Nico was absolutely desperate to get some freshly made doughnuts from Blackpool so a trip to the Pleasure Beach was instigated.
It was glorious! The place was empty. It was the 4th September so all the schools were back [ apart from Oli ] – ok, so most of the schools were back. We barely queued up for any of the rides and because of that we’d pretty much done every big ride in the park by lunch.
Jason and I sat down and had a couple of beers whilst the boys went off and did the same rides again, and again. Jason vowed he was never going on the Big One again and I kinda agreed with him – I always come off that ride with a headache. However, given that the park was so empty we came up with the “cunning” plan of queuing for the front seat of the Big One.
It only took 5 or 10 minutes to get to the front seats and was an astonishing ride. Properly terrifying. Anyway, about half way through the ride I look at Jason and he’s got his head down scrabbling in the footwell. I was all confused and yelled “what are you doing?”. Jason didn’t hear me though – we were going very fast and it was very noisy. So when the ride came to an end a very ashen faced Jason looked at me and said “My phone flew out of my pocket”. Disaster. Proper disaster.
Jason reported it to the park authorities and they said they’d try and find it in the morning when they do the walk around the track. This was a bit rubbish though. I asked if Nico had a “Find My Phone” type thing setup so that he could see the locations of Jason’s phone. Turns out he did. Turns out the phone looked like it was outside the grounds of the Pleasure Beach and really close to the Big Blue Hotel. So off we went, to the Big Blue Hotel.
After wandering up and down the fence line going “we’re right on top of it” and “it must be here somewhere” we eventually caught a glimpse of the phone through the hole in the gate. Some cunning teamwork and a big stick meant that we were eventually able to retrieve Jason’s phone. It was an amazing bit of fortune. The people walking the track would never have found it as it wasn’t on the Pleasure Beach property. If the phone hadn’t landed next to the gate we would never have spotted it as we couldn’t see through the fence.
Jason was overjoyed
There were a few new scratches and dinks but it had survived a fall of about 20m at high speed.
After a pretty relaxing week up in Washington we took a flight down to Ontario, CA. We were going to fly into LAX but were advised a smaller more intimate airport would be better. It was. We got out of the airport quickly, picked up the hire car quickly and hit the freeways of LA to get to our apartment in downtown.
Turns out our downtown apartment really was very downtown! We went out for dinner at a Thai restaurant but managed to take a wrong turn on the way there and ended up on the road with all the stars in the pavement., Hollywood Boulevard.
We hung out in LA for a couple of days and did our best to avoid the major touristy stuff. Scouse offered us some tickets to go to Disney but it was just sooooooo hot that we didn’t fancy standing in a queue for 1hr for a 1 minute ride. We saw the Brae tar pits, Griffith Observatory, shopped for trainers in West Hollywood, ate at Chick Fil A amongst other places, took a long walk down Hollwood Boulevard looking at the stars in the pavement. It was a pretty cool place to be.
After a couple of days in our apartment in LA we decided to head out to the beach and so rented a hotel near Venice Beach. It only took about an hour to get there and was a pretty cool place. The big revelation was the constant smell of weed. I don’t mind a bit of weed, used to quite like the smell – but after days of being constantly bombarded by it – well, it got a little much really. Maybe the UK should decriminalise rather than legalise, but ho hum, I digress.
We rented a bike each from the beach and headed north towards Santa Monica Pier along the Venice Beach cycle path. We had an excellent time. Cruising along with other people on skateboards, e-bikes, scooters. Was truly epic. Then the day took a turn for the worse. After we handed the bikes back we were wandering in the general direction of our hotel looking for somewhere to eat lunch, and drink some beer, when out of nowhere appeared a muscle bound psychopath. Emma and Oli saw him stomping down the road with no shirt, fists clenched, a look of anger on his face yelling stuff and gave the dude a wide berth. Unfortunately I was in a bit of a world of my own and only saw him at the last second. I swerved to avoid him but he took a sidestep in my direction and full on shoulder checked me. He then spun around and started hurling racial abuse. “Show some fucking respect white boy. I’m gonna punch those curly blonde hairs out of your fucking head” – stuff along those lines. Was pretty scary really. I kept walking expecting a punch to the back of the head at some point but he moved on to harass somebody else, and we drank quite a few calming beers. On the bright side at least I now have a crazy story of some big black dude harassing me in LA.
The next morning we were heading to Monterey which despite looking like a teeny tiny distance on the map actually took us hours. Many fun bits to this road trip but one particularly memorable bit was the pit-stop in Paso Robles. Whilst we were in America it was hot. Seriously hot. Unseasonably hot. As we got out of the car in Paso Robles to visit Jack-in-the-box [ they actually give you the food in a box ] the temperature was 109F. It was unbearably hot and made my skin tingle just standing in it. Fortunately by the time we arrived in Monterey it was 20deg cooler.
Food – in a box!
Many fun bits in Monterrey. Me messing up the uber and getting us dropped off in the middle of nowhere and having to hike the rails to trails route into town. Oli getting asked for his number by some girl at the bowling alley. All of us being there at the same time as the Monterrey Car Festival with people slowly driving through The Cannery in old American cars with the suspension bouncing up and down. It was pretty epic…but a little too touristy for me.
Emma and Oli in Monterrey
After two nights in Monterrey we continued our journey north to meet up with Tommy and Pat in Russian River. Driving over the Golden Gate bridge was a little disappointing as the top was hidden by mist. Our planned stop at Muir Woods to see the Redwoods had to be abandoned since it seems it’s turned into a proper tourist attraction since Emma and I last visited twenty years ago and now you have to reserve a parking space! However, it was great to arrive in the middle of nowhere [ but surrounded by Redwoods which was cool ] at Tommy’s rented cabin in the woods. We kayaked on the river, we drank beer, we played darts and generally caught up with T and P whom we hadn’t seen for far too long.
Oli, me [ in my new t-shirt ], Tommy, Pat, EmI do own more than one t-shirt – honestly
After two nights of sleeping on Tommy’s mezzanine with the ceiling inches from my face causing me to bang my head every time I moved in the night, we headed off to Vallejo to borrow Pat’s house for a bit. Before setting off though we went for a walk in Armstrong Woods near Russian River. Just as beautiful as Muir but without all the tourists.
The deal was we look after Pat’s house, cats and plants and in return we have a place to stay rent free. Which was a bargain. When we arrived we could only find one of the cats which was OK as Pat had said the other was very skittish. However as we were exploring the gardens Emma made the rather grizzly discovery of a dead cat that had been partly eaten by something – we think Raccoons. After a bit of a delicate conversation with Pat we were advised to check the dead cats chin since there is a cat similar to Pats that lives in the area but apparently has a hairier chin. So Oliver and I were out in the baking California sunshine using a stick to lift the decaying dead cats head up so we could see its chin. At this point I compared the markings on the dead cat with the markings on a picture of the cat that P had sent me. They were two very different cats.
So we dug a hole, stuck the dead cat in it and filled it over again. Welcome to Vallejo!
From Vallejo the best way to get to San Francisco is to take the ferry from Vallejo Harbour straight into the Port of San Francisco. So we did. We rode the trolley cars, we jumped on buses, we climbed Coit Tower…all 13 floors since the elevator was broken, we walked down Lombard Street and we ate some food in China Town. The thing we didn’t do however, which was a big thing on my bucket list for this trip, was ride in a self driving Waymo taxi. I had the app, I’d been invited to use the taxi system but when I came to put in my credit card details it demanded a zip code with numbers in it. 90210 – that sort of thing. No matter what I tried I couldn’t authenticate my card for the app. So it was with a heavy heart [ after some racial abuse from a homeless black guy! ] that we boarded the ferry and left SF.
I however was not to be deterred. I messaged Jason and asked him to send me his credit card details so that I could book a Waymo. He didn’t believe me at first. Thought I was having a bit of a laugh. But eventually he relented and sent me the details over. I popped them into the Waymo app and with great delight saw the message “Where do you want to go”.
So the next day we caught the ferry back into San Francisco. We hopped on to the cable car from the ferry port that took us, well, frankly we didn’t care where it took us since we planned to get a Waymo at the end, and made sure we sat/stood on the outside of the cable car
Hanging off the side of the cable car taking a photo was a bit dicey
We jumped off the cable car at the last stop. Got shouted at by some crazy white guy wandering the streets of SF, ate some Vietnamese food, and summoned a Waymo.
It was absolutely fantastic. No driver, just a steering wheel moving around with signs all over saying “Don’t touch the wheel”. It drove us for about 25 minutes up to Haight-Ashbury and we wandered around the hippy district looking at cool clothes and shoes. But I don’t think anybody bought anything.
Back to Pats. Ate food, drank wine, slept and then surprisingly Tommy popped in as we were leaving for Oakland Airport to head back to Seattle/Tacoma.
We set off from ACI Slaton heading for Sipanska Luka. Everything was beautiful. Three of us started the day with a swim in the sea and then we headed for the pool in the marina which had a pool bar.
Captain Michal pretending to wait for a beer
Unfortunately the weather wasn’t hot enough for us to sit at the pool bar and have a beer…but we still had a morning beer.
We set sail for Sipanska and I took the boat off the mooring with some great coaching from Michal. I took us out into the main body of water heading for Sipanska and we decided to raise the genoa. We sailed along like this for a while and turned off the engines. We were making about 5kts and the winds were good so we decided to raise the main sail. We didn’t want the Genoa bumping about as we put the main sail up so we furled it away…a bit. In hindsight we should have furled it away entirely but hindsight is a bugger. It took us a while to get the mainsail up due to various problems and all this time the Genoa was flapping about. This flapping managed to loosen the shackle that attached the Genoa to the sheet until the shackle undid completely and shot the length of the boat like a bullet narrowly missing taking out Goochy. So now we had a mainsail half up and a severely flapping Genoa that we now had no control over. We managed to furl the Genoa some more to get rid of that problem for now, and then we carried on with the mainsail. It was at this point we put the first reef sheet into the electric winch to put some tension in it. Sadly we came straight out of the jammer and onto the electric winch at a bad angle. So when we started the electric winch it ripped the sheet out of the jammer and we broke it. So now we had a broken Genoa and a broken jammer, but we had a mainsail up.
Unfortunately on a Catamaran you can’t really sail on just a main as the boat becomes unbalanced and keeps heading into wind. So we dropped the mainsail again and started heading to a protected bay to make repairs.
We found a decent enough spot to park and anchored. We found a spare shackle and put the sheet back onto the Genoa and then tried to furl it away completely only to discover we’d over rotated the self furling jib mechanism thing and couldn’t put it away. So we made some more repairs, fixed that problem and then had a beer and did a little swimming.
Finally the time came to head to Sipanska so we decided to weigh anchor and get ready to go. We had some issues with the anchor earlier on the trip where the anchor chain would sometimes bundle up near the winch instead of dropping neatly into the anchor chain locker. This time it bundled up before we could stop it and knocked the anchor chain off the winch. This meant the anchor chain was attached to nothing and instead of raising the anchor chain we deposited 100m of chain onto the seabed. Fortunately the end of the chain is attached to the boat by a line so we were able to drag a few metres of chain back into the boat by hand, attach it the winch and started lifting the anchor again. This time I occupied the locker next to the anchor chain and kept jamming to end of the boat hook into the pile of chain to make sure there was room for the anchor chain to drop neatly.
We eventually made it to Sipanska for some much needed food and wine.
End result – we snapped some plastic off the jammer.
My new passion is growing Basil plants. No way do we need this much Basil but I’ve been cultivating new plants from cuttings and then giving them away as presents. Who in the world does not need a fresh Basil plant on the window sill? Seriously…who?
When we did the extension the builder installed some Oak skirting boards. He did the joins using a butt joint. I moaned about it here [ https://junglefreedomfighters.com/?p=2017 ] in the past.
Well I’ve just been bought a scroll saw [ thanks Mum ] to have another crack at all this. The scroll saw is essentially a powered version of the coping saw I mention in the post above.
Turns out I’m still a bit rubbish at it.
Shiny!
The skirting board joint you see above is my first attempt. I’ll persevere with my scroll saw with a bit more practice and then hopefully I’ll finally have the skirting boards I’ve dreamt of.
Jac and Mark and the kids all went out to celebrate one of their children’s birthdays…yeah I should really know which one but I’m rubbish at things like that and I was totally distracted by us getting Holly for the day.
We absolutely loved having her. Yeah, there were a few puddles. Yeah, she did nearly break the patio doors by running head first into them. Yeah, she did have a bit of a chew on my hat. But it was brilliant to have such an excited bundle of energy in the house. Violet enjoyed it for the first hour or two but then she wanted a sleep…and Holly didn’t.
As a side note I also popped around to Jac and Mark’s yesterday and Holly came running and jumping at me and was so excited that a bit of wee came out onto my foot. Her wee, not mine.
When I was young and at Primary School my Mum was a Schoolteacher and so couldn’t pick me up. Fortunately Nana Molly lived a few hundred metres away from my school and so after I finished school I’d walk over to Nanas and she’d make me my “tea”. Dinner was often “Lobbies”. Meat, potatoes, onions and other veg in a gravy. Some call it potato hash, some call it scouse. We called it lobbies. Anyway, quite often Nana Molly would also make jam tarts. They were amazing. Highlight of my day even though it was just shortcrust pastry with some jam in it.
I recently had some pre-rolled shortcrust pastry that was past the use by date so I had to do something quick. So I picked up some sausage meat from the local butcher and made some posh sausage rolls. I had some left over pastry and we had some jam in the fridge that had been there a while and this is the end result.
The third from the right was made without using a pastry cutter. Dunno what I was thinking
My friendly neighbourhood electrician finally found some time for me and came and hooked my workshop up to power. I specified my usual ridiculous number of plug sockets, four strip lights and two outdoor sockets. The electrician quizzed me about what I intended to use the outdoor sockets and I had to admit I had no idea. I’m sure they’ll come in useful for something though.
We left the armoured cable trailing over the garden because neither of us were up for digging. The sun came out the next day and Oli fancied earning a bit of cash so out he went and buried the cable for me. He actually did a pretty good job of it too.
Will we as a race [ or possibly that should be as a gender ] ever get tired of drawing penis’ on things? It’s a pastime as old as the hills. I reckon somewhere in Africa there’s a cave with a huge penis drawn in dinosaur blood or something.
Anyway, I bring you the latest act of petty vandalism from my little boy.
I finally got a pair of orange trainers and ohhhh my god are they orange! They don’t look so bad in the picture but once you get outside in them they’re bright. We went for lunch with Erika and Keith and I wore them. At the end of lunch I went for a wee. On the way back from my wee I heard some woman on a table remark to her companions “There they are…that’s the man with the trainers”
At the end of each term everyone tends to finish at lunchtime so off we pop to The Plough for lunch and beers. The Plough is great as it is walkable, you can book a table for four plus a dog and they do fantastic salt and pepper chicken with half rice half chips and curry sauce.
The end of the Summer term was a bit of a bust as both the kids refused to come despite it being a family tradition so this year I made it clear we were *all* going.
When we had the extension done we got a plumber in to do some stuff. Turns out he’s an absolute bell end. Monumental dick. Nearly ended up costing me a new boiler because he couldn’t be arsed flushing the system. Anyway. One of the other things he did was to fit a stop cock so that I could turn off my outside water supply when the weather gets toward freezing.
The input to the stopcock is a 15mm pipe. The output from the stopcock is a 25mm MDPE pipe that goes down the garden. So he fitted a 25/15mm stopcock. All good so far. The only minor problem is that the stopcock is unidirectional. It’s designed to stop the flow of water FROM a 25mm pipe to a 15mm pipe. The exact opposite of the situation we have. The upshot of this is that I could not stop the flow of water down the garden. This wasn’t such a big deal, I could cope with it, until the builders next door offered to remove my bamboo problem [ more on this later ] with a massive digger. The bamboo is growing directly above my water pipe and I was pretty convinced they were going to damage my pipe and my only solution would be to turn off the main stopcock in the house and we wouldn’t be able to use water until the pipe was repaired.
What the plumber should have done is put in a standard 15mm stopcock on the 15mm pipe and then just fitted an adaptor from the output of the stopcock onto the 25mm pipe. Piece of cake. No problem. Have it done in 5 minutes. Except of course since the pipe work has been fitted we’ve built a kitchen around it which makes access really really hard.
I had to chop the crap out of my kitchen cabinet, fit a series of 90 degree bends to avoid the waste pipe and introduce a 15/25 adaptor which can’t be seen in the picture above. All went pretty well until I had to introduce the adaptor. Getting a clean cut on a 15mm pipe is easy. inserting the pipe support on a 15mm pipe is easy. Everything to do with a 25mm pipe is really really hard. I couldn’t get a square cut with the cheap pipe cutters that the nobhead plumber left behind. I struggled to push the pipe insert far enough in. Both of which combined to give me a leak. Ultimately I bought a new pair of ratcheting pipe cutters which gave me an excellent cut on the pipe. I then fired up my heat gun on the MDPE to warm it slightly and make it just a touch more flexible so that I could get the pipe insert in.
Now the job is complete. I have a stopcock to stop the water going outside. The builders dug up the bamboo and didn’t even come close to my water pipe. It’s all been a massive waste of time.
The time has come to build the stud walls and give some more rigidity to my oak frame. We got a delivery of timber and had to move it from the drop off point beyond my gates into my garage where we’d be storing it.
Oli and I did the manual labour since he was on Summer holidays. We started off carry 2 lengths of 4×2. Then I carried 3 pieces in one go. Naturally Oli then had to carry 4. So I moved 5. With 6 pieces of timber left Oli went for it. It all slipped out of his hands and he struggled to get through the gate but he made it in the end. Took him twice as long as if he’d taken them one at a time though
All set for turning into beautiful stud walls
In the past when I’ve been making stud walls I just kind of eyeballed the right angles with varying results. But when I was making my bookcases I started to appreciate the beauty of a proper right angle. So I got some 90 degree clamps. I made use of them on each stud wall I made and they turned out pretty well.
As I put my first nicely square stud wall in it highlighted that the entire frame had shifted at some point and was now kinda leaning backwards a bit. So I dug out some ground anchors and a ratchet strap and brought the frame forwards by a few degrees. The ratchet strap would have to stay in place until I had stud walls everywhere. It was there for a couple of weeks and it was a happy moment when I eventually disconnected the strap and nothing fell over!
First test stud wall with added ratchet-strap-nessMore stud walls with the OG still in the background
The day eventually came when I had all the stud walls in place and I could get rid of the ratchet strap and finally give my grass a proper cut.
It’s difficult to make out in the picture above but I’ve also put the rafters in for my mezzanine. So what’s the first thing everyone does when building a mezzanine? Lob a palette up there and then climb up a ladder onto the wobbly palette then call your son and say “hey look out of your window” and then wave at him from the end of your garden. That’s the first thing everyone does right?
Me on top of a palette on top of my mezzanine taking a selfie
For the past decade or so all the old Xerox boys have tried to meet up in September to celebrate being another year older, wiser and still alive. We’ve lost a couple along the way and some have just drifted off but we always get a good turnout when we meet up
Gang signs Darren…really?
This year’s restaurant was Thaikuhn and we all had a wonderful time except Scouse who nearly got battered in the toilet when he flicked his wet hands in the face of a complete stranger who had a passing resemblance to Dickie. There’s always something that goes wrong!
For the past few years I’ve stayed in one of the colleges. I’m a bit dubious about going back to Sidney Sussex college after the fire alarm/smoke detector incident so this year a bunch of us stayed at Christs, which I argue is a better place anyway.
My Mum and I had a wonderful day at the Emmerdale experience tour. Sam Dingle poured me a pint for £6 [ robbing bastard ] and my mother and I met Laurel
When we came to The Woolpack I asked my Mother to take a picture of me. This is what I got
A while ago we had a Thai meal with Sarah and Freddie. During the Thai meal Sarah mentioned they were going Karting later in the week and would Oli and I like to go. Oli said he’d like to try it, I was amazed that he’d never done it, so later that week off we popped.
Now I personally am rather a dab hand at this sort of thing as I went quite often during the magic4 days ….
Won the entire thing after overtaking Brian Bennet on the ramp up the bridge on the final lap. I bet he still smarts about arseing up that corner and giving me a way past
Oli did really well for his first ever go at Karting. I won, of course, but when the lap times came in Oli’s fastest lap was only 0.5s behind my fastest lap. I was very impressed with him.
After the karting session Oli was buzzing and asked if he could go again the week after with his mates. Oli organised it. I booked it. The parents went along to watch them and Oli took first place. Got a “gold” medal and everything.
Amelia was off in Spain with Mary so Emma, Oli and I took a trip into Liverpool to do an escape room. It was expensive and hot but very much fun. Oli was great – we were rubbish. On the way back we nipped into Albert Schloss and had the best beer and pretzels evahhhhhhhh
