So despite everything, AAMI claims
have not gone away. Time to prepare for the next step. They really have nothing to go on.
To summarize:
On 18 October 2022 I backed into Helen Miller's car, which she had parked in the
blind spot outside the garage. Contact was (plastic) bumper to (plastic) bumper.
Damage was non-existent, but Helen claimed to see something. All I have is this photo
of the bumper on my car, where it connected with her bumper:
The same evening, Helen asked Yvonne for the registration
number of my car. She didn't mention the incident to me at all, although I saw her a
number of times.
On 8 November 2022 I received two apparently identical letters from AAMI, claiming that I had damaged Helen's
car. No explanation of the damage. Helen was there at the time, so I asked her about
it. She said “you're insured, right, so the insurers pay”. I wanted to examine the
alleged damage more carefully, but she refused to let me, and she also refused to let me
take photos, though I got a couple as she was driving off. I replied to AAMI denying
liability and asking for evidence, to which I received no reply.
On 3 April 2023 I received another letter from AAMI, enclosing an invoice for
replacing the the rear bumper. No reference to my letter of 8 November. I replied
again reminding them of the letter and asking for proof of my liability.
On 17 April 2024, after 4 reminders, I received a reply from AAMI claiming to have
tried to call me on a different number from the one I gave them. They included a total
of 18 images, all with missing Exif data, and without comment. At least half of them were unrelated to the
incident. Some showed minor damage to the rear of the car. I replied reminding me of
the phone number and asking for correct photos and a description of what damage was
done.
On 27 April 2023 I received another email, again claiming to have tried the wrong
phone number, and supplying no further information. I replied reminding them that they
had the correct number on record.
After that, silence for almost exactly a year. The message was so badly written that at first I thought
it was spam. I replied asking them to answer my outstanding questions.
On 23 April 2024 I received an email with two screen shots: a Facebook page showing where Yvonne gave her the registration number of my car, and a partial
display of my initial diary entry on the subject, the one where I wrote “Sorry, Helen, I didn't
do any damage. If you want me to pay, get proof”. And that, they say, proves that I am
to blame.
Are there any clues in the photos AAMI sent me on 17 April 2023? Many are clearly not related, and there are photos of the back of the
car that look perfectly normal:
That's strange on a plastic bumper. But how could it have come from the incident? My
bumper is convex, and it couldn't have caused a scratch like that, especially not in concave
parts of her bumper.
What's that mess on the bumper? It looks like paint that
has flaked off, and it's not on the other photos. Is it even the same car?
When were the photos taken?
Still, I have a couple of photos of the car that I took while she was driving off on
8 November 2022:
The one on the left looks more like an indentation from a pointed object. So there were
really two separate scratches on the bumper, one on each side. Coming even closer,
There are indents on the bottom of each scratch, as if something with a hard bumper had
driven straight into the back of the car. There's no way I could have caused even one of
them, and absolutely no way that I could have caused both. For me the case is clear: Helen
is trying to get me to pay for damage done by somebody else, probably in a car park.
There's no way she could convince anybody with a brain of that.
But why didn't I see the damage when I bumped into her car? There are a number of
possibilities. Maybe it didn't happen until later. I wasn't given a chance to
look at the car more closely on 8 November. Is that the reason why? It's interesting that
one of the photos she provided does not appear to show any damage:
But later damage alone wouldn't explain things. She went to her insurance as soon as the
incident happened. Has it maybe happened earlier, and she had somehow covered it over.
Spent a lot of time reading documentation for fvwm, without coming to any real
conclusion. It does seem that I can have one window manager per screen, but clearly there's
a question as to whether I want to. It seems that the -v option might give me more
insights into what fvwm3 doesn't like about my configuration file, though.
They've changed the location of Ports Collection man pages, and I didn't find out. But then
the references to Bitkeeper date to my time at MySQL, over 17
years ago.
You can buy chili sauces on every street corner, many kinds. But I can't find one that I
like, especially for the eggs in huevos
rancheros. There are things like Sriracha, which are almost only (almost
too) hot, with no additional flavour. Then there's Tabasco, which has been round for
ever. It's not really a sauce, and if it were, it would also be too hot. Then there are
various sambals, potentially also
too hot, and frequently with dried prawns and things that limit the usefulness outside
South-East Asian food. And then there are things like chili paste, some of which aren't
bad, but the one I have (from Lee
Kum Kee) is too salty.
And then there's bibimjang, a Korean sauce
intended for bibimbap. I made
it over a year ago and was pleasantly surprised. But it, too, is limited in its
usefulness due to the sesame seeds and sesame oil.
OK, remove them. And how about that, without the sesame, it doesn't taste bad. I used it
today, and the recipe is here. It may
evolve.
I've been following my weight since March 2023, when we got a second set of scales. The
initial results were encouraging: round 87 to 88 kg, corresponding to a BMI of a little over 23, and
considerably less than the 90 kg that I had expected.
And not surprisingly, it has stayed that way, though the day-to-day fluctuations were
greater than I expected, up to 1 kg per day in each direction. Until my firstcataract operation, after which it dropped below 87 kg and stayed that way, dropping even further.
Today it hit 84.7 kg.
Why? That's a drop of over 3%. Is it indicative of some problem? I don't feel in any way
different, and potentially it has happened to me before when I wasn't weighing myself. Off
to search the web, with a Google search coming up with comforting information like “Cancer,
even when other symptoms are not present”. But that led to this
page, which included the information that it could be a cause of loss of appetite, not
loss of weight.
I have an appointment with Paul Smith in 3 weeks. I'll discuss it with him then; in the
meantime spent some time copying the data into the computer and investigating plot programs
once again. gnuplot may no
longer be the best choice (if it ever was), but it has the advantage that I sort of know it.
It's always Bruno approaching Mona, and they're careful about their distances. This evening
he jumped up onto Yvonne's lap while in the armchair, only to
find Mona already there. Both looked surprised, but made no noise, and Bruno retreated. It
was a different matter with Elena: she
came up to me while Mona was on my lap. Mona departed, hissing and growling, but didn't go
far, and she came back when Lena was gone.
Paella for dinner again tonight. Spent
some time reading up various recipes, and discovered a claim that it should be made with “Fumet”. That doesn't sound Spanish to me, but a
bit of trawling through Wikipedia brought me to the Spanish entry Fumet, clearly a borrowing from the French
fumet de poisson. And the recipes showed that it was based on shellfish, not fish.
Do we have something like that in the pantry? Yes!
Aaargh! These horriblespoons again! What's a « petite cuillerée »? A teaspoon? Saltspoon? Off to look
online, where it seems that the fumet de crustacés is no longer made. But clearly the
concentrations would be the same as for fumet de poisson (fish), which they do still make.
And once again no information as to the quantities.
But then I found this page, from the maker, which offers 750 g professional packs. Still no direct
quantities, but the label states that it will make up to 50 l of fumet. In other words, a
round 15 g per litre.
Finally! Put 18 g in the water, and it worked well. Yvonne knows this recipe well, of course, but she said that it tasted particularly good this time.
It wasn't until later that I discovered that I have been here before. At the time I guessed 16 g/l, close enough to today's results.
That still doesn't tell me the volume of a petite cuillerée, of course. See if I care. The
weight corresponds to 2.5 g.
This page contains (roughly) yesterday's and today's entries. I have
a horror of reverse chronological documents, so
all my diary entries are chronological. This page normally contains the last two days,
but if I fall behind it may contain more. You can find older entries in
the archive. Note that I often update a diary entry
a day or two after I write it.
Do you have a comment about something I have written? This is a diary, not a
“blog”, and there is
deliberately no provision for directly adding comments. It's also not a vehicle
for third-party content. But I welcome feedback and try to
reply to all messages I receive. See the diary overview for more details. If you do
send me a message relating to something I have written, please indicate
whether you'd prefer me not to mention your name. Otherwise
I'll assume that it's OK to do so.
