saturday) and I set off around lunch time. It seemed most strange when I finally arrived in Aberystwyth; I've always driven around in big circles until now. It somehow didn't feel real to go from Notts to Aber.

Only problem with the weekend was that I've still not informed my parents that I'm a Vegetarian, and I didn't want to put them out. So I just ate meat this weekend. :( I didn't enjoy it, in fact when I thought about it I felt ill, so I had to make a concious effort not to think about it. Strange really that I've not missed meat in any way shape or form since I became Vegatarian - but I suppose there's time yet.

Anyway, I seem to have rambleBlogged© again so I will now shut up and get on with some work.