a fairground life (some summer)

The summer was hot, nearly as hot as I remembered it in my youth. The parks were lush green and working outside was a pleasure. So the arms on the skydiver got a dirty paint up (lights batons still attached) but it brightened up the ride. Its been at least two years since they saw paint. The ride is 20 years now since the fibre glass skins were fitted to the cars and my maintenance free period on these is now expired. The sun and elements have faded the colours of the metal flake finish and a few surface cracks an dings need filling. With this now bothering me, I spent £500 on metallic paints, lacquers, base coat, thinners , fillers and various other items including a couple of spray guns. Unfortunately the main ingredient turned out to be a compressor but I overlooked that and 6 months later the job has still not been done. I hope the paint doesn't go off. I wonder if I was trying to tidy up a few loose ends incase my end was nigh. I do enjoy the border run and it was a bit easier with the skydiver not attending Burntisland, people assume health but this was more a financial decision after last years fair was shocking poor. However nature fills a vacuum and R filled our void by taking the DZ back from the borders to a new fair in Kilbirnie that I had to attend on Sunday to bring his trailer back to the borders for him. Arriving back at Selkirk I found a blowout had penetrated the wheel arch and the hub had grabbed the under floor wiring loom and quite literally pulled the wiring out of the walls!!! the socket fronts were all there but the wiring was stripped out by the turning of the hub. This is apparently a common happening, thinking it would get repaired easily we were shocked the next week when the insurance company wrote the trailer off.
       Avoiding the painting job I built two new speaker cabinets for the ride, the old ones were from 1979 and it was only the pvc cover that held them together. Another job done was fitting hydraulics to the DZ to raise the floors instead of a hand winch. I ordered the cylinders off the internet and they arrived two days later all ready to go.This was in prep for my great northern run in August. June slipped into July and things at the mall were slow, but out of the blue a previously cancelled event came back from the dead. A private hire for a well know satellite tv company that we have done four times previously. We juggled a few items and left the mall a week early to attend the RHC at Ingliston. The weather turned severely wet the night before and I literally set the fair at night during a lightning storm. Some how the heavy rides still managed to pull on site the next morning without any hassle. The event went well and we moved off late Saturday night to the next fair at BOA. AB came to shift a load for my bro, it had been a while since he had done any HGV work so I swapped and took the twist (biggest) and AB took the DZ (smallest) to save dropping him in at the deep end.
Happy New Year.