Trampoline Scream ( or Trampoline Nightmare, if you prefer)

Well, it finally happened. Dr. Bannon was right. It is ill advised, and dangerous, to fool around on a trampoline.

Personally, I blame the internet.  What happened was, I put a little video of me failing to do a front flip (Russian style) on YouTube, as an amusing illustration for this very blog (see Trampoline Dream).  Being on YouTube attracts helpful comments, including this one:

EJT flips 2 days ago

If u dont learn forwards before u jump you'll get more height and definitely land it

Normally, of course, I don't take dangerous sports advice from people who can't spell "lean" (or even "you" - not to mention "don't"), but I did agree somewhat with the general analysis, and I suppose this was still in the back of my mind when I ventured out to the tramp (as we enthusiasts call it) yesterday.  After a standard-issue failed attempt very like the one on YouTube I tried deliberately reducing the amount of back-step to use more of the tramp-power for height, and relying more on the backwards up-fling of the arms (which is the defining characteristic of the Russian style) for rotation.  The result surprised me!  I obviously overdid the adjustment, because I got loads of height, but only half the required rotation.

Alas, half a flip only gets you from upright to upside-down, and so that's how I hit the tramp - head first, whilst still in a full tuck, wondering why time had slowed down, and still waiting for the sky to appear in my field of vision.  The impact came as a complete surprise.  Then there was a loud noise like scrunching up a load of bubblewrap, which started in my neck, and went rapidly along my back.  Since it was a trampoline, I presume I went back up into the air again after that, but I was distracted at the time and I can't really remember.  I do remember thinking "Oh shit, I think I might have really fucked  up properly this time" or something very similar, as I came to rest.  A less-than-welcome retirement centred around thoracic paraplegia seemed a very possible outcome.

upside-down
(note: This illustration is for provided for illustration purposes only; it may not show the actual event referred to in the text. Colour presentation depends on your monitor settings. Stay home; Save the NHS; Don't vote Tory. Terms and conditions apply. )

As it turns out, I don't seem to have done all that much damage.  Obviously I've got a few stiff bits and some odd pains here and there, and a lot of clunky noises when I move; but all my extremities are still reporting for duty, and the mobility is already returning to my neck.  It has all been very sobering though.  Only the other day I was encouraging people to get out and do things (governmental restrictions on movement etc. permitting, obvs) with Horace's time-worn "carpe diem", but I failed to point out that sometimes, the diem can also carpe you right back.  I certainly felt pretty well plucked.

In the course of writing this post I noticed that the comment by EJT_flips actually includes a link, so I followed it, and found that EJT_flips seems to be a slim, curly-haired chap who looks about fourteen who can indeed not only do a standing back flip on grass, but also a standing front flip on a soft mat, which is pretty bloody awesome. He also posted a video of himself failing to do a double front on a tramp (you're getting into the lingo now, I trust) and landing on his back, before bouncing into a brick wall, pretty much.  It didn't seem to bother him at all, but I guess that's the "being about fourteen" thing.

I find myself being advised more and more (and not just by Dr. Bannon) that it would be wise, at this point, to finally abandon the goal of doing a front-flip.  But I don't know - I think when the lockdown is over, and I can get someone competent to spot me (still gettin' it?), I should at least be able to master the trampoline version without risking total disaster for both me and the lovely Jackie.

So I'm still feelin based.  As long as I don't be sleepin' on while I'm flexin' on the g-tramp, it'll be fetch.^*

As we fourteen-year-old hip-hop tramp-master types might say.

^* (see glossary if necessary)

Water, water, everywhere

The Infinite Weekend was three years old the other day!

Annual Summary:

• Much the same as last year really
• Still reasonably healthy and having lots of fun
• Thoroughly recommend retirement over working!

And so, onto a project report (or two).

I mentioned the garden irrigation project a while ago.  It took a while to get all the pipe connectors - it turns out that they never turn up if you haven't actually ordered them - and since then progress has been a bit fitful (what with the drinking and everything) but we are fully operational now.  As a result, the garden, which would otherwise be rather dry, is covered with black pipes, like this:

Exminster Desert

There is 16mm pipe all round the edge, and 6mm pipe to each of the terminations, which are adjustable sprinklers, if you have enough water pressure to actually sprinkle.  We are a bit low on water pressure, because I am feeding this lot (a total of 50m of 16mm pipe and about 40 sprinklers so far) from the house's built-in rainwater collection system, which delivers its precious prize using a pump in the garage.  It's able to supply them all, but only at a dribble.  It's a rare situation where dribbling is genuinely OK, but fortunately this is one of them.

The whole lot is turned on and off by this sandwich box:

sandwich box

SANDWICH BOX!

which contains the water control solenoid valves out of the old washing machine (see Sawdust).  I'm using two of them in parallel to maximise the flow rate.  I had to make the fitting on the right, because you can't buy dual entry bulkhead mounting Hoselock connectors off the shelf, for some unaccountable reason.  It's basically a brass tap connector on the outside, and a threaded adaptor, with a ground-down t-piece attached inside it using copious amounts of hot glue gun glue, on the inside.  With some big washers.  Anyway, it doesn't leak, so hoorah!

Inside the house, I acquired a single channel USB-controlled mains switch, which is a little printed circuit board with a socketed chip and a relay on it, which your PC thinks looks like a COM port when you plug it in.  It's made by KMtronic and they cost £26.40 new, but I found a second hand one on Ebay for a fiver.

There is already a laptop on the breakfast bar in the kitchen to do the actual controlling, so the obvious place to mount the switch was right there, under the breakfast bar.  So I needed a suitable box...

I did look into buying one, but I couldn't find anything really ideal, so I made one instead.  Since it's got mains electricity inside, I thought it should be be made of nice insulating plastic, and I came up with this:

It's made of square plastic rainwater downpipe (from stock, natch).  Inside it looks like this:

The bosses are rivnuts, held in with hot glue gun glue (as is the front panel).  The board sits inside like this:

leaving lots of room for the mains cable and strain relief.  Two screws hold it up under the counter top and all is wonderful.  I did think about fitting a plastic shield round each of the mounting screws so that I could claim the whole thing to be double insulated, but pragmatism won me over in the end.  I am pretty sure it won't electrocute anyone unless there's a massive earthquake and simultaneous flood, in which case all bets are off, and so, in all probability, is the electricity.

So far so good; but idly looking up washing machine water control valves on the internet, I made the unexpected discovery that they are not rated for continuous operation!  They can manage a mere two minutes on, before needing the following three minutes to cool down.  Who'd have thought it?  Anyway, we are going to be software controlled, so that's no problem.  A bit of Python, a one-line shell script, and a few days farting around, and we can set the thing for some period of irrigation using a command like

$ water 15

to get 15 minutes of on-time, spread across the required 36 minutes.  Actually, the rest periods are good all round, because the pump in the garage doesn't like continuous operation much either, and cuts out sometimes when you're using the hose. Whereupon it has to be manually reset (by me), which isn't in the spirit of automation really.  So, the lazy valves are OK with me.

The next issue is, what should the user interface look like?  I foresee a web-based thing with cron in the background for controlling regularly-timed events, but it's far from settled.  Obviously, since it's software, anything is possible.  I'm also considering a rain gauge...

Also in the garden, the lovely Jackie requested a two-way bird feeder hanger which would thwart squirrels and cats.  I leapt into action with the aluminium post from the for-sale sign from our last house (previously used in a special tool for single-handed lifting of the brick-filled manhole cover there, and thence returned to stock) and some tube from a scrap aluminium hang-glider frame, kindly donated by a friend who still does that sort of thing.  I was going to "weld" it using those new rods they advertise on the internet (more like a sort of aluminium brazing really) but sadly, I couldn't get enough heat from my crappy blowtorch.  I even made a new, bigger burner tube but to no avail.  Anyway, here it is in bolted-together (and spray-painted copper) form, appearing to erupt out of a sun lounger:

gibbet

As you can see, I went for the classic gibbet format.  It's mounted on the fence, to be away from the terrace, and it's quite tall; so it needs to pivot forward so that the lovely Jackie can reach the feeders to reload.  Thus:

reloading the gibbet

To hold it upright, I thought a ball catch would do the trick:

...has only got one ball

but it turned out that the frequent Exminster tornadoes were to much for it, so I had to add this at the top:

which I have to say seems a bit ridiculous, but it works.  Actually it has a rather satisfying finality about it when you push the pole back upright.  I have no idea why, but I have several such door latches in stock, new and unused.  The door handle is one from our old house which was replaced in the refurb there.  Plenty more of those in stock too...

gibbet erected, and secured by door handle

The left hand feeder is for sunflower hearts, which goldfinches enjoy spreading over the garden with their specially adapted beaks.  Sparrows, of course, prefer spreading the conventional mixed seeds.  You can see them both doing it in full-motion, exciting video (!) here.

And finally, as if this post doesn't have enough pictures in it, here's something we saw in a car park recently when we went out for some "exercise":

man exercising his batmobile

I didn't have the heart to tell him that one of his rear wheels was missing.

Bread

It seems everyone's having a go at making bread these days (or at least stripping the supermarket shelves of bread making ingredients), and lately I have been too.  Actually I've been a bit of a baker on and off for quite a while.  In my going-to-work era, I used to take sandwiches for lunch, and often I used to make my own bread for them.  Admittedly I used a bread making machine most of the time, which pretty much reduces the craft element down to deciding what sort of flour to buy, but I still got a slightly smug feeling of wholemeal righteousness out of it.

Eventually the breadmaker mysteriously stopped getting its part of the process right, and took to delivering the classic sunken brick loaf every time, despite all-new ingredients, microscopic measurement accuracy and kindly waves of well-intentioned bafflement.  Looking back from this distance it seems pretty obvious that it wasn't warming itself properly during the proving stage, but at the time I was just baffled, and the lovely Jackie (who generally has to absorb such bafflements) forced me to throw the thing into the small electrical skip, along with all those other sad, every-so-slightly-broken things, for the sake of a peaceful life.  We are still together, and happier than ever, so it obviously worked; but really - is such strong medicine ever really justified?

Possibly with the guilt of this episode weighing on her (but much more probably not at all), she nevertheless made up for it a few years ago by giving me a splendid book with the jarringly straightforward title "HOW TO MAKE BREAD".  It was written by South African man who looks as if he should be a Norwegian jazz bassist or something, and it has lots of lovely pictures and nice clear instructions and is altogether wonderful.  It includes instructions on how to make Armenian flatbread the way they do at the Savoy (he used to work there) and baguettes made with a poolish, and all sorts of other wonders.  The poolish method, as I'm sure you already know, is the traditional way to make baguettes, "whereby a wet sponge is left to ferment overnight before adding the rest of the ingredients".  So if you are scared off by recipes in which item 2 starts with "The next day, in a (smaller) mixing bowl...", or even by the very idea of deliberately leaving a wet sponge to ferment in your kitchen overnight, you might want to look elsewhere.

Anyway, I made some rather good ciabatta using this book a while ago, and so I thought I'd have a go at something else - by making it up as I went along instead.  Before we had the breadmaker I used to have quite a lot of success with a "minimal proving" method, where most of the proving (or proofing, if you are a Norwegian jazz bassist) happens in the tin, so I thought I'd adapt the ciabatta recipe, and use some wholemeal flour, and change the proportions completely, and make it in a (larger) stainless mixing bowl, but using his bowl-on-bowl covering technique, along with my really-quite-warm top oven proving (proofing) system, and let it rise and then just throw it in the oven in the mixing bowl.  This was the result:

What you maybe can't see here is that I had to chisel it out of the tin with a machete, and the resulting mess is - well - quite tough, really.  Fortunately, anything that's remotely like bread can always be recovered by toasting it, adding avocado and sprinkling it with black pepper, thus:

Very good, though I say so myself.  Alas, nobody has had the nerve to go into the scullery yet, where the mixing bowl has lain a-soaking since last night's chiselling.  Presumably, since it's stainless steel, I will be able to recondition it with the angle grinder if necessary.

So what's the moral of this strange tale?  Perhaps it's that the advice of a world-class artisanal bread maker does have some value after all, and it really is worth spending the whole day getting up every ten minutes to fold your dough exactly twice, orthogonally, before eventually laying it ceremonially into the folds of your dampened-linen proofing cloth in your parchment-lined proofing dish to gestate, while you are splitting teak logs into perfect 1/4in kindling sticks to fire the ancient stone baking oven in the fairy cave at the bottom of the magic grotto.  While fermenting a couple of sponges in the scullery.

But I think it's more likely to be that there's a lot to be said for simply having a go.  And also that it's always advisable to have an avocado ready, just in case it's needed.

Boring admin!

I've decided to change the way subscription works on the Infinite Weekend blog.  I know that the current system works OK from the subscriber's point of view (if you've succeeded in jumping through the required hoops to get on the subscription list), but it does have some snags from my point of view - the main one being that I have no idea who gets an email.  I can't even find out how many people are on the list, let alone whether anybody actually reads the post.  I get to see how many hits the actual blog site has (very few, thanks for asking) but after that it's all a mystery.  I'm sure all this secrecy is intended to stop me from blackmailing my subscribers (imagine if your boss found out that you read this sort of stuff!) but it's no good for me.

Hence the change - which is to use MailChimp to send the subscription emails instead of Blogger.  That way, I get complete control over the email content, as well as stats on how many emails are sent, and even (if I want to) how many people have actually opened their email.  Slightly spooky, me looking into your inbox like that, but it's honestly nothing compared to what Google et al already do, let alone what they have in mind for you in their brave new world of 5G-enabled globally-integrated universal track'n'trace.  Did you know Microsoft have a patent for a cryptocurrency mining system which works by measuring people's physical (or even mental) activity, and reporting back to their server exactly how hard you're working? Hard to imagine that being used for anything other than benign purposes, isn't it?  But since the virus, this sort of intrusion into your very being is now vitally important for your (and everybody else's) health, as well as the usual global domination.  Honest.  Anyway, we can't let the Chinese have all the big data, can we?

But I digress.  The important thing is that to make this subscription thing work, I need everybody who's already taken the trouble to subscribe, to do so again, using the new form, which now includes spaces for your name.  I presume that, as before, it only appears on the "web version" of the blog (not the email or mobile version), although I haven't checked that properly yet.  If you do manage to find it, (if you are on the website, it should be just to the right of this text >>>) you just have to fill it in, and you're done, thank you very much.  No silly "I'm not a robot" nonsense.  Also, if you fill in the First Name field, your emails get a personalised greeting!  And if you fill in the Last Name field as well, I won't have to guess who you are...

If you can find it in yourself to be so kind, I'd be enormously grateful.

I suppose you will also have to unsubscribe yourself from the original list too.  I'd love to help, but since I don't even get access to the list, I am powerless!


Now that that's done, it's time for more frivolous things!  It was the lovely Jackie's birthday the other day, so I made her a cake.  After the brilliant success of my recent best-cake-I've-ever-made carrot, walnut and ginger cake (Nigella Lawson's recipe, but with no cream cheese in the icing), I went for a somewhat own-recipe beetroot and chocolate cake with soft chocolate icing.  Here's what it looked like:

no-name beetroot cake

The cake was a little bit denser than intended, but the icing was a bit of a triumph, even though I do say so myself.  It's made from double cream that had been in the fridge long enough to go solid and start to slightly resemble cream cheese (150g), mixed with melted 70% chocolate (100g).  No added sugar.  Or actual cheese.  It's not as greasy as butter icing, but it has all the other desirable qualities, and it's extremely chocolatey.  Mmmm.

Anyway, the lovely Jackie suggested decorating the thing with dried raspberries (which we have in stock), and since it was her birthday cake I obviously agreed, which resulted in this:

Covid-cake

...which we instantly renamed Covid-cake, for obvious reasons.

Then my brother Alan and his wife sent delicious hand-made chocolates, one of which looked just like the Covid-cake in miniature.  So in the final rename it became Pacman-cake...

 

Pacman-cake

 ...and then we ate it.