test please delete

[DoctorStrangelove]

And it's zen time!

^^^ Om.

Morning.

Dry.

Was sunny before the Big Black Cloud arrived.

Blue sky in parts (just not that part).

Colder in here at 14.5 deg, 15.5 deg in the kitchen, 11 deg in the leanto.

986 mBar, 29.11 in Hg, 739.56 Torr, 14.3 psi, (up from 982 last night), 77% RH.

Thursday.

Nothing was put out for the recycling & waste disposal engineers so their passage along the road was unremarked this morning.

Back on 28th Feb 2019 I was wound up by the prospective 2nd visit to Carmarthen for the health check they forgot to do the first time and made my last attendance to the dentist, not having made another since, due, mainly, to the plague.

Walk (unabbreviated) walked, initially in the wan sunshine, latterly in the drizzle.

It's raining again now.

Lunch: baked potato with cheese and baked beans, a red corner yog, bramble jelly and marmalade on slices of toasted Morrisons sunflower and pumpkin seed, 0.91*1.5 pints of good Glengettie tea.

Entertainment: thing on Y&Y about some chap who invented Twicketing, followed by Sliced Bread about SAD and wakeup lamps. I was so innerested in this last that I have no fecking idea what the result was.

TWAO. Are the pips squeaking yet? If it ain't hurting it ain't working. Etc. Etc.

Stone me, it works.

The Ferguson 357BT radio has finally burst into something approaching life shortly before it met the hammer.

Discovered that one of the windings on the ferrite slab is supposed to be movable so I moved it away from the other winding.

Then some jiggery pokery getting the slab back on its very odd mounting plate thingie.

Then reflowed some solder joints.

Then changed a 100nF somewhat cracked ceramic for an actual 100nF (rather than 68nF measured) capacitor.

And lo! it sort of works, very quietly, but it does tune & such like.

Requires a 35 ohm speaker which are like the proverbial hen's teeth* these days, but it's finally functional after a mere 45 years or so.

I'll throw it away now.

*Not as rare as I'd thought. CPC have some.

Tea: chilli con carne (last portion) with rice, some pear halves, a yog, 0.91*1.5 pints of good Glengettie tea.

Entertainment: PM.

Wheeler Dealers S15 E3 1991 Toyota MR2 Turbo with a leaky Hose From Hell & a shot turbo & a leaky head gasket. Bought $7k5. Total $9k1. Sold: $11k.

BBC2: The secret genius of Modern life: internet pizza. From the invention of the takeaway, through the invention of GPS, the invention of the keep it warm bag and the ap. Reasonably inneresting. Particularly the Indian food delivery system developed in the 1890s.

Trucking Hell on 5 Action: Allegedly New! Maybe the one with Rory! Rory has retired & become a woodsman. And he's got hair.

Choice of Wheeler Dealers S17 E6 Porsche 997. Bought £15k, Total: £20k8, Sold: £26k. Mot ran out in 2015 so it's been reregistered at a guess. Remind me not to buy a watercooled Porsche.

Or Brian Cox (not that one, the swearing mofo) "How the Other Half Live". It would only irritate me, full of rich bastards.

[WTFH]

Morning all
Blue skies, sunshine, and a bit of a chill in the air.

Apart from that, eek just sent me down a rabbit warren for the last hour.

[NickFitz]

Morning denizens

Grey, rainy day out, and expected to continue thus. Currently 8°C, maybe getting to 9°C later, and the barometers are down even further at 972/980mB

I had an alarm-less night's sleep, to see if sleeping as much as my system demanded would help resolve the great tiredness that has been troubling me of late. Seems to have helped a bit

But now I shall undo all the good work by rushing off to Sainsbury's, despite the weather. It's a tradeoff; I'm trying to find the sweet spot between the early morning OAP crowd and the late morning luncheoneers

[Pondlife]

Morning all

METAR EGFF 170950Z AUTO 29012KT 9999 NCD 10/09 Q0987

Gusts 25-30Kts forecast for later

Christmas tree has been ordered from the local cricket club.

Last tues eve (8th) whilst out for our evening perambulation I managed to whack my foot against a curb due to not looking where I was going. That night it decided to swell up to the point that I was hobbling around the next day like the idiot I am. The good news is that the swelling has gone and it's finally back to its normal size/shape, the bad news is that any excuse I had to justify my laziness has now gone.

[NickFitz]

Sainsbury's done despite the rain

Christmas Viz Alert!

The rain has eased off a bit now I'm back

[NickFitz]

In my absence at the shops, the solicitor had emailed with the final amount required from me to cover the deposit, legal fees, and apportionments of service charge and so on for completion on the 28th. Turns out NatWest only allow me to transfer up to £20,000/day so I'll have to pay it in two parts. First part in the sum of £19,500 has just been sent, and I think that's the largest single payment I've ever made from a personal bank account in my life

Also, this stuff is so much easier when you can do it using an app on your phone. I assume in olden times (like twenty-odd years ago), I would have had to travel to my branch and sign a bunch of stuff under the beady eyes of a manager, or something along those lines

[DoctorStrangelove]

In my absence at the shops, the solicitor had emailed with the final amount required from me to cover the deposit, legal fees, and apportionments of service charge and so on for completion on the 28th. Turns out NatWest only allow me to transfer up to £20,000/day so I'll have to pay it in two parts. First part in the sum of £19,500 has just been sent, and I think that's the largest single payment I've ever made from a personal bank account in my life

Also, this stuff is so much easier when you can do it using an app on your phone. I assume in olden times (like twenty-odd years ago), I would have had to travel to my branch and sign a bunch of stuff under the beady eyes of a manager, or something along those lines

Nah. In 1998 I requested a cheque from the building society for £51k for my house with no questions whatsoever that I recall.

I didn't even have to prove who I was or where I'd got the money from. It's a bit different today: selling next door led to all sorts of fun & games.

Of course the irony is that this pile has gone up about 130%, whereas a similar house for the same price across the valley, there's tidy then, boyo, has gone up 300%. Then again this one's less likely to be affected by the needful doings of The Main Colliery Company Ltd.

Meanwhile on the 28th of Feb 2019 Xogg was bothered with a torrent of scammer phonecalls including one obvious one from the subcontinent. Bob a Job from the sounds of it.

I've avoided this by never answering the phone since 99.8% of the calls on the landline are scams, largely directed at my late father.

[WTFH]

Then a sterile one was filled with some of yesterday’s juice (which I’m just going to scrump) ...
The latest just is running at 1.052SG, which may push it towards 7% ABV.

After 10 days of sitting around being a well behaved brew, today it decided to start fermenting furiously.
The office is perfect fermenting temperature.

The next issue is bottles. Based on the 3 demijohns currently in use, I'll need 15x750ml.
Then there's the rest of the apples that need dealing with.

Brewing is a full-time job!

[NickFitz]

Lunch: ham toasties

I bought a large seedy bloomer and a large wholemeal loaf when shopping, which meant a complete reorganisation of the bread-holding area of the freezer once I'd completed slicing them. Between them and the baps I also bought, it was a bit tricky getting everything back in

[NickFitz]

The recycling has been taken down, and as that filled the bin, I have trundled it forth