A visit to the engineers

So, I toddled along to meet my prospective engineers today. Having had a brief e-mail conversation in which I sent them some diagrams (not of my making) of the motor, and describing what I was hoping to achieve, and then having had a chat with the big cheese from the company (it’s not a big company), he requested that I turn up today when the other partner, who coincidentally is the owner of a Morris ‘Tho was there, and please to be bringing the 8″ Motor with me.

So, Kathryn and I loaded the rather heavy lump that is the motor into the back of Chester yesterday, and this morning I spent twenty minutes pondering and looking and drawing some very sketchy engineering diagrams of the mounts I want fabricated.

So I turned up, and the head of the chap I’d been speaking to walks over and says Hi, and shakes my hand, and greets me with “You’re very clued up for..a…girl”. I think he realised that his sentence was walking off a cliff that, perhaps, he didn’t want to walk off, but he soldiered on anyway. Ignoring the blatant sexism (oh, fun), we went on to have a nice chat about what I want, what they can do, what work they normally do, and how good my drawings need to be to get what I want done.

Not very, it turns out, is the answer. My quick and dirty sketch from this morning:

Plus some dimensions, would be sufficient. The slight problem there, of needing dimensions, that makes things a wee bit more complex. It means probably delaying the project start date until after I finish my course, because I’m going to have to actually go down, strip the engine out, and measure things.

After much discussion it was decided they didn’t need to see the frigging motor. So, that shifting of the bastard heavy object out of the garage? Unnecessary pain on our part. Never mind.

However, after their unwarranted bout of sexism I now feel the need to produce good, high quality, engineering diagrams. I’ve played with Google Sketchup before, and am having a little dink with ‘DraftSight’, so we’ll see which one ends up taking my fancy. I can’t work on it at the moment, anyhow, but… I’m quite excited.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.

Be more careful, Kate.

So, I knew my liver function test results were fine, but was under the impression my cholesterol levels were not-great. Err, high, would be the word. Obviously, there’s good and bad cholesterol. I couldn’t remember the numbers, the overall value was on the high side, and so paranoia kicked in. I’ve been mentally beating my body with sticks. High blood pressure, high cholesterol and an iffy liver, that was basically where I was at. Oh, and lousy allergies.

But it’s been bugging me, so I rang the GP and got the actual figures. Yes, the ‘bad’ cholesterol is the highest acceptable ‘normal’ value. This is less than ideal. But the ‘good’ cholesterol and overall levels are also just within the acceptable limits. Probably a bit high for my age, but given the shed-loads of cheese I eat, understandable.

So I can chill a bit, and only berate my body for its poor quality liver and high blood pressure (which I’m keeping an eye on, but am not going to ‘do’ anything about unless it gets significantly high until after my dissertation. Because I suspect that’s what’s making it high). Actually, given my blood test results actually show my liver’s actually *working properly*, I’m going to go easy on my body for a bit :)

Well, apart from the 24 odd miles a week of cycling.

Easy apart from that.

Originally published at Kates Journal. You can comment here or there.