Just recovering from a wicked ice-storm here.
Greenhouses trashed, car-roofs dimpled and dented, gardens flattened.
Here's a pic of some vicious hailstones with my 62mm lens-cap for scale.
More pics and some video later.
Archive for 2012
Tall stories
There was an interesting story in The Telegraph yesterday - the fur's flying over accusations of folk Photoshopping their pics with the intent of "proving" that they topped-out on Everest.
I never felt the need to cheat in such a manner. After stopping for a beer some way short of the top I dozed off, and when I awoke I found that the support team had gone home so I never quite reached the summit.
Don't believe me? Here's a photo to prove it:
Not to scale.
Review – Vango Banshee 300 – Re-jigged
I've re-jigged the lines on the front-end of the Vango Banshee 300. I didn't like the way the running-loops at the line-lok ends ran through fabric loops on the vent-flap, there was potential for "sawing" during adjustment. Also, having vee-lines meant that it was impossible to adjust the angle of the vent-flap without altering the angle of the line that pulls out the centre of the end wall - the direction of pull there should be fixed. Weightwise I've measured nowt but I've lost a yard of line and gained a peg and a line-lok. If there's any extra to carry it's hardly going to break my back, is it?
Anyway, here's what it looked like out-of-the bag:
Front with original (dodgy) guy configuration - 2 vee-lines and 2 pegs
And here are a couple of shots showing the new config:
Front with revised guy configuration - 3 single lines and 3 pegs
As previous
There, that's better. You can't beat having adjustable flaps 🙂
Next I'll be adding a webbing-strap across the secondary entrance. Experiments with a bit of shock-cord indicated that it makes getting the correct pole-spacing much easier on that side, leading to less strain on the entrance-zips.
Cheesed off
You'll recall the episode about the Croque Monsieur.
Well, Anna brought home a "Ready Steady Cook" recipe sheet a while ago. On it are three sweet and three savoury dishes to be prepared at school during her "Food Technology" lessons. ALL of the savoury recipes (puff-pastry tarts, baby pizza and chilli pasta-bake) include cheese and two of them include meat. Thinking back through the current year, I recall her having to make a ham/bacon pizza and a lasagne, again cheese and meat were involved. None of these savoury recipes suggest alternatives for either the cheese or the meat.
The trouble is that Anna doesn't eat cheese and she doesn't enjoy cooking with it. She brings her results home for us others to consume and they're all really well-made and a joy to behold, but of the four people in our household three don't like cheese and the fourth, while liking cheese, is a vegetarian and so can't partake of most of the savoury dishes that Anna labours to produce.
If these food-prep lessons are intended to teach Anna some of the skills needed to prepare meals for herself then they aren't hitting the mark. She loves cooking but there's a risk that her enthusiasm might be extinguished by the school seemingly promoting a foolish notion that everyone likes cheese and therefore it must be included in savoury dishes. There is a choice of many thousands of simple cheese-less savoury dishes that could have been on that recipe sheet, so why this stupid cheese fixation?
Of course, when she cooks the sweet stuff we're falling over each other to get at it - she bakes a mean cake and as for the superb blue meringues that she made at home last week, well, we didn't get a look in - they were taken to school and scoffed by her and her friends.
Let's hope that the school sees sense now that they've been made aware of the situation.
Anyway, here's the result of her "Food Technology" session today...
four huge and magnificent puff-pastry tarts with mushrooms cunningly substituted for Chorizo:
Nice work, eh?
Observing Report 19th June 2012 (Sunspots)
Yesterday the clouds parted for longer than expected so I nipped out to get some pics of the group of active regions that are about to go out of sight behind the Sun's limb. The seeing was surprisingly good which allowed a fair bit of detail to be captured:
Active Regions 1504 - 1507 (19/06/2012).
300/3000 stacked frames.
DMK mono CCD camera on the C80ED-R.
Baader Planetarium AstroSolar™ Safety Film (ND 5.0) and #58 Green filter.
To give you some idea of the size of these things, the dark core of that largest sunspot in the AR1504 group is twice as big as our planet.
It's making me feel quite insignificant.
Double Spuds
Last year we grew two varieties of spuds - three bags of Charlotte and three of Anya.
This year we've gone mad - six bags of Anya, three of Charlotte and three of Pentland Javelin. Three plantings with four-week spacings, starting on March 23rd.
I really wanted to dedicate an area of the garden to these things... last year I used the slabbed area in front of the obsy but later I built the warm-room on it. I had planned to have the green-house up by now with a slabbed area in front of it for the spud-bags but with me being unfit for such construction projects it's had to wait. That's why the yard now looks like a spud-farm:
The dodgy weather so far this year means that first bag of Charlotte is still about a week or two off being ready, but once we start cropping we should be OK for spuds all summer long.
