The Infinite Weekend

Cooking

I recently attempted to cook something (of my own invention) which involved pureed apricots. To perform this task I chose our venerable (approx 1989 vintage) Philips Storemaster all-purpose electric whizzing kitchen gizmo, which in addition to chopping, slicing, mixing, mashing, thrashing, juicing, pummelling etc has the unique feature of storing sumbunall* of its accessories inside its own back panel.

*Sumbunall is a portmanteau word meaning "some, but not all". See Robert Anton Wilson, "Quantum Psychology" if you have the time.

Here's the venerable Storemaster, poised ready for a grating task:

Storemaster

and here's the back view, showing how it cleverly stores the dough hook, cake mixer, and twin blade attachments. Oh, and the mains cable (but not the mains plug, of course).

Storemaster, storing things

And finally, here are all the accessories it doesn't have room to store:

Store somewhere else, please

Anyway, it turns out that pureeing apricots is tougher than it sounds, and the poor old Storemaster jammed up, still whirring, and the twin bladed attachment ceased to rotate. Thereafter, the transmission seemed to have gone, and the twin blades had no grunt whatsoever. Bugger.

Obviously this meant taking it apart (1989 remember, one Posidrive screwdriver and you're in there) and lo! A lovely aluminium-framed belt drive assembly with reduction gearing, driving a concentric shaft assembly with different outputs for high and low speed attachments. Here's the overview:

Belt drive

and here's the shaft assembly, showing low speed output (green) which is all one piece with the big cog, and the high speed output (blue), driven by the inner shaft.

Innermost workings of the Storemaster

Unfortunately, that's as far as I could get. The blue bit would rotate on its shaft but not come off it, and the shaft it retained in the cog by an inaccessible circlip inside the conical part. I guess the blue bit is pressed on, and originally had an internal shape which keyed it onto the shaft somehow (but no more).

So, I drilled a 1mm hole (handheld - my drillpress won't go that small) right through the base of the blue part (being careful to miss the green part where it sits inside the blue part), and then used the broken-off shaft of the same drill bit as a dowel to key the blue bit onto the shaft.

I chose 1mm because I also have 1.1mm & 1.2mm drills which I thought might be needed for a nice tight fit, but actually 1mm was fine in the plastic. I really didn't expect to be able to drill the (hardened?) shaft successfully either, but it turned out to be no problem. Likewise, drilling a 20mm long hole with a 1mm bit, handheld, without breaking the drill bit seemed unlikely to work, but in fact it did.

So, a bit of cleaning up, silicone lubricant (OK for plastic apparently) and reassembly, and the Storemaster has been restored, again (last time I had to make it a new presser out of beech - you can see it in the top picture. Beech is top wood for kitchen implements).

Just as well, because we need to make more kimchi (Korean fermented cabbage, a bit like sauerkraut but more interesting). Yum!

Music

I still haven't spent anything like as much time doing musical activities as I had expected/intended to. I have achieved one thing though, which is to write some music for some lyrics offered by a friend who does poetry, and that sort of thing. Actually I don't like songs, as a rule, but I regarded it as a challenge. Of course the downside of this setup is that you hear my contribution you have to listen to me sing, which takes a little getting used to. Anyway, here's the first go, with no mastering:

https://soundcloud.com/wacht-nacht/know-your-enemy

Since then I had a bit of fortune. I started to look at the idea of a cheap bass guitar, and found what looked like just the thing on Gumtree late last Sunday night; a Westone Thunder Jet, just down the road in Chagford. So after a few text messages, I arranged to go and have a look in the morning (no problem, when you've retired, of course).

When I got there, the woman said "I know it's underpriced - I've already had six more enquiries this morning". And so it was - the guitar seemed OK (more below) and came complete with Yorkville Bassmaster 1x15 combo amp, and a tuner. And a strap. Total advertised price: £50. I offered £60. Seemed only fair, everyone seemed quite happy.

As bought

Despite the silly name, Westone Thunder basses from the '80s are generally regarded as well built instruments of better than average quality, and are even slightly collectable nowadays. This one seemed to have a rather high action, but the neck wasn't bowed at all. I was hopeful that I could improve it with the truss rod, but sadly, that didn't prove to be true. The truss rod turned out to be already fully tightened, and anyway only seemed to affect the main part of the neck. Mine seems to have a tiny kink where it meets the body. I removed the neck and reseated it after deburring he holes and cleaning everything but it didn't change anything. So I settled for setting it up like that - including filing the nut and setting the bridge pieces unfeasibly low. The end result is that it's got a very acceptable action but you might get a buzz if you bend above the 15th fret. I think that could probably be fixed with a bit of judicious fret filing, but for now I can live with it for £60 - or if I sell the amp, even less. Anyone want a bass combo?

I assumed I would need to shell out a significant proportion of the £60 on a new set of strings (especially seeing how the existing ones had been fitted - ugh)

Ugh

but even that wasn't necessary. A little cleanup and refitting them properly - ahh!

Ahh

The amp is finished in a strange blue carpet material which works well as a cat scratching post, apparently. Apart from that, it's in good nick (home use only, and not a lot of that, I suspect) and works admirably.

So maybe there will be another version of "Know your Enemy" with a proper bass line, and maybe a longer guitar break. Comments and general abuse welcome, of course.

Still running...

I have been trying to avoid writing posts about my running exploits, because I fear they might lack the general interest quality I've been striving for in the blog; but the fact is that my life seems to have become somewhat dominated by running recently, so there isn't really much choice. Maybe I should start a new blog, so that people who only want stuff that's actually amusing don't have to put up with it. Please feel free to vote for your preference using the comment facility below. Of course, like the EU Commission, I reserve the right to ignore the result if I don't like it.

Anyway, the upshot is that I have been running every day for the last week or more, complete with spreadsheet to keep track of my performance. Strangely, the two courses take about the same time, so it's difficult to remember what my PB is for each one - and it keeps changing! Currently the results are:

Hill	21:45
Millers Crossing	22:17

Today I did 22:00 up the hill - a pesky 15 seconds too slow for a new record.

Part of the credit for this frequently improving performance is surely due to selecting appropriate "music". I put this in quotes because in my search for suitably driving, beat-driven sounds with a BPM (beats per minute) value that is provided by the creator (for DJs) I have discovered a genre called "dark psy". This is fast psytrance with not the slightest intention of being pleasant to listen to. This is good, because it isn't distracting in the way that nice music is, and it keeps you awake, in case any kind of running reverie should waft along. Also, one of the tracks I found was called "Early Retirement", so I just had to give it a go. It's only 150BPM though, which (it turns out) is a bit slow for me nowadays. About 155BPM is more like it for the Miller's Crossing route, and even 165 for the trip down the hill. 165BPM means a track like "Apocalyptic Nonsense" (which is from an album called "Age of Apocalypse" - so you can't say you weren't warned). Anyway, here's a link to a preview, just to give you a taste of what I mean: Apocalyptic Nonsense preview

In other news, I went to a running shop and had my gait analysed so that they could sell me some proper shoes. I over-pronate, like most of the population, so I now have a pair of Brooks Ravenna DNA 8 "stability shoes". A bargain at £115. At least, they will be if they keep my ankles working. I decided not to buy a pair of tights for £45-£70 from the running shop though. Something tells me I could do better elsewhere.

All this expenditure hasn't improved my time though, no PB on either route yet after running each one in the new stability shoes. But at least they are a nice colour. Since we haven't had an amusing picture for ages, here's what I now look like when I pretend to be running:

As you can see, I've removed my left arm at the shoulder to save weight. The bluetooth headphones are good if a bit heavy - you can get bluetooth earbuds apparently. Oh, and I'm carrying a phone for music, so obviously I should be in the market for some sort of wrist-mounted computer gizmo. I think another grand should see me through for a while...

Running

I'm not sure whether this news has the whimsical quality which I usually strive for, but it does contain a path, of sorts (see "about me") so here we go.

After a spectacular series of personal best times up and down the hill (PB now stands at 21:52, phew!), I decided that it was time to break out and try running on the flat. The course I chose is along the Exeter Flood Relief Channel to the Miller's Crossing bridge, around the millstone and back the same way - pretty flat except for Exwick Hill itself, which is steeply uphill right at the end of the run.

And so it was that I ran 2 miles, continuously, for the first time in my life, as far as I am able to judge. I was once forced to participate in "cross-country running" at school, but I don't think I ran much of the 4 1/2 mile course. Looking back, I think I did quite well to have only done it once. As I recall it, it was cold, muddy, and thoroughly unpleasant.

By contrast, today's effort was pretty OK. My time was 24:38, for what that's worth. I don't see running fast anywhere in the foreseeable future, but that's OK.

Now I have to take the dog for a walk. (We are looking after the noble Bruce)

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It has come to my attention that amongst my readers, there are some who find that navigating to my blog in anticipation of a moment of vaguely amusing silliness and finding that, yet again, there's nothing new there, is genuinely disappointing. This is a negative result which is exactly the opposite of the intention of the blog in the first place, and I apologise for that.

To avoid disappointment in the future, I've fixed it so that the "follow by email" widget actually shows on the page. Just stick your email in the box just above my head over there on the right and click the button, and magical electronical computatory internetworking wizardry will send you an email whenever I actually get it together to write something new. With a bit of luck.

This is such a dull and functional post that I feel the need to enliven it with a random picture, so here is one, shamelessly borrowed from the internet:

Raspberries

One from my list

In keeping with this blog's original objective of chronicling my progress through the morass of retired life, I can now make an interim report on one of the things I claimed as an objective "when I retired".

I said I would get fitter.

A couple of years ago I started walking up the hill outside our house in the evenings after work. It's a little used lane for the most part, which goes past a few houses and then on into woods and countryside. It's only 880m (according to Google Maps) but it is quite an effective hill, with some seriously steep bits. Anyway, I took to walking up it, attempting, where I could, to keep pace with some bangin' psytrance at about 120-140bpm (which is much too fast to walk normally, so I looked like a loony when this was successful). The idea of this was to protect my knees, those being famously weedy and unable to handle anything more percussive than walking.

This carried on for a while and I gradually got faster (I think my PB was a whisker over 25min), even sometimes trotting a bit on the way down, until winter came, and the unlit lane became unappealing, at which point I gave up. So that was that.

Anyway, couple of weeks ago I though it was time to take up the challenge again. My first effort was a shade under 30min, which I was fairly happy with. I've been getting faster - and trotting more - doing the course nearly every day since. And today I did yet another PB (a remarkable 23:05) by running all the way.

It's hard to express how surprised I am to be able to do this! I can't remember when I could last run for 20 minutes continuously, but it was a LONG time ago. I suppose that my previous sedentary (working) lifestyle was very bad for my knees, and that my current regime of sleeping, wandering aimlessly about quite a lot, doing some hard labour on the house of luuurve from time to time, and occasionally listening to bangin' psytrance, has built up their musculature. Or something. Anyway, it's a really big milestone for me, and I feel great.

To celebrate, I drank beer. Cheers!