Foreign Perspectives

When I think about a vacation in Mexico, it seems to me that it’s the type of place that you need to settle into to really make the best of your time there. For me that rules out a hotel type trip as that always seems to be (often quite literally) a flying visit and doesn’t really give you the chance to settle into the local culture.

Somewhere like Rocky Point house rentals gives quite a good selection of different properties for such a holiday. In terms of Mexico, some people like to dive right into the local culture and for that you’re best going for a stand-alone villa. If you’re the type who like a lot going on around you, it’s probably best to look at the resort properties and that usually means condos. Either way, there’s quite a long list of places to choose from.

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In days gone by it would be maybe £100 to get a car serviced but those days have long since gone and I just paid out over twice that.

In fact, it would have been much more but we’d had the speedo set on trip rather than distance travelled so managed to miss out a service completely. Whilst we did that accidently this time I think we may well do it delibrately next time as I’m sure a lot of people are increasingly doing these days with the spiralling cost of the process.

Is it safe though? If you’d done that 20 years ago perhaps the answer would have been “no” but cars have become a whole lot more reliable over that time yet the service interval hasn’t changed. From our point of view, it certainly doesn’t appear to have made much difference in the running of the car, certainly not £200 worth of difference.

OK, we’ve some new oil in the car and presumably it’s cleaner oil than the stuff they threw out, which I imagine is better for the car. However, is it enough cleaner to make it worthwhile paying £200 to have it changed? I’m sure we could have managed to do that ourselves for maybe £20 tops. I’ve looked at the list of stuff they did and there’s nothing on it that seems really worth paying that much for so I figure that we’ll likely skip the next service too.

In fact, the only thing that might have been worthwhile for them to have done turns out to be a warranty thing which they couldn’t do today anyway and we’ve to go back in a couple of weeks when they get the part.

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I’ve been plugging away with the SevaTeem theme off and on over the last month or so and it’s now complete enough to let me try it out on various blogs that I run.

Obviously since I designed it mainly for me, it runs quite nicely on a number of those blogs but one or two have highlighted little things that I’d like to do with it. For instance, An Age of Magic uses a dark background therefore I needed to be able to change the colour of the various fonts used so that added a few options. That sorted out a lot of stuff at a stroke as it also lets me change the background image and not need to dive into the stylesheet to change colours as they’re all laid out on the options screen now.

One or two little “funnies” turned up when I tried to add in various bits of HTML in the sidebars by way of widgets so I’m going to be adding one or two options along those lines or perhaps buildin a widget that’ll deal with those issues.

This blog uses a fixed width so I’m currently working on adding that as an option. SevaTeem is a fluid width theme but I want to be able to use a fixed width as well.

Why all the options? Basically because I want SevaTeem to be the only theme that I ever need.

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