Well its a quiet Sunday today and although we went down to Port Charlotte to look at a potential rentals house for next year, we looked on the outside only but will be able to see the inside later on next week but in the meantime I thought I would spend a few minutes on various matters good and bad.
I am not sure if I mentioned how dirty the BBQ grill was in the first house we rented but this was easily outdone by the absolute disaster of the BBQ in the current house which we moved to on 31 March. I have informed the housing agents in no uncertain terms how unhappy we are with this and lets see what they can do to fix. The first BBQ grill plates were still covered with meat and grease and so I complained and they sent somebody round to sort it which they should have done in the beginning but failed to do and I had hoped that when we moved house they would have learnt from the troubles in the first house and made sure all was well here,only it wasn't and you will be able to see photos as below.
First dirty BBQ
We have visited the Lighthouse restaurant and bar a couple of times, this is a good place, always busy which is a good sign but they do excellent burgers and boiled Gulf Bay shrimps and together with a large carton of Iced tea its an excellent meal. The second time we visited there was a bloody gale blowing and so we had to hold everything down on the table to stop it blowing away which is the price you pay for being by the coast. On the other hand further round the Golf Coast they were experiencing house wrecking tornados so it could have been worse.
Last Friday the 1st April we paid a visit to Sarasota Costco to top our stocks of food and plonk for the next month and it seemed like a comedy of error had struck us down. As we pulled in to the Costco car park a warning light came on the dashboard of the car, oh well what's this all about and it a little while to find the right page in the book and it was something to do with automatic braking if you were reversing and were likely to back in to something. Oh well lets see what happens when we restart the car and also after I cleaned all the rear sensors and camera all was well. However in Costco we did a good shop of about $ 380 , amazing value for what we purchased, and whilst in UK Costco accept most credit cards they only accept a couple which I don’t have and VISA debit which I used the first time we were there with no problem. Anyway the card machine rejected my Visa debit card????and I tried again with same card but again then failed. Then we tried Jennifer's card which also failed, what the bloody hell is going on, so there we were with a trolley full of cold meat, wine and lots of other stuff and sufficient cash. The check out assistant said if you have another card there is an ATM in the corner of the shop so I breathed a sigh of relief and headed over to the ATM and took out 400 dollars in cash. Whilst going thro the process on the ATM which was mighty complicated it briefly said this is an English card do you want to be changed in Sterling to which I entered NO, well I think it was entered as I was pressing the button the screen writing disappeared and the cash was counted in nice twenty dollar bills.
So back to the check out and because of the delay they had to cancel the first lot of scanning and do it all over again but this time of course with cash it was no problem. After finishing our shopping we went to Five Guys for a burger and fries, excellent burgers these people serve and after lunch back via Publix supermarket for some basics and then back to the new house. It was now that I discovered what a disaster the BBQ is and there is no way in the world I am going to cook on this as it was also unsafe. First of all it was covered in grease, the grills had also bits of meats and god knows what but also the burner covers are all rusted away and so you have quite large flames in some parts of the grill and not in the other parts, not acceptable.
Anyway the next day as usual checking my credit cards and bank account, something I do every day religiously to ensure I notice errors quickly I noticed that the Fair FX prepaid credit which I used in Costco had been charged as Sterling and so in the process of amalgamation they had converted the Euro and Sterling balances in to USD and so my Euros and Sterling are gone. Not quite what I expected and so have sent a big letter of complaint , lets see what happens..
Well that's enough for today
