Saturday, January 30, 2010

Citroen Saxo vtr

This morning found me earnestly searching the Internet for used car dealers in Reading. With Clare having to commute regularly down to Wells and me in Reading for my contract she has to have a car. "A small one," she suggested, "one I can get onto the drive in Wells."

With a long list of potential dealers, our first stop was Rose Kiln Lane which seemed to house a small cluster of them. We started with a visit to an establishment which confusing specialised in Nissan and Fiat cars (KJM Reading). But it was the part-exchanged Citroen Saxo (pictured below - not ours though) which caught Clare's eye.


The salesman, a good guy named Ruairi Ellis, assured us that although it was nine years old, the Saxo had barely done 30,000 miles with one careful lady owner. Amazingly he had the documentation to prove it. After a satisfactory test drive, it was ours. Clare collects it on Tuesday en route to our new home.

Getting established in Wells is going to be a lengthy process. When Clare and Alex were there last week, they tackled the downstairs bathroom which proved to be in a less than hygienic state. In fact when Alex returned to Reading on the Tuesday evening he was quite ill during the night having picked up a bug. The upshot is that we need the bathrooms fixed as well as the kitchen before we can consider moving our furniture in, so the builders will be busy over the next period.

Some time this weekend I will spend a couple of hours progressing the first chapter of the Calculus of Variations material in my maths MSc OU course. At this early stage it's just revision of standard calculus results but there are lots of examples which one is obliged to work through. Maple was also easier than I thought to start up although it again takes time to walk around the myriad of functions. It's fairly awesome to watch it effortlessly summing infinite series and integrating seriously heavy expressions. At the very least it will be great as a maths text editor for assignments.