Into The New Year

So 2022 ended just over a month ago. I’ve been a little tardy in writing anything but to be honest, I didn’t particularly want to go over the vagaries of the last year. That’s not to say nothing interesting happened just that I couldn’t motivate myself to write anything about it. Realistically, life is moving ever onwards without much change but I did pickup a new car last month after our X-Trail got to the point where it was just not worth the money fixing the things that were wrong.

It all started towards the end of last year. The clutch failed on Cat whilst she was driving and the cost of fixing that was a couple thousand. Shortly after fixing that, the aircon stopped blowing cold air which, with the height of summer fast approaching, was less than ideal. After a visit to a mechanic, it was discovered that it wasn’t a leak or a regassing but that the compressor itself was shafted. This was another couple thousand to fix alongside new tyres and its upcoming service the latter of which could likely discover other things that were going wrong and only increase how much it would take to fix things. In the end, it made more sense to get a new (read used) car and trade in the X-Trail.

What I didn’t expect was that its replacement would be a Focus XR5 Turbo or, for those everywhere else in the world, a Focus ST. It’s slightly older than the X-Trail in manufacture date, hailing from 2010, but had just under 120,000kms on the clock which, for the age, wasn’t too bad. It’s the first hot-hatch that I’ve owned and having driven other similar cars in the past, it’s fun to have something with a bit of nip about it after driving a wallowing SUV for about seven or so years. It’s also not too much more expensive to run from the rough math of things so all-in-all it’s not a bad trade. Moreover, it’s been lovely having working aircon now that summer’s properly here.

School has also restarted and so both the girls have started back on another year of education as well as all the extracurricular activities that they get up to such as dancing. Our youngest is going to try Joeys (young Girl Guides) and Soccajoeys this year too so that will be interesting to see. Whether they peak her interest will remain to be seen but it’s great to see her trying something new. As for our eldest, it’s all about dancing for her and it’s great to see her so passionate about it. Swimming lessons are also continuing so we’re going to be a busy for the next few weeks until we hit the Easter holidays.