Jungle Freedom Fighters

I’ve been able to solve the Rubik’s Cube for quite a few years and do it every now and then to keep the formula/algorithm/moves/whatever fresh in my head. But recently I happened to be in the room when Emma and Oli were watching Arrow and Felicity Smoak talked about a cube within a cube and then did it on the TV. It was pretty cool. So I looked it up and …

Can’t remember how to do it without looking it up – but I’ll get there

I did it – I finally did it. I solved a Sudoku. I was up early on a Sunday morning. The house was quiet and the news was looping so I decided to have a crack at solving the Sudoku. I tried a few in the past and just got frustrated/stuck/bored but this time I persevered.

So now I can do them quite regularly. Still takes me ages though – even with Emma helping. So now we regularly solve the Guardian crossword, 9 letter word and Sudoku. Getting old!

No idea if I’m spelling names correctly – but we went to Manchester to celebrate the birthday of our ummmmm second cousin once removed, or something.

The Thai food was amazing. My Thai, John Dalton St. Well worth a visit

As a result of all the building work we’re having done I decided to have a massive fire and get rid of some of the crap. When I say massive…it’s been the biggest one yet. It managed to melt the drainpipe on the back of my office. So I’ll have to replace that in the spring time then 🙁

For the first time in an awfully long time I boarded a plane, flew to Croatia and hopped on a 40ft catamaran for a week of “sailing” around the islands of Croatia

I went with Michal and Josh along with a bunch of crazy guys that Michal knew. Much fun was had…

Many beautiful sunsets were observed…

Many crazy things were done…

and many beautiful towns visited

What could be more fun than going into a family member’s Netflix profile and messing with their name and profile pic?

It’s been quite the journey. Laying concrete, getting drunk, building stud walls, getting drunk, putting on a roof, getting drunk. So finally it came to the time to stop drinking [ it helped that Charlie stopped coming around since he now lives in Manchester ] and finish the job.

So I enlisted the services of mini me and did a bit of slave labouring

Some people, cough Dan cough, mock me for my Ryobi tools fetish. But if they’re good enough for the god that is Colin Furze then they’re good enough for me…and apparently Oli.

We made a bit of a shoddy job in places [ this is rather a recurring theme right ] when putting the tongue and groove cladding on. You can see this in the back wall where there is light coming through the planks – you shouldn’t really have light coming through the planks but hey ho – it’s only a shed.

Added a bit of guttering…

Then came the time to make and mount some doors. I went through a few versions of doors and this bit could be a blog post all of its own, but I’m getting a bit bored of blogging about my shed so I’m going to skip over it. I had some 16mm or 18mm [ can’t remember which ] ply laying around so I made use of it. I really should have used something much less thick as these doors weigh a tonne! Especially after putting on my fancy shmancy outsidey bits

If any burglars are considering coming nicking my paint cans and hammock then please don’t smash through my walls / crowbar my doors – you can just unscrew the hinges and you’re in!

Aaron came and hooked me up with electricity for lights and plug sockets and stuff.

And finally we come to the end of the odyssey that has been the shed building mission. I’ve got stuff in there, I’ve added the fascia boards to the front to make it all pretty and I even sealed the end caps onto the guttering, although you can’t see that in this photo.

There’ll be one more blog post on this matter and it will be the costs. Really quite nervous about adding up how much the concrete/timber/electrics have cost in total – especially given that timber shortages have pushed up the prices of everything and I used far too much wood for the job – but we’ll see! It’s still probably cheaper than buying one off the shelf which wouldn’t be anywhere near as sturdy.

My final note….right angles….RIGHT ANGLES!!!

With the stud walls in place I reckon it’s time to put the roof on. I’m taking a central beam with rafters approach. Kinda wish I hadn’t, but ho hum

The rafters are all wonkily in place – seriously, it’s a right mess, but it’s keeping the water out. I ran out of 2×6 so went and bought some more but bought it in brown…because I’m an idiot.

Because way way way back at the beginning I made a mistake and my bricks weren’t laid at exact 90 degree angles everything has been kinda thrown out. This is why there are gaps in my roof. It’s not the end of the world since it’s being felted but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from this whole experience it’s that 90 degrees is really really really important.

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.