A big red box ...

... has now appeared in the back of Casey (in case you are wondering, Casey is the name of the PT Cruiser - with a registration number of BBKC 458 it could hardly have been anything else now, could it?) and the big red box is full. For having been to a Lowe's yesterday afternoon and the huge Home Depot and Walmart that were right on the US-Canadian border at Covington (they must have heard me coming), I now have 100 drywall pattresses (cost $22 the lot), 25 wall-mounted pattresses, 20 white sockets - the standard colour, 10 ivory sockets, 10 red sockets (regular readers of these pages know that I'm heavily into colour-coding for different usages), all of the fascia plates (they say that they are unbreakable - obviously they haven't had me in there for a while), about 50 3-pin plugs, a few extension leads and all kinds of other exciting American electrical stuff.

The reason for this of course is that when I do 12-volt DC electrical circuits running off solar panels and wind turbines in Europe I need to use plugs and sockets and the like that cannot be mistaken for anything else and which can handle high amperages. There's no American fittings in Europe so no-one will mistake them, and as American current is 110 volts instead of 230 volts and so more susceptible to voltage drop, they use thicker cable to compensate - and the thicker cable will handle higher amperages.

So now I have a full stock on hand and I shall be shipping that back to Europe in due course and so when I get back I can get on with what I'm supposed to be doing - ie earning money to compensate for what I'm spending over here. You've no idea how rampant inflation has been over here since I last visited. Petrol in the States for example costs $2.80 a gallon in most places, and as there are only 16 fluid ounces in an American pint instead of 20 in a European pint, an American gallon is just about 3.65 litres. And $2.80 a gallon is a far cry from 2005 when I was paying $1.45 and an even farther cry from 2001 when I was paying $1.10.

Cheapest motel I've found so far has been $45 - last night, stranded in the wilderness miles from civilisation I paid a whopping $69, and that motel was nothing to write home about at all. Gone are the days from 2002 when I paid $25 per night and in 2005 when I was stopping in a respectable chain of modern motels at $33 per night. With millions of Americans out of work and rampant inflation such as I am noticing, no wonder there are thousands of people being turned out onto the streets. The States is nothing like the Shoppers' Paradise it used to be.

But in Walmart I also bit the bullet and bought a new digital dictaphone. The Olympus that Rhys recommended wasn't carried and they had a whole selection of different ones. not one of which did everything that I needed. In the end I bought a Sony at $39 which does not have a direct connection to a computer (which is strange and disappointing - I'll have to rig up a cable through the headphone and mike sockets and see what I can do about getting some speech recognition software) but it does have a "pause" facility (which puts the "record" on standby for an hour), 2gb of memory, a unidirectional microphone facility as well as the more normal omnidirectional mike - so if you switch it into unidirectional, it just picks up whatever is going directly into the mike and none of the background noise, a noise reduction facility that cuts out high-frequency interference. All in all considering that there wasn't much choice, I'm well-impressed with it and it's doing the business.

I'm now in Quebec, on the south side of the St Lawrence between Montreal and Quebec City, in quite an impressive motel. $60 Canadian it has to be said, but it has all mod cons including a microwave so tea has cost me less than $2 - a couple of tins from the supermarket next door. If I'm spending all this money on motels I'm going to have to economise on the eating - no restaurants for me - and I can see me buying a $30 microwave for where a motel doesn't have one if these prices keep up.

Of course, many of you know that the eastern part of Quebec, from roughly the centre of Montreal, is French-speaking and here in my shower room the taps are marked with C and F.
"Chaud and Froid" I hear you say.
"Rubbish" I retort. "It's cold and freezing".