Slow post

I’m sitting in my bus in the dead center of South Carolina. A place so dead that if a leaf falls, they write about it in the local paper. Actually, that’’s probably not true - living here is quite noisy with the silence punctuated by the staccato rattle of gunfire and the occasional meth lab explosiuon. Time was the countryside would have been full of illegal stills but now meth pays more apparently.

Despite being in such harmonious surroundings, the post does get here and gets here quite respectably too. The postman graduated to a Jeep a few years ago and retired the horse. Mind, it was either a Jeep or a horse to get through the local dirt tracks with the Jeep being largely immune to the profusion of copperhead snakes.

I have four things on order. Some are coming from California which means they might be coming from California if China Inc has them in the warehouse. If they’re still on the banana boat however it could be optimistic to believe they’re going to arrive this month.

On order are:

• my new charge controller - due to arrive from California on the 24th. Hard to track this as the tracking number doesn’t work.
• My new watt meter - due to arrive from California on the 25th. Hard to track as the tracking number doesn’t work.
• Some MC4 connectors - due to arrive August 16th from Guangzhou, China. The tracking for that quit on the 6th of July so it’s hard to track.
• my SAE to cigarette lighter plug adaptor - due to arrive from Shenzhen, China between June 27th and July 18th. The tracking for that quit on June 24th when it reached New York.

The crazy thing is all of this stuff is lightweight and small. It’s incredible the amount of time it’s all taking. The parcel from Shenzhen looks very much as though it has been lost by USPS. That, for me, will be a first. In all the years I have been in the USA, I have only had one problem with USPS and this is the one problem.

It really wouldn’t have mattered if I’d bought this on Amazon or eBay though I used eBay because Amazon’s prices are outrageous, especially combined with minimum orders before shipping is waived. Amazon spends too much time trying to sell memberships and too little time on offering a right-priced product.

Years ago I used to work for a well known chain of bookstores, notable for producing their own e-reader when in fact rebadging an existing ereader would have been so much simpler. They had a membership that was only worth getting if you spent $250 a year on products from them. I don’t know about you but I buy all my books secondhand on abebooks.com or download free ereader versions on my iPad. I have not set foot inside a bookshop since I quit working for the last one in 2013. Why would I when I can get everything online? And of course with $80 Amazon membership (which probably only goes to Jeff Bezos booze and broads fund), I can guarantee I’d never buy enough to justify the $80. Last year I think I spent $30 on Amazon. The year before, $0.

So, I’m stuck with strange arrival dates from eBay. Having said that, I ordered a couple of switches from Amazon and they took weeks to arrive. It turned out Amazon had stated on the advert in small print where I wouldn’t normally look that the goods were not sold by Amazon but by some guy in China via Amazon’s website. I hadn’t realised Amazon was sneaky and dishonest like that but now I do. By the time they had arrived, I had employed a different solution.

My gripe with eBay is it’s hard to identify where their products come from. If it says it’s coming from California then I expect that to be true. It seems though that things coming from the common ports - New York, California, Charleston etc are likely not to be coming from a warehouse there but rather they’re advertised as soon as the slaves start pulling on the oars to propel the boat from the Chinese harbor toward the USA. It takes those political prisoners forever to row those great big boats - they need to eat some spinach!

So, end result I’m pretty much cooling my heels until stuff starts to arrive. The charge ontroller is the vital component I’m really waiting for. The connectors are the next most useful component. Once they arrive I can recycle some of the wire I’ve tasked differently in order to provide wiring for the rear solar input. As for the SAE to cigarette adaptor - I just don’t think it’s going to arrive. The watt meter isn’t essential but will be useful and will help me monitor my power situation better.

I’m looking at my first trip in the bus as a camper as being on the 7th of September. That’s going to be very good. I can’t wait to use my bus. Over the intervening time, once the new solar controller is installed and the second solar input installed, the bus will be completed. Then I have to fix a buzzing relay in the console. I suspect a screw might have fallen down there and look into lowering the brake pedal. Other than that, there is one stray wire that’s dangling from something the hillbillies did to the transmission.

As the bus has not had an oil change since November 2014, it’s overdue as the oil does not last forever even with occasional engine turnovers. That’ll be the ideal time for a good clean and lube and a new gasket on the sump. Some time I’ll have to buy new tires too. Those I have are elderly remolds on the back and the front has the infamous Goodyear G159 suicide tires. Those are known for exploding unexpectedly.

On the whole things are looking up though this China stuff is holding up progress. A pox on the people that lie and claim stuff is coming from California when it’s not. Another pox on Amazon and Jeff Bezos - just because!