We took a speedboat out to a series of islands in Krabi province. Did some snorkeling but the conditions weren’t ideal. I’ll link to a video when I get it all sorted out.
Finally escaped the traffic of Bangkok
Photobooth fun at Sammi’s wedding
First ever uber ride in Thailand
Tuk tuk ho
Fish feet
Farewell London, for a while
2016 Mission
It’s big
Cooking tripod
Oliver and I woke up on a Sunday morning and decided what we had to do was make a cup of tea. Outside.
We built a fire and burned off a load of rubbish we wanted to get rid of. Whilst that was going on we found three likely looking branches and sawed them to roughly the right lengths. Recycled some wire from a chain link fence to tie them all together and gave it a whirl.
For Mk 1 we were using rope to suspend our Billy can. It worked ok as a short term solution. Also, I forgot to put the lid on.
Emma came down when all the hard work had been done and there was tea that needed drinking. Oli doesn’t really drink tea so he gave a celebratory dab.
For Mk 2 I recycled some chain off an old gate that I had lying around. We also discovered we could only make one cup of tea per Billy can so this time I made the fire a lot hotter to make my cup of tea more quickly.
Fixing the road
We live on an unadopted road. Over the past few years it’s been getting more and more bumpy. For the past couple of months I’ve been regularly grounding my car when coming in to park so I finally decided to fix it.
I got 4*1000kg bags of MOT Type 1 delivered
and hired a roller. I was going to use a whacker plate but where’s the fun in that?
it was then a family effort to get to stoney sandy mix out of the bags and into the right places.
It doesn’t look too great and it isn’t perfectly flat but my car no longer bottoms out when I park it.
Lessons learned:
- The MOT Type 1 tends not to be mixed too well which doesn’t set properly. Mix it in the barrow before dumping it in place.
- It’s bloody hard work getting a tonne of stones out of a bag. Use a machine to do it next time.
- Make sure your supplier also has MOT Type 2 which you can order a few tonnes of to give it a nice smooth finish.
Fixing the trampoline, again.
Quite some time ago we had some gales and the trampoline was blown across the garden. It was pretty badly wrecked but I patched it together again. Unfortunately the patching wasn’t quite good enough and it kept falling apart. I’d regularly spend days fixing it again and it would just break again. I finallu decided enough was enough. I decided to fix it one last time and if it broke again then it was going into the bin. So this fix had to be a good one…
I took out the metal ummm things that held up the netting and drilled holes in them so that I could drive a screw through them and properly fix them to the uprights.
The finished product. I had to use tie wraps to connect the netting back up with the screwed metal things but it’s going to stay up! The thing about TP Toys trampolines is that they’re built for easy erection rather than long term use. The system of holding up the metal things is shockingly bad, the top of the netting wears through in no time and the studs for keeping the uprights vertical are simply shit.
First attempt at glass cutting
Building a new desk
A while ago Oliver asked for some space in my office to build Lego creations. Being the dutiful loving father [ and a little bored ] I decided to indulge him.
The wood was a 40mm x 900mm x 3000mm piece of birch from eBay which I had to chop down to size in the garage.
I completely messed up getting the braces in a line. I’m really not very good at that sort of thing.
So I eventually went with supports at either end and then worry about making it safe later
Below is not quite the finished item. I had to wait for a hole saw to arrive and then I added 4 x 60mm holes near the wall to keep cables tidy and underneath I installed cable trays so that it still looked neat when all the kit was in place.
Finally I used a car jack and a stool to lift the whole desk up a little and add some steel supports underneath so the whole thing doesn’t just collapse if somebody sits on it…but I’ve yet to pluck up the courage to sit on it.
Massive thanks go to Mark from #4 who helped me carry to wood from the garage to my office and then came up with the cunning plan of sliding it into place using the sofa bed.