Jungle Freedom Fighters

The shed saga rumbleth on….

I always had Dan’s voice rumbling in the back of my head that I should be putting a hardcore base beneath my concrete. It nagged at me. Kept me awake at night. Until finally I cracked. I lifted up the paving stones – which I was just being lazy by burying – and ordered some more wood to go with a couple of bulk bags of hardcore. I specifically ordered the hardcore as bulk bags to be delivered on a truck with a hoist so that they could drop them into the dug out base hole. The guy turned up, took one look and told me there was “no chance” the arm would lift the bag over the bushes. He didn’t even have a go … that’s the problem with people today – no willingness to go the extra mile to help ME!

So anyway, I spent a couple of days wheelbarrowing two bulk bags [ or about 2 tonnes ] of stones around the bushes and into my hole. I then hired a compression plate and the end result looked like this :

Slightly before doing all this the pubs in England re-opened. So I took a break for a while and met up with Paul and Jason. Paul and I started discussing concrete pouring techniques and he put me onto the concrete poker. It’s basically a vibrator but I think people in the building industry are averse to using that word. Turns out the poker/vibrator was a genius idea of Paul’s. He also told me about how to use a float, which is you rotate the handle to change the angle of the float and have it skim across the surface of the concrete giving you a neat finish. This came in incredibly useful when the chap at the tool hire shop asked me if I knew how to use it. “Sure”, I replied “you just twist the handle and change the angle right?” – the tool hire guy replied affirmatively and added “you wouldn’t believe how many people bring it back and say they couldn’t make it work”. We exchanged knowing glances and eye-rolls and I swaggered off with my pride intact.

The day of the concrete pour arrived and it was a beautiful morning. No wind, no rain, sunshine – but they did arrive at about 7.30am.

So the stressful bit is now done. I’ve never poured concrete before and if it had gone all wrong then it would have been a proper PITA to sort it out. From now on it’s just laying a few bricks and screwing together some wood…famous last words.

During a recent impromptu garden party where we basically started drinking at 11am and didn’t quite get around to stopping until I couldn’t speak anymore and then proceeded to sit on the toilet with the lid down and crack it and then wake up next morning wondering who the bloody hell broke my toilet…we played chess.

I played Nigel – who I reckon is some sort of secret Grandmaster because he kicked my arse at least twice – that I remember. I firmly believe that it’s his Grandmaster-dom rather than me constantly confusing my Bishop for my King, or my pawn for my Queen. Anyway, it got me interested in Chess again and so Charlie and I had an evening of sipping some fine wines and drinking some fine rum and playing some less-than-fine Chess.

It finally happened, I turned 50. Many in this world at times thought I wouldn’t make it this far – but here I am with my London Gangsta Crew at Moor Hall eating Michelin starred food.

Or complete OCD nutcase, you decide.

So I always have an omelette for breakfast on weekdays. It’s always two eggs, always chorizo, always cheese and then sometimes mushrooms, sometimes tomato and sometimes red pepper. That’s not the weird bit.

I noticed this morning that I always put my omelette ingredients on the left side of the omelette and always fold from right to left…thusly

I generally use the same ring on the hob too – which always reminds me of a r/casualuk post asking if anyone had a favourite ring on the cooker. Seems I do, for omelettes at least.

This is likely to be a series of blog posts as it’s going to be quite the saga. As I mentioned in my earlier post I intend to be drinking wine and building sheds. The wine drinking is pretty much covered – so I thought we’d make a start on building a proper shed

Next step – building the rebar supports and pouring concrete – I told you it was going to be an epic!

Now then, I’m not specifically saying that I’m retiring but nor am I ruling it out. For the sake of this blog post let’s just pretend that I’m done working.

So, what does one eat on the very first morning of one’s not-necessarily-retirement-day-but-maybe.

It had to happen sooner or later but 1st April 2021 is when it actually occurred. I’ve finally finished working for Sky. I started by developing v2 of the Android Sky News app in West Cross House, then moving on to work on the Sky Sports app. I left for a year to work in Manchester but then got drafted back into Sky to work on the super top secret Sky Q app. When I started working on this project I couldn’t be told what the project was until I signed up – which was all a bit weird. Had an absolute whale of a time with the mobile app development team, made many great friends [ Dragan, Josh, Michal, Doc et al ] and one mortal enemy – I still maintain that Eran Boudjnah [ or whatever the fuck he’s called ] is a monumental fucking bell-end

After several years of working on Android I made the move to the EPG team where I worked with Stu and Dave and many other amazing people. Then Rishi Sunak came along and introduced IR35 and it all kinda went tits up. Ho hum.

So here we find ourselves in the middle, or hopefully coming to the end, of a global pandemic and yours truly wondering what to do next. The obvious move is to drink wine and build sheds – so to that end I’d like to thank my colleagues at Sky that clubbed together and bought me something wet and red – it was lush

This is the black cat that Willow [ our proper cat ] absolutely hates. Whenever the black cat comes into our garden Willow makes this god awful noise. It’s kind of like a moany cat scream with added wailiness. So I properly got into trouble for giving the black cat some food. Seems it’s ok for everyone else in the house to adopt waifs and strays – except for me!

I’ve been trying to find a nice simple fitbit clock face. All I want is a pretty picture, my heart rate and the number of steps that I’ve done today…oh, and the time of course.

Could I find one in the huge online array of clock faces? Could I bollocks. It’s all crazy, in your face, neon themed god awful screens. Or pictures of the stars and stripes and shit like that.

So I made my own

This is v1 – just showing the time. v2 has the same picture but I added the heart rate and steps – and took the seconds off the clock. I just need to add the battery level and I’m done.

Fitbit marketplace my ass.

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