Strawberries

Wow, time sure does fly when you're having fun.  And it has been fun, actually, having the house of luuurve encamped in our house for several weeks, despite the excess of stuff which comes with three extra people, one of whom is a baby.  Babies come with an unbelievable amount of stuff, much of which is adorned with faces - why is that?  Layla seems to be OK at recognising actual human faces, so why the need for extra tuition on this particular topic?  Does a paddling pool HAVE to be covered with grinning gorillas and been gesticulating giraffes to be fun?  Do soft toys have to be cartooney representions of animals?  What's the hidden message here?  It seems to me that the world is actually mostly full of interesting but inanimate things, and that faces indicate something a little bit special - generally things that one probably shouldn't pick up and stick in your mouth in later life.  But that's not the message we convey with all that baby stuff.  Oh well.

Layla now does "baby-led weaning" which means that she gets given fairly big chunks of stuff to eat, and there are basically no rules.  There is a lot of tactile experimentation (technically known as squidging) and quite a bit of spillage (on the face and body, into the capacious bib, back onto the tray-table, down the side of the high chair, directly onto the floor and many other places which are only discovered later in the clean-up phase).  Some food actually gets consumed, although it's amusing to see the odd mouthful which you thought had gone forever somehow return for recycling into one of the above options.  Highly coloured foods are best - strawberries and beetroot are especially favoured for their ability to produce a vivid image of chainsaw massacre or cannibalism.  This all takes place just before bath time, which is just as well.

For us grown-ups, Leo's habit of proper cooking (you know, from real ingredients) has raised the bar on food preparation somewhat, so we have been having little dinner parties, eating  round a table, every night.  With wine.  Marvellous! 

For the last fortnight Leo and I have been working on the newly-enlarged house of luuurve - painting the extension, laying the (engineered wood) floor, finishing the bathroom, and most recently installing the kitchen.  This is not quite what I thought retirement would consist of!  It's been a lot harder work than my previous employment, that's for sure.  But the house of luuurve is looking really good, and it's nearly done.  More tomorrow when I plumb in the newly-fitted kitchen sink - if I can manage to buy the right size connectors this time, grrrr! 

Exeter Strawberry Massacre

Grand Pierre

Well, today's news is that I have just gone solo in grandparenting.  I was entrusted with over two hours of entirely unassisted baby-minding, and achieved a perfect score on the basic skills of (1) keeping both parties alive, and (2) avoiding any shrieks of such ear-piecing loudness as to cause permanent deafness.  I did all this by merely accommodating little Layla's every whim, so far as I was able to determine them.  Of course, that requires a certain amount of creative empathy because she can basically only squeal and squeak, but it's pretty obvious that the only thing she cares about most of the time is standing up. She hasn't quite mastered it yet and she does need something to grab hold of, to elevate herself out of the default sitting position, but her determination is quite something to behold. She hasn't got very far with balance yet though.  And there are so many distractions.  Especially shiny things.

All this preoccupation with standing means that crawling isn't really a thing yet.  Layla's nearest approach to a crawling stance looks more like AdhoMukha Svasasana (downward facing dog).  The next move is to lift one arm and rotate backwards (somewhat in the manner of Utthita Trikoasana or Ardha Chandrasana) until equilibrium is finally restored by a gentle collapse into a sort of floppy Sukhasana (sitting cross legged).  None of this provides any locomotion, however, which is source of frustration, especially when there are so many interesting things just out of reach.

Meanwhile, it seems that one must adopt a special name to be a grand parent (especially a fake one like me).  I have been awarded the name Grand Pierre, which I quite like, as it reminds me of my great mate Pierre.  We met at university, and he declared that since it was confusing that I was called Pete and so was he, he would call me Pierre.  I declared that for the sake of symmetry, I would call him Pierre.  And so it was, until he died some years ago.

Pierre smoked roll-ups all his life, and then died of a form of lung cancer which, they told him, is not associated with smoking.  He found this very ironic (but he was still very pissed off about it).

I did overhear someone, who was speaking baby-talk to Layla at the time, refer to me as Petey-poos.  So there's another reason to be pleased that it's officially Grand Pierre.

Pierre

Happy families

While all this constructional endeavour has been taking place, it has come to pass that the House Of Luuurve has come to stay, as promised, so the old folks (me and Jackie) are sleeping in the loft.  Sad to say, even after all this time, the loft ladder is still being manually operated (using a single string to open and close it from above).  Well, it works.

Slightly surprisingly, we all seem to be getting along just fine in the overcrowded bungalow, with Leo on parental leave and Ellen going out to work at the moment.  Layla, of course, gets a lot of attention from everybody all the time.  There are altogether too many delights in this arrangement to document, so here are just three snaps:

Paddling pool on the grass:

The lawn in summer (see gardening)

Layla enjoying her first ever restaurant outing:

Pizza and beer

Bruce posing with a delphinium:

The noble Bruce

Work, rest and play

Once again, the astute reader of this blog will has have noticed that nothing seems to have happened for ages.  Of course, it's not true - I've just been to engaged with all the myriad things which retirement unexpectedly throws one's way.  There's been a bit of work (e.g. erecting a 12m x 6m marquee in a field in the pouring rain, and building an enclosure for two compost loos out of ex-military tent canvas, scaffold tubes, ratchet straps and rope) as well as quite a bit of rest (it is still the tennis-watching season, after all) and quite a bit of play, including a few classic tasks.  My favourite at the moment is fixing my Tannoy SFX sub-woofer, which started making an impressively loud 50Hz buzz whenever it was switched on, about a year ago.  It has taken this long to even look inside.  I started with the internet, which turned up one chap showing off his fix for one with no sound at all, due to a PSU fault.  He replaced an open-circuit transistor Q152, which (he says) controls the -12V line.

Here's my PSU PCB:

Ha!  Evidently there has been overheating in the region of Q152 (actually removed before I took this picture)...  Obviously mine has gone short-circuit, and the 12V line has been whanging up and down like a whangy thing.  Methinks Q152 may be a bit under-specified.

Q152 is an A1015GR, which cost about £0.001 each if you buy a few thousand, 2p each if you only want 50, 1p each if you want 10 (all from China) or a spectacular £3.50 for 5 from Germany.  I went for the latter and got them within a few days.  I suspect that I would still be waiting for my delivery of 10 units for 99p (free postage) from Shenzen (but I dare say they would arrive eventually).

Anyway, I stuck one in, and lo - it works perfectly.  All done with no reference to circuit diagrams, and with precious little understanding of anything really.  Hoorah!

Fun, fun fun...

I seem to have been a bit remiss about keeping up the blog flow (which sounds like something only people who maintain cassette toilets would have to do), but it's not because nothing has been happening.  I've actually crossed some tasks off the list! (see Day Four)

First off,  mending the electric mirror on the camper van.  I diagnosed brokenness, so I bought a new pattern one, only £50 delivered, which seemed too cheap for a fully motorised, heated jobby with dual-curvature lens, but it seems OK except for one tiny detail - since it's a driver's side mirror for a RH drive van, instead of a passenger side mirror for my LH drive van, you can't get it to go quite far enough round to see the back wheel of the van and the kerb without craning across the passenger's seat.  I think this is OK because the passenger is usually the lovely Jackie, who doesn't mind that sort of attention from me.

Next, replacing the door speakers in the van.  I got "correct fit" ones without mounting tabs, but with the right connectors for the door looms, all the way from Germany.  The speakers don't buzz any more, but the driver's door card does.  Isn't it sweet that this huge piece of plastic, which holds up the door pocket (retained by a Cambium Networks-style eighteen screws!) including the heavy speaker, is called a door card?  I remember cars where they were actually made of something very like cardboard, and fell to pieces when you levered them off, leaving half the little popper things in the door.  But then, those cars also had floors with rusty holes in, and a Morris badge on the back.

What else?  Lazy days and summer ways, and skies, cornflower blue (credit: Mike Absalom) for the most part.  Riding the blue bike, which is still awesome - I discovered a fantastic road between Bampton and Wiveliscombe - sweeping, open and deserted.  One could go quite fast there, if so minded. Playing grandfather to little Layla on the lawn with the newly acquired paddling pool.  Watching the French Open on TV - for the first time ever, I enjoyed the womens competition more than the mens.  Hooray for Jelena Ostapenko, who plays like I always wanted to.  None of your dreary percentage tennis there!  One commentator described her strategy as "see ball, hit winner" - excellent!  Oh, and the Isle of Man TT - John McGuinness not there due to injury from the North West 200, Guy Martin fell off and injured his wrist, Hutchie, who was out of action for a long time after breaking his leg very badly (twice) won 2 races and then broke his leg again in the Senior, and three other riders died.  Lap record unchanged at 133.962mph (average). Altogether another typical year for the world's most extraordinary "sporting event".

So really, it's just fun, fun fun.  What's more, there's no apparent sign of daddy taking the T-bird away any time soon (credit: Beach Boys).

Blue bike enjoying lunch at Wiveliscombe

Gardening

One of the things that people do when they retire is gardening.  My contribution to gardening thus far has been occasionally to mow what we jokingly call "the lawn":

Before gardening

Now for gardening!

After gardening

There you go!  Easy, isn't it?  I used to amuse myself by mowing a different pattern each time, but the spiral has proved by far the most popular, so I bow to my public in this regard.


Unfortunately, the downside of gardening is that MANY plants WERE injured in this process.  Look more closely at the "before "state:

All these lovely little miracles of nature had to be destroyed to make that little spiral, which will only last a week or two.  I suppose the upside is that all the little miracles will be back in a week or two, as well.  Life goes on, after all, come what may. What was it our nearly-ex-prime minister May said?  Breakfast means breakfast.  I think that was it.  I agree.

Polling day

Today is polling day! 

In case you missed the introduction, it's between a bunch of cynical privileged self-serving opportunist liars with very dubious economic models and no scruples whatsoever who have increased the National Debt whilst consistently reducing spending on health, defence, education and social protection for the last six years, and are rapidly selling off the NHS to make the UK's health system into America's (Conservative), and a bunch of relative unknowns who don't share much of an ideology or economic strategy, grudgingly allowing themselves to be led by a popular, peace-loving, principled, genuine socialist with a vision of a better society and a less confrontational world (Labour).   Or the Greens, who are lovely and all that, but who won't get in (Green).

I hope you all voted with your conscience, one way or another.

A Pole on a pole for polling day (Anna Rogowska, with thanks to Getty images; fair use and all that)