It’s that time of year again
Caricature
Oli desperately wanted a father/son caricature. How could I resist?
Samui Culture
We went over to see the Big Bhudda today and then had lunch on Chaweng beach, picked up some bits and pieces followed by beer and a curry. Smashing day
Private pool
We checked out of noisy road dog poo beach bungalow and moved up into the hills of koh Samui. Private pool (sometimes), biggest hotel room I have *ever* stayed in and absolutely stunning views over to Ko Phangan. Bit of a trek to the shops but ho hum. Off to big bhudda and Chaweng today.
Koh Samui
We made it to Koh Samui. Beautiful sunsets just like we remember but the place has changed massively and not in a good way 🙁
Koh Phi Phi
We headed into the Phi Phi national marine park by speedboat. We popped into a few beaches but Hat Maya ( where the beach was filmed ) was just ridiculously busy. Even the main Phi Phi Don beach was pretty rammed. Quite disappointing and annoying in many ways 🙁
Speed boat to the islands
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
Wedding over we took the first opportunity we could to escape the chaos of Bangkok City and fly out to Ao Nang beach in Krabi province. Massage, snorkeling, streetfood and beer. Not necessarily in that order.
Photobooth fun at Sammi’s wedding
First ever uber ride in Thailand
Tuk tuk ho
A morning in Lumphini park looking at the monitor lizards and then a crazy tuk tuk ride home. Quick dip in the pool before heading out for a dinner cruise on the Chao Praya River.
Mooching along Khao San Rd buying sarongs and other assorted tat…..and beer. Arrived via tuk tuk from Wat Poh where we couldn’t get in because we had shorts on. 🙁
Fish feet
For some reason the fish preferred the old feet of Emma and I. We were in hysterics with the fish nibbling away. Strangest feeling ever
Farewell London, for a while
My last night in London for a while was spent in the usual style at my favourite dumpling joint
2016 Mission
Each year I tend to try to accomplish something. In 2016 the ambition was to visit the theatre every month. As you can see, I accomplished it. There were a few close calls when I only made it to the theatre by the 29th of the month but nevertheless…..boom!
BTW – Harold Pinter plays…shit
It’s big
4.9 sq metres of flexifoil goodness
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
Cutting small pieces is a piece of cake. But whenever I try to cut a big piece it breaks more or less in the right place but with jaggedy bits. So it looks a bit rubbish but at least my greenhouse is now complete with the old wonky bits removed