The place where I document the stupid stuff I do
Usually the sail shade will suffice when it comes to keeping cool and snoozing in the back garden, but sometimes one needs a little extra shade for when the sun is starting to go down and the rays dip beneath the shade and start cooking you. Enter, the side shade
This is the good bit. This is the bit where my garage that was full of wood and has been for quite some time
…begins to empty.
Charlie and I started carrying the wood out of the garage and sawing it into roughly the sizes we wanted and erected some stud walls. We did this for a while and then started doing a bit of drinking. It all got a bit blurry but eventually we ended up with some pretty badly fitting stud walls. The reason they were pretty badly fitting is because I made the mistake of not springing some cash for some new bricks and instead used some that I had in the back garden which ultimately were all different sizes. Because it appears I’m not as good at laying bricks as I thought I was it’s all a bit wobbly. Furthermore, because the day I laid the bricks was really really hot and the concrete still trying to soak up moisture all my mortar went off too quickly which resulted in a bit of a shoddy job…but ho hum – it’s just a shed.
In the picture above you can see that the front left brick has been taken out. This is partly due to the aforementioned shoddy brick laying and partly because Emma looked at it and said “Do you think the red tractor will fit through that hole?”. I measured it, and it would…just. So I took a couple of bricks out to make the hole bigger. It was slightly before this happened that I cracked my head on my old shed doorway and decided this wan’t going to happen on my new shed and made the whole thing taller. Plans, pffffkkkk, fuck that.
Because I made the whole thing taller I decided to add a mezzanine – but that can wait until part 2.
Paul finally became an old bastard like the rest of us
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.
This is Joshua Ong. He’s a geek living in London and one of my very dear friends. Unfortunately, I do know him.
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.