Oli has finally finished high school and will soon be making his way to college to study some yet-to-be-determined-which A-Levels. Before all that nonsense they had, as is the tradition in the UK these days, a prom to to attend. After the meal in the pub prom celebrations the class decided they wanted to have a proper party with beer and drugs and dancing girls and what have you.
OK, just beer.
In an overly optimistic moment Oli decided to put up some tents where everyone could sleep. Josh came along and helped by putting his tent up. Which is currently still in my garage.
The night arrived, pretty much the whole class came back to my house. I went to bed. My hard work had been done organising the garage just in case it rained.
I came downstairs at about 6am and opened the kitchen blinds. There were still a bunch of boys partying and I think it’s the first time I ever saw my little boy drunk. Apparently the last girl left at 5am so a pretty good party all in all.
I made them all a bunch of sausage butties and a plate of beans on toast with cheese and egg on top for Ayman.
Then I started the clear up. I swear to god – these kids must have just been opening a beer, taking a sip and then wandering off before coming back and opening another beer. The quantity of beer and cider I had to pour away before recycling the cans was simply heartbreaking. Flippin’ youf!
We’ve been having a minor issue with the Tesla. If you hit a bump in the road with sufficient force then the whole car goes haywire and the cruise control stops working, the regenerative braking stops working, ABS stops working – all sorts of crazy stuff. As soon as you stop the car, get out and lock it then the whole thing resets and it’s back to the normal “drive with just the accelerator” mode. So it’s not anything too worrying – just massively annoying. Massively, massively annoying. Especially annoying given the absolutely atrocious condition that British roads are in.
After combing the UK Tesla owners group posts several people were suggesting it was either a dodgy ABS sensor or a loose earth connection on the 12v battery. I checked the battery – no problem there. So I decided to jack the car up and re-seat the sensors.
This is me mid unplugging and replugging the sensors
After unplugging and re-plugging the sensors I took it for a test drive. Before the work you had to hit something with quite some force to send the car mental. After the work you had to just glance in the direction of a pothole and the car would have a meltdown. I’d made it worse. Oddly though this actually encouraged me. It made me think I was messing about in the right area.
I bought a couple of new ABS sensors on eBay for £30 and then me and the boy decided to jack up the car and do the drivers side first. After doing the drivers side sensor I took it for a test drive. First bump in the road….nothing. The place where it usually goes on the drive to the high school….nothing. Speed bumps which would always trigger it…..nothing.
I’m well pleased with the way my chilli plants have grown. I probably should have topped them when they reached about 30cm but I was kind of curious to see how big they would get. Pretty damned big is the answer. I reckon the biggest is just less than 1m tall. However, the most excellent news and the reason for this post is I now have a pile of chillis growing.
I’m going to leave them on the plant until they ripen and go red. Then I have to decide something to cook with them. I’m thinking tofu.
The old sofa was falling apart. It had been sat on for over a decade, flipped over to turn into a mini fort for the kids on many many occasions, had gallons of tea/wine/lager spilled on it – but I still love it and it’s taken up residence in my office for lunchtime snoozes.
It’s been replaced by this bad boy
When it first arrived my initial thought was “it’s too big”. After having had it for a while I’m now thinking “it’s too big”. We have to get rid of the purple sofa, get rid of the tripod lamp and then maybe, just maybe we’ll be able to move around in our living room.
I can however confirm it’s very good for snoozing on. Many naps already completed and we’ve barely got the labels off it.
We’ve always had this space in our bathroom that was just crying out for some shelves. I just happened to have an Oak beam left over from my Workshop build which would turn into some rather lovely shelves.
So I popped around to Dan’s house and we machined the beam into some usable planks
.
This is how they looked after I chopped them to size and Danish oiled them.
The next step was to fashion some supports and break out the digital spirit level that I borrowed off Jason Howarth.
My plans to visit Manchester every month and London every three months are coming along quite nicely. I think I missed January in Manchester [ but January in Manchester is miserable ] and I didn’t actually make it to London until May. But all in all doing pretty good.
Affleck & Brown – Ellie, Charlie, Deej and Me
Not sure at what point in the day this was – flares may or may not have been purchased by this point. But I definitely left Manchester with a pair.
It was about two years ago that I started building my workshop and pretty much managed to complete it in six months. I say “pretty much” because I never quite got around to putting fascia boards on it so the front and back roofy bits always looked a bit scruffy.
Well….no more
So the fascia boards are the bits of wood that make the top triangle.
Now you can see that because I didn’t know what I was doing I didn’t put a load of nails into the cladding which is why you can now see a bunch of the boards starting to warp. Fortunately I still have some nail gun nails so I’ll have to rent my favourite power tool from Hodgsons, mark out where the stud walls are and then shoot a load more nails in. Sounds like a job for the Summer.
For those people old enough to remember the halcyon days of mobile gaming, Angry Birds, Cut The Rope, et al before the developers got all greedy with In-App purchases and adverts every 30 seconds, will surely remember Plants v Zombies.
For those that do remember PvZ then you will surely remember the opening audio to each level “The zombies…are coming”. Well, ummm, I kinda changed it to be “The Chillis … are coming”
Some Scotch Bonnet and some finger chilli – not sure which is which yet
Earlier I pondered if the seeds in the Chilli’s from Aldi would germinate. Turns out they did.
Being the early rising dutiful husband that I am I often greet Emma with a cup of tea in the morning. On normal days I’ll have a quick look at what time she set the alarm for and I’ll make tea and take it upstairs just in time to switch off her alarm and then we settle in with tea to do the Guardian crossword.
This is fine except for weekends. She doesn’t set an alarm on weekends. So I’d always in the past try and pick a reasonable time and wander up. This seldom worked out. She’d either be fast asleep or she’d come downstairs before I made tea. This situation could not persist.
A long long time ago Amazon released these really quite cool things called “Amazon Dash Buttons” where you would hook them up to your WiFi and when you press the Dash Button it would contact the Amazon Mothership and order you another whatever, box of teabags, toilet roll, dishwasher tablets – whatever it was set up for.
So I bought one on eBay.
A lot of the info on the web talked about them having a soldered in flat battery which was going to be a pain. After taking my Dremel to the button I discovered that the version I had was filled with a AAA battery. So I replaced the battery and got to configuring my firewall so that the MAC address of the Dash Button couldn’t get outside my network since it seems Amazon are being a bunch of dicks about this sort of thing and remotely bricking any devices that contact the server.
After much hacking involving playing some audio into the Dash Button, performing a factory reset, and then using a Python script to configure the button for my IOT network I had the beginnings of a solution. I have a Raspberry Pi that was already doing a few things and now it also sits and listens for an ARP packet from the MAC address of the Dash Button. When it receives the ARP it will then call a Telegram script that I wrote which will message my phone with a “Bring Tea” message.
So far so good – but there’s no ACK. I could go to the bottom of the stairs and shout up “OK, tea incoming” but that would just wake everyone else up. So I released the hounds…well hound.
Violet, our pet Whippet loves getting in bed with us when we’re doing the crossword. So the sequence of events is now:
Emma wakes up.
Presses the tea button.
I open the door for Violet and she runs upstairs and gets in bed with Emma
I make tea and take it upstairs.
We complete the crossword and the nine-letter anagram.
Not long after it started getting these minging scuffs on the front of it making the whole garage door look a bit rubbish. I couldn’t work out what was causing the problem so every now and then I’d give it a lick of spray paint and it would nice again, for a while.
Recently one of the locking straps snapped so I took it all apart and discovered that some of the plastic circle things that hold the locking straps in place had snapped too. So I ordered a bunch of bits from eBay and set to work. Whilst I was doing all this I noticed that there were scuff marks on the inside of the steel housing that corresponded with the scuff marks on the door. That was it! That was what was cacking up my doors. Upon closer inspection it seemed the top part of the steel housing was bowing down a bit – no idea why but I put a small hole in it with a metal drill, stuck a 100mm torx screw through the hole and screwed it into a roof support above. Screwing the screw in raised the housing top higher and no more scuffing occurred. A jet wash and a bit of spray paint later and we have this
Every now and then my Mum and I will have a few drinks in the rather fabulous Goats Gate and then get a Chinese takeaway. I took a picture to send to Uncle Chris who was busy holidaying at the time. It turned out to be such a lovely picture I had to publish it.
I like cooking. I like cooking with chillies. I like growing stuff. So I’m growing some chillies from some seeds that were inside the chillies that I bought from Aldi. I’m unsure whether they will produce any plants since there was always a rumour that vegetable producers irradiated their produce to keep it fresher and stop people growing the seeds.
As part of the work I do for the local Parish Council I put lots of effort into keeping some woodlands that we own in good condition. One of the things that’s been bothering me for a while is a bunch of plastic tree protectors on trees that the council planted before we bought the land off them.
So I rallied the troops from my Facebook group and off we set one Saturday morning and took down about 400 tree protectors. A week or so later Oli, Amelia, Violet, Jace and I went down to do a little tidying of the tubes. Jace had to shoot off so he didn’t quite make it into the photo.
A month later and the tubes are still on the floor of the woods as recycling them is proving to be a bit tricky – but I have a new lead.
Many years ago we bought a shoe rack basket type thing. Over time it fell apart and I did a patch up job on it with a few screws. It didn’t work very well and started falling apart again. The final straw came when Amelia fell onto it and the whole thing just crumbled and and fell apart. Emma wanted to put it in the bin. I wanted to do a proper fix up job on it.
Bits missing, wood snapped – this will not do
Starting to put it back together. Glued and dowelled. No screws whatsoever…well, except to hold the wicker seats on.
Almost back together. Undercoat being applied.
The finished piece. You can sit on it and everything.
The moles that I mentioned in a previous post made a proper mess of my garden. Like a proper turn-your-ankle-on-the-unevenness mess. I considered hiring a roller from Hodgsons to try and fix it but they only had the ones that you have to pull by hand.
Screw that
So I bought one.
It’s about a metre wide and weighs about 80kg when full of water and fastens perfectly onto the back of Old Faithful.
It’s made a difference – not to the extent that the garden can be used as a putting green but it’s definitely better. However, we’ve not had a really good downpour since I bought it [ you’re all welcome ] so I reckon next time it properly lashes it down and ground is properly soaked I’ll be out there driving around the garden with an umbrella.
It’s that time of year again when life focuses on preparing the garden and the associated outdoor furniture for the coming Summer.
Just look at the difference!
There are few things in life more satisfying than attacking an algae covered piece of furniture with Karcher’s finest jet washer.
Then came time to jet wash the patio. It’s quite a big patio and it was pretty badly covered in algae so it took a while. The other problem is that the jet washer is so powerful it started ripping up all the grouting so I’m going to have to do something about that 🙁
I don’t think I’ll jet wash the patio again though – I’ll use my funky Ryobi battery powered knapsack sprayer which is an absolutely beautiful piece of kit. If you’ve ever had to use a knapsack sprayer with the pumpy handle thing then you’ll know what a pain it is. Battery powered knapsack sprayers are the future kids. Hmmmm, went off on a bit of a tangent there – anyway – into my knapsack sprayer I’ll put some “wet and forget” and spray the patio every 3 months which should keep the algae at bay. We’ll see.
Ever since we kept chickens I’ve been on the hunt for the elusive perfect poached egg. The freshness is definitely important but I also read something recently that made me wonder. We all assume that an egg is made up of a yolk and the white. However, it seems not all white is white. Some of it is very runny and that’s the bit that makes your poached eggs all messy. So some chef suggested putting the egg into a strainer first, to get rid of the runny bit.
So I did
I’m pretty impressed with the one on the left.
Oh and keto bread….it’s a definite meh from me but if you absolutely have to have something on toast and you’re “low-carbing” then it’ll do.
Emma and I nipped into town to see Charlie and Ellie. Food was consumed and then it got messy. As is usual with Emma and I once we have a few drinks all caution is thrown to the wind and we just went mental. Fun day out though
Aside from making completely new fence panels it also seems I’m quite the dab hand at taking old knackered fence panels and bringing them back to life
I had to use my planer to take 20+ years worth of weathering off the fence panel. Then replace one of the back support thingys with some new 2×1 and finally give the whole thing a coating of fence paint – all of which was accomplished with the help of a fine bottle of Burgundy that can be seen in the background. Better thing…Burgundy…Workshop…Agog to Learn
At some point last year me and Uncle Chris were messing about with my tractor adjusting the steering and we spotted that the drive belt had lots of cracks in it and was pretty badly perished in places. It was still working but a worst case scenario is that it would snap whilst mowing the front garden and then I’d have to push it miles to get it back to my workshop…and this tractor is pretty bloody heavy.
So we took it apart
I did a bit of research to find out which belt size I needed and popped down to a local belts and bearings workshop type place and bought one for £20 rather than the £45 that most mower sites were after. Then Winter arrived and it got cold. I hunkered down for the Winter hibernating in a nice warm house rather than rolling around on the frozen concrete floor of my workshop.
Winter came to an end and the weather suddenly picked up in February and it was positively Spring like. I gave Uncle Chris a call, he happened to be free so he came over and we set to it.
I’ve never had my tractor in quite so many pieces so it was a relief to have Chris with me. The drive belt is quite a bugger to replace as you have to take so many bits and pieces off the chassis and engine to release it. Release it we did however, eventually.
Putting the new one on was a piece of cake and we just went backwards through everything we had previously done and it was back together in no time. Fired up the engine and tried to drive it….nothing. I then realised I’d disengaged the clutch when we were moving it around the workshop. Re-engaged the clutch and it started moving, but very, very slowly.
That belt should not be hanging beneath the pulley like that
After a bit of looking and a bit of thinking we decided we’d gone the wrong way around a pulley. Moved the belt across to the other side, tensioned it up again and all was marvelous. The tractor was flying along – I’d be mowing again in no time. Uncle Chris had to leave at this point and I was pretty tired so we knocked off for the day and I’d finish putting it back together again a few days later.
A few days later came and Oli and I went down to the workshop to finish off putting it together. It was only a few minutes before we realised the path the belt was taking was wrong. It would rub against the grass chute when the cutting deck was lifted which would damage both the grass chute and the belt. So I put the belt back to its original position and tried to make it as tense as possible but nothing I did was working.
I eventually concluded that I had the wrong belt. I double checked the writing on the new belt and it was exactly what I asked for. I disassembled the tractor again to get the belt off [ much quicker second time around ] and compared the new belt to the old one. Exactly the same size! I was perplexed at this point. I consulted online mower forums and made a post about my predicament. I’d done everything right. So I just got more and more confused.
Eventually I went back to the belts and bearings supplier and had a long chat with the fellow there. He was a bit bemused too but suggested I try a belt that is 1 inch smaller. He happened to have one in stock so off I popped with it and fitted it pretty quickly since I was now *very* familiar with the process. It was like night and day! The tension was perfect, the routing avoided the grass chute. It was a thing of beauty.
I called the chap at the belt shop and ordered a Kevlar wrapped belt of the same size and then went along and paid for the two belts. The belt that he loaned me is still on the tractor and the Kevlar belt is waiting until I next tear down the tractor and then I’ll do a replacement.
I’m still struggling to understand why everything on the internet [ possible echo chamber going on ] is telling me one size, and in reality I had to buy one an inch shorter. Ho hum. It’s fixed now and I’m happy again.
