Author Archive.

Time is Tight

Posted by on April 20th 2009 in Making stuff, Projects, Video (YouTube, Vimeo etc.)

Apologies for the lack of regular blogging - there just aren't enough hours in the day. There's been no time for hiking or star-gazing, but to be fair we did manage to take a few hours off for a walk around Bosworth Park last Monday (which reminds me that I still have to upload the pics from that).

After two weeks of school holidays, I've a backlog of stuff to shift...

  • At least three trailer-trips to the local tip (sorry, recycling centre) for my waste, and another trip for my dad's stuff;
  • Setting up eBay and PayPal seller-accounts for a friend;
  • Fitting-out the old shed;
  • Digging out a 1m cube of soil/subsoil to take the foundation for the telescope pier;
  • Driving in several 2m steel rods to anchor into the clay subsoil;
  • Hand-mixing 850kg of concrete to refill said hole;
  • Installing footings for a 7ft x 7ft observatory-shed around said hole and pier;
  • Building said observatory;
  • Fitting a new garage door for my dad;
  • Getting the microwave oven fixed;
  • And all of the mundane everyday stuff that we all have to endure.

Never mind, we're looking forward to a carefree weekend, so it's not so bad.

A little chill-music would seem to be in order:

Reconditioned, runs like new

Posted by on April 13th 2009 in Making stuff, Projects
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Our old knackered hut had given good service but was suffering from a tad (well, more like thirteen years) of neglect, as you can see in the following pic taken last autumn:

 

The offending shed, dwarfed by our Salix babylonica and by the bonfire-fuel.

 

Deadwood.

 

The roof was, er, partial, and had let in so much rain that the floor and bearers had rotted, but the T&G shiplap sides were mostly sound. The choice was simple - repair or replace. Well, I'm not one for wasting £400 of cash, so we went off to B&Q, discount card in hand, and raided their timber and board stocks. A week later, after a jet-wash and much sawing and screwing, the thing now lives a bit closer to the house and looks like this:

 

Revamped.

 

It's shrunk a bit - we had to trim 5" of rot off the bottom edge, and we shortened the length by 5" so that we could use 2400mm timbers and boards instead of having to buy and trim 10-footers. Now the floor and roof are better than they ever were when it was new, and it's been fully double-proofed inside and out.

Not bad, eh? And there's enough change from the budget to buy a few beers, which are well-deserved.

I reckon I'm getting the hang of this recycling malarkey.

For Scott

Posted by on March 29th 2009 in Rambling on...
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Crumble pic as requested:

 

Lyme Disease petition

Posted by on March 28th 2009 in Health, or lack thereof, In the News
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Lyme Disease is on the increase and it can be a particularly debilitating condition. If you've been bitten by a tick and you suspect that you might have contracted Lyme Disease, you should go to your GP as soon as possible. Unfortunately, there's a fair chance that he/she'll have no idea what you're blabbering on about. Even if they do know, there's (allegedly) a lack of proper clinical guidelines for dealing with the condition. This needs to be put right, as early and ongoing proper treatment is much more successful than delayed action.

To this end, Gill Reese of Lyme Disease Action has raised an online petition, which can be found at http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/Lyme-guidelines/ .

Here's the pitch:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to put in place Clinical Guidelines, SPECIFIC to the United Kingdom, for the diagnosis and treatment of all patients, including children, who have acquired Lyme disease or associated Tick-borne diseases.

These guidelines should be part of a national strategy to combat this increasingly common threat to health in the United Kingdom and should address the UK presentation of Lyme disease and other emerging Tick-borne Diseases.

Please sign the petition (and get as many others as possible to sign) before it closes on April 7th. The current number of signatories is 1775 - that's nowhere near enough.

Thank you.

No-Show

Posted by on March 27th 2009 in Rambling on...
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The OS Outdoors Show 2009 was in full swing at the NEC today and there were plenty of OutdoorBloggers forum members there doing the rounds and reporting their findings and opinions. Notable among the roving reporters is John Hee, who didn't take long to start adding details to his blog. Hopefully his reports will fill out with more juicy details when he gets back to base and has time to collate his data.

I'm not attending this year, for a couple of reasons. First up, I was never going to attend as a punter, as I've done that bit three times before and although it's a good way to meet old friends, the day eventually turns into a shopping spree. OK, so there are some good deals to be had, but there's not much that I need. Second, WD's offer of a press-pass came to nothing when all went silent after he took the huff over the way I manage my blog's RSS feeds.

No matter. The weekend's set fair, and I've plenty of outdoors stuff to keep me occupied.

Stay happy  🙂

Fiddler’s elbow

Posted by on March 24th 2009 in Astrostuff, Congratulations!, Health, or lack thereof

Just because I was named after a famous violinist shouldn't mean that my life has to be up and down like the proverbial fiddler's elbow, but just lately that's the way it's been.

I'm now about to start week two of a bitch of a cold, which I caught after a pleasant evening of beers with Nick and Steve. Personally, I blame the guest brew. Other may well be more specific and blame the quantity of the guest brew, but I couldn't possibly comment. Either way, it's having a prolonged effect. I've missed so many things over the last fortnight that I'm considering rebooting the calendar and starting again at Jan 1st, and giving it another shot.

The first "miss" was Titan's transit of Saturn on the 12th, which couldn't be seen directly here but which I was going to watch from an antipodean site via the web. Titan transits like this don't happen very often, as they only occur when Saturn's equatorial plane is roughly in line with the Earth, and it'll be ages before I get another chance. If you're interested, there's a pic and a cool movie of the Feb 24th transit over at http://heritage.stsci.edu/2009/12/index.html, reproduced here (with permission):

After four days of living under a duvet, I managed to crawl out to attend a family get-together on Sunday to celebrate the 80th birthday of my mother-in-law, but the day after that was spent undercover again.

On Tuesday I had no choice, as I had to spend most of the day at the local A&E due to "unusual circumstances". Wednesday was pretty much the same.

Thursday and Friday were more duvet-days, which meant that I missed my chance to don the "Father Jack" costume at what turned out to be an excellent fancy-dress birthday party for a good friend, but there was no way that I was going to miss Saturday's pool-party celebrations for our Annabelle's 10th birthday:

 

 

Mother's Day was spent at home feeling rough, which meant that Chris was a bit short-changed when it came to celebrating her day, and I didn't get over to see my mum either, so I've a lot of grovelling and catching-up to do this week.  😐

Anyway, I'm on the mend now. Even the boiler-fixing man says that I'm on the up, and he should know - he's been here three times during the last few weeks wrestling with (and losing to) our unruly Halstead Quattro, which has decided to play up now that it's a teenager.

Let's hope that tomorrow's better, and that the boiler gets fixed soon thereafter.

Of course, all this means that dates for our annual wildie, originally scheduled for sometime during the next two weeks, have had to be reconsidered.

I'm off to do some more coughing. Bye for now. :sad:
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