Jungle Freedom Fighters

Charlie has been whining that all the blog posts about him make it look like he just stands around doing nothing – so he put a bit of extra special effort in to do stuff and then made me take pictures of him.

After several years of having a break from my favourite noodles I decided to treat myself again. They are definitely the best…noodles…ever!

I’m finishing work. I need a break. Getting a bit bored doing the same old stuff and there are so many other things that I’d really rather be doing. One of those things is building a shed. I’m gonna build a proper shed with stud walls and a sturdy door and all those things that a proper shed should have.

So we decided to get rid of the old one first. I inherited this shed from my Granddad when he died. I remember him keeping his birds in it when I was just a boy so this is a shed that’s been in our family for a long time. It didn’t take the boy wonder long to put an end to that particular legacy.

He punched out the perspex windows and roundhouse kicked the back off. I hit the front panel with my 2lb lump hammer that I inherited from my Dad and the front panel and then the two remaining sides comically collapsed out wards. We took the whole thing down in about two minutes, after getting the roof off.

So the shed has gone, in its place is a bit of a rough canvas where the shed Mk 2 will be built. It’s going to have electricity and everything.

Everytime I think of fixing stuff I always have the Elbow lyrics of “The fix is in” going through my head. That song is all about rigging a horse race which has nothing to do with me finally installing a pair of optical sensors to stop me breaking my garage doors.

I thought it was going to be really, really difficult to have the signal reflected back to the transmitter/receiver. As it turns out it was super easy. I think if the reflector had been a mirror then yeah…mega tough – but since it has that weird reflector type layout it turns out that you have to put it in roughly the right area and then you’re golden.

It’s all kicking off in the Steele household on the pasta stakes. First we added a little semolina to our mix, then we let the KitchenAid food mixer (flex) do most of the heavy lifting when it came to kneading the dough and then Amelia finished off the kneading by hand. We then made use of our new funky pasta holder upper thing to complete the trifecta of pasta making improvements.

The finished result was lush!

Those of you paying attention will remember that I managed to crash my garage door onto my car and that I planned to get some sensors installed. Well, annoyingly the sensors haven’t arrived yet but I managed to crash my garage door into a ceramic pot. So, it’s a step up from bashing my car in but ho hum.

Fortunately this time the white plastic things didn’t snap, they just cracked a little and made a little plasticcy bit flap around a bit which caused some issues. So, in my usual over-engineered approach I fixed it with some masking tape.

Sensors arriving tomorrow, they’ll be installed this weekend and you my dear reader will hopefully never hear more tales of door smashing plastic bits.

This is Joshua Wong. He’s a political activist in Hong Kong. I don’t know him.

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This is Joshua Ong. He’s a geek living in London and one of my very dear friends. Unfortunately, I do know him.

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He bought me this for Christmas. Now I have to go out and buy the real thing to put in my garage and hopefully not close the garage door on the bonnet.

This is why I say [ very much tongue in cheek ] that it is unfortunate that I know him.

We moved from dry tagliatelle to fresh tagliatelle a while ago and the difference is pretty epic. So inspired by some Saturday morning kitchen cookery type programme making their own pasta, I decided Amelia and I should have a crack at it. We got the pasta machine as a Christmas prezzie from Granddad John and Amelia/Emma bought me the 00 flour used for making pasta…and off we went

After a 30 minute chilling session in the fridge the fun part began

On the whole our first tagliatelle making experience was an immensely positive one. We loved it. But we messed up. We ran the tagliatelle through the pasta machine until it was about the thickness of fresh tagliatelle – which was about two notches away from being the thinnest setting on the machine. This was a mistake. As soon as we started boiling the tagliatelle it swelled up massively and was pretty thick – kinda ending up like Udon noodles. They tasted fantastic, but just a bit thick. So next time we do tagliatelle [ we’ve done several batches of spaghetti since, but no tagliatelle ] we’ll be sure to run them through the machine on the thinnest setting.

For a long time now I’ve had an item on my todo list which is to make my garage doors more intelligent. Add a raspberry-pi into the mix so that I can send the doors up and down using my phone. Put a bit of computer vision in there so that the doors wont close/stop closing if an object is detected in the path…but I didn’t do it. It was a big job and little jobs always took precedent. That was a bit of a mistake.

I was reversing the car back into the garage after doing some shelf painting work [ more on that later ] when I heard an oddly familiar whirring noise. It took a second or two to locate the source of the noise. It was the garage door coming down whilst I was halfway through the door in the car. Like a complete idiot I had the remote control for the door in my pocket and as I’d been turning around to check I wasn’t going to run over my newly painted shelves I’d accidentally triggered the down button.

Annoyingly I was wearing about four layers and had no idea which pocket I’d put the controls in so that I could send the door back up. I was rapidly patting all of my pockets trying to find it and quickly gave up on that plan. I then jammed the car into reverse and shot backwards, but then equally quickly jammed the brakes on worrying that I was going to crash into something. By now time ran out. The door made contact with the bonnet and the motor continued whirring. It pressed harder and harder and various things started whining and squealing before eventually the whiny squealiness became cracking and snappiness.

The white bit on the shaft used to be attached to the white bit on the door.

In fact, all three of the white bits on the shaft used to be attached to the white bits on the door.

Fortunately Emma was home as I was stuck in the garage. I called her, she came to my rescue. We lifted the door off the car and I gingerly reversed it into the garage. We lowered the broken door to the ground and inspected the car. There were a few light scratches, fortunately the bottom of the door has a rubber seal so that protected the car. I’ve since T-Cut’d the car and polished it and it’s looking alright again.

I had a go at fixing the door. Took some links out and the door went up and down like a dream – right up until the point that the door didn’t realise I’d taken the links out and smashed into the floor and broke all three links again – yeah, that was a great day – I hardly swore at all.

Alan, the chap who built the garage in the first place, came over. Fixed it in about five minutes, readjusted all the settings that I’d thrown out by turning the shaft around by hand, drank a beer and then left again.

I’ve since been in contact with the manufacturer of the garage doors and I’m currently trying to get my hands on some sensors that detect if there is an obstacle…if I can’t then I’m definitely going to be putting a raspberry pi in place.

We’re having the garage that’s part of the house turned into another room since we now have a big garage out back. So naturally I have to clean it out and there are these truly massive metal shelf units. They were going to be sent to the metal recycling at the tip but then I realised I could relatively easily turn them into staging for my newly erected greenhouse.

The first shelf unit has now been turned into two full on fantastic bits of greenhouse staging. Metal shelves with several coats of radiator paint. I reckon these shelves will be in my grand-children’s greenhouse one day.

So we bought a new trampoline….a bigger one….a truly massive thing – it’s gotta be seen to be believed

This is some serious steel tubing. I built it, then I took it apart, then I built it again, then I took it apart again. Then I chatted with the help desk and took it even more apart and then built it all again. To say that a few swear words came out of my mouth would be an understatement. If it were flammable I probably would have just set fire to the whole thing. I think the design has some issues…..or maybe they should just try writing the fucking manual in English rather than using those ridiculous drawings that are intended to explain the build procedure to every human on the planet but instead leave you scratching your head about why some cartoon character is specifically being told not to eat a slice of cake.

Over a grand for a trampoline and they can’t be arsed translating the build instructions.

You can’t really tell, but it’s truly massive

Those bushes to the left are about 7ft high

Amelia loves her trampoline, adores it. It’s pretty much the only thing she’s ever asked for – and it’s never been quite the same since a gale blew it across the garden. So when it moved past being ugly and into simply being an eyesore we took it down. To be fair summertime was coming to an end and we planned to buy a new one but it was very, very satisfying to take it apart and get rid of it.

A quick mow later and it’s looking much better. I’ve since put grass seed down and you can barely tell it was ever there.

It was a beautiful day and Charlie was over to visit so we thought we’d get a little exercise with a walk in the countryside. We came across a tree and the boys got stuck in

After our walk across the fields we had a quick drink in The Plough. The wasps were out in full force and I discovered that Oliver and Charlie are a pair of wasp-wusses. Running around screaming like little girls!

Asda did a 25% off wine if you buy 6 or more bottles…

So we filled the wine rack. I’m writing this several weeks after the purchase and the rack is definitely not quite so full anymore

There’s a tree at the back of my office that is slowly dying. It still has leaves and stuff but there is a massive wound in the bark and it’s rotting from the inside out. Given that it has quite a good chance of falling onto the electricity lines that supply my house I’d rather try and take it down in a controlled fashion than let the wind blow it down.

So Oli and I got to work. We rigged up a few bits of climbing rope to hopefully control the tree when it comes to drop.

So, with the ropes set up and the chainsaw at the ready we began. It all went pretty well. The chainsaw went through the tree like a hot knife through butter. The final bit of wood was severed and the tree fell in exactly the direction I didn’t want it to.

Fortunately the rope at the top of the tree took a lot of the weight. I was incredibly lucky. Just a few feet of slack and at least some of those lines would be down and I’d be facing a pretty hefty bill from the electricity people. It was at about this time that Oli remarked “Next time we have to chop a tree down should we get a man in?”. He’s quite wise for his age that one.

I kinda ran out of ideas about how to get this tree down without taking out the electricity so I wedged my ladder underneath it to give it some additional support. Turns out to be an utterly genius move and not at all like me!

With the ladder firmly in place I took another chunk out of the bottom of the tree madly hoping that it didn’t then make the bottom half of the tree too light and then pivot the tree over the ladder and into the power lines. Thankfully it didn’t. I then had a tree supported by a climbing rope and pivoting on a ladder. We were able to swing the tree and and have it floating…away from the power lines

So between us we swung it around and accidentally destroyed the fence post but managed to get it chopped up into small enough pieces for me to split and burn. It was a pretty intense start to a beautiful Saturday morning.

Our cat Willow – which we own…

We’ve also “got” a second “cat” Pickle. His real name is Moses but he refuses to live with his owners and just constantly comes to our house and so Amelia named him Pickle. We’ve sent him home in a cat basket seven times now but he just keeps coming back so we’ve stopped sending him away. Persistent little bugger

Surely by now everyone must know my Mum has a caravan in Wales. Well, we used to go quite regularly but hadn’t been in absolutely ages. The kids still go but Emma and I hadn’t been.

That all changed when we decided to go for a mid-week break and take a bike ride along the North Wales coastal path. For some reason I didn’t take any pictures of the actual bike ride but in the evening we wandered down to the beach to watch the sun set.

So, as a result of buying the Z4 it meant that I had three cars. Which was a little excessive. So I got rid of the 3 series by giving it to Stuart/Stewart – I can never remember the spelling – who will undoubtedly park it in somebody’s front garden before the year is out.

As a result of getting rid of that car it meant we had no way to transport the bikes around…which is definitely not groovy. So I bought a bike rack for the Porsche.

I didn’t quite think it through though as I forgot to buy the light set and number plate and stuff. We still took it to Wales but I’m pretty sure had a police man pulled in behind us then we’d have been in a spot of trouble. Must buy some stuff to make it all legal.

For a while now we’ve been sitting on the outdoor garden furniture and remarking upon how tatty it was. Even Paddy, of all people, remarked that it had definitely seen better days. So we bought some more. Proper recyclable furniture. Created in conjunction with the Eden Project made from fully renewable stuff. It’s a vision of beauty.

Got drunk and agreed to buy a car. I reckon this is at least car #3 that I’ve bought whilst drunk. Excellent fun though. BMW Z4 2.5L Straight 6 with a roof that goes up and down like a god damned Transformer – wackkah acckaaah ack