Moving house

Well, not quite yet.  But we are putting our house on the market, to see if we could actually get the £350,000 our most sensible estate agent (out of the classic three valuations) thinks it's worth.

This has necessitated some tarting up normal maintenance involving paint.  I don't get on very well with paint.  It always seems to be going so well, until you spot a bit that's sagging like a drunken eyelid or dribbling like a cracked plastic glass, and it's too late to fix because it's already too solid to brush out.  Also, despite my best efforts to prepare before hand, I always end up finding some new cobwebs, or sawdust, or dead beetles or something when I'm actually painting, so everything goes from smooth to gritty, and then there's no going back.

Fortunately tarting up normal maintenance doesn't require a high-precision finish.  If fact (I am assured) it's mostly about changing the appearance, rather than re-protecting the fabric of the estate.  Who knew? Anyway, this makes the job much quicker.  We refinished the front of the house (including the garage door in fashionable grey) in what we non-time-challenged folk like to call "no time at all", and even gave the back of the garage (which is also the view from the spare bedroom) a new coat of cheery yellow.  We also found time to fix all sorts of things which have somehow eluded my attention for the last year or more, like fixing the house back door lock so that it opens properly.  I could say more, but I'll leave it that I had a complete spare lock assembly in stock from when I changed the one at the house of luuurve for a slam-lock version. Hah!

Oh, and we borrowed a pressure washer.  I've never used one before.  They're jolly good, but they can be a bit fierce, and it's easy to get carried away and remove all the mortar between your paving slabs, or inadvertently dig up the drive.  Or remove a lot more paint from the garage door than you were intending to.

Pressure Washer 1;  Garage Door 0

Still, that's OK, as long as you have enough primer in stock.  A series of quick blasts with some aerosol cans on the door and a splosh of Sandtex on the concrete, and this is the result:

The pressure washer really is the tool of choice for cleaning the composite lower deck though (recycled plastic and hardwood, allegedly, although it's hard to spot any wood content), as shown here by the lovely Jackie, who is sporting a boiler suit by Dickies, worn in the contemporary "four sizes too big" fashion, and floral wellies "a là Glasto" (sunshade headband - model's own).

We had a go on the wooden deck to, but it proved to be very slow work and we had to give the pressure washer back, so that wasn't quite as good.  Bah!

Anyway, if anyone out there wants to buy our lovely house, check it out on Rightmove (very soon), but don't get your hopes up too much. We aren't going to sell until we have found somewhere better (double garage, at least), and so far we haven't been able find anything that fits the bill.

Knot two posts on the same day?

I recently had cause to tie a knot, and the knot I chose was the alpine butterfly.  This knot causes me great joy whenever I am reminded of it, because it's so perfect.  It creates a stable loop which won't tighten up. It is tied "on the bight", meaning you don't need any rope ends to tie it.  When completed, you can pull either end against the loop, or each other, or any combination, and it stays stable. And it doesn't "block"; meaning that you can always undo it, even when it's been under severe load.  And it's very simple and beautiful looking.  And once you know how, it's almost impossible to get it wrong. Of course, other knots have their place, but this one really is a doozy.

Here it is in its resplendent glory:

seen from one side...

...and the other

I think you'll agree it's a handsome piece of work.  And now, of course, I'm going to show you how to tie it.

First you get a bit of rope and twist it twice, as if winding a clock, with your right hand.  It should look like this:

Then you fold the top half down behind, so that it looks like this:

Then you wrap the lowest loop (as seen above) around the cross just above it and push it downwards through the hole in the middle of the pretzel.  If you got your fingers out of the way, it would look like this:

but if fact you push it through until you can pull it right through from the other side.  Congratulations, that's it.  You might like to manipulate the way the bits sit as you tighten it up, to make it into the thing of beauty which its geometry surely deserves, but it works as a knot even if you are so callous as to not bother.

What a knot, eh?

Happy anniversary!

It's May,  which makes it also the first anniversary of my retirement - wow.  I must say, it's been a blast.  I think I can truthfully say that I haven't had a bad day, which is pretty remarkable.

So on that basis I can thoroughly recommend retirement, if you can see you way clear to funding it somehow.  Of course, it helps a great deal if you have a definite end of retirement date in mind, which I do; I have a specific intention of retiring completely from the world not later than my 80th birthday.  This seems only sensible to me - the idea of going on and on though an inevitable loss of faculties, mobility, capability, and probably a lot of other things until the money runs out, and then trusting the government to look after you until their so-called "carers" can't keep you alive any more strikes me as a very undesirable scenario indeed.  Not to mention being a tremendous waste of resources.

So that means that I am now 1/20th of the way through my retirement, and some sort of review is in order.  Being a nerdy numerical sort of fellow, I will try guessing at how often I have done various classes of things in the last year:

Boring commutes	0
Dull motorbike rides	0
Woke up with a care in the world	0
National Trust sites visited	1
New camper vans bought*	1
Proper projects actually completed	1
Foreign holidays	2
Rescue missions for Lammie**	2
Fantastic motorbike rides	3
Musical offerings created	3
Loaves baked	a handful
Things mended	quite a few
Meals cooked	loads
Crosswords completed	dozens
Late nights	scores
Morning lie-ins	a plethora
Bottles of wine consumed	do we really have to do this?
Days spent looking after Layla***	25

* Actually to be quite precise, we haven't really bought it yet, but we have committed to buying it and we're going to finish the paperwork later today.  It's a proper coachbuilt motorhome (not a van conversion), it's insanely expensive, and it looks like this:

Still, the lovely Jackie says it's A GOOD THING so all will be well.  It fits up the road with a full 1.5in to spare on each side and has an electric drop-down bed, so I'm pleased.

** Lammie is a small cuddly sheep toy, which is essential to Layla's sense of wellbeing when those pesky adults try to convince her that it's time to sleep.  Sleeping without the comforting feel of Lammie's ears is practically impossible.  As a consequence, the discovery that Lammie has been left in the wrong place can require desperate measures, such as cross-town motorbike sorties at the dead of early evening.  Lammie was once left at nursery, whence he couldn't be recovered until the next day.  Somehow, we managed, and everyone is still alive to tell the tale. Phew.

*** This is probably right, since we now take Layla in for one day (and night) a week, to the gentle benefit of all concerned.  The house of luuurve gets a brief period of R&R, we get some quality Layla time, and Layla gets a more varied experience of life, not to mention a great deal of personal attention.  She seems to like it (most of the time), and between the two of us, the lovely Jackie and I can cope with the intensity for one day a week (just about).  Phew again.

Overall, this retirement lark is not panning out how I expected at all - but that's not a problem.  I suppose it might be looking a bit boring from the outside, but it certainly isn't from where I sit.  Meanwhile,  we've just put our house on the market, in an exploratory kind of way, with the intention of enhancing our garage/workshop capability (and getting more house for friends and family too) so we are definitely not finished yet.  Stay tuned...

Garage post script

Now that I've replaced the guttering with lovely new stuff (because the old stuff was all floppy about the joints, having been been brutally abused with a file by whoever put it up) and got rid of the old roof, I'm declaring the garage roof project finished!  It's certainly nice and dry inside so that's a win.

New guttering!

Getting rid of the old roof proved even more expensive that expected, because I didn't see the same chap at the tip, and they basically make up their own interpretation of the rules.  This chap insisted that "£10 per package or sheet" meant "£10 per package; unless it contains more than one sheet, in which case the number of sheets", unlike the first chap who said the only constraint on a £10 package was that you had to be able to get it in the skip yourself.  Anyway, they decided to charge me £65 for 7 1/2 sheets in 4 packages, plus one bag of rubble.  Go figure, as our American cousins might say.

So now all the numbers are in and it looks like this:

actual roof material!	£210.00
tools (bolt cropper)	£9.99
trailer hire	£70.80
plastic film to wrap old roof	£53.75
sealant & foam	£12.63
J-bolts	£22.82
magic paint	£15.99
guttering	£27.11
old roof disposal	£65.00
fuel	£11.90
Total	£499.99

So, under £500 all in. Hoorah! OK, I admit that I estimated the fuel cost. Overall, I think I saved quite a lot of money over getting someone else to do it though.

And I've also got a left-over 5m x 1m piece of roof material to use to make the insulated box for the solar water heating project, which has been collecting scrap materials for several years now, to the quiet despair of the lovely Jackie, who would really prefer NOT to have such stuff (specifically, two used radiators and a double-glazed patio door, and more recently a slightly leaky water butt) littering the estate.

Left over, but still loved

Progress on the project been slightly hampered by the fact that there's really absolutely no point in doing it (see loft hatch automation), since I can't really imagine installing a tank in the loft and integrating it with the multipoint heater we use - not even sure if that's legal, you never know with plumbing these days - but I suppose it could possibly provide a warm paddling pool for Layla.  Or possibly a Legionnaires' disease incubator. Hmmm.

Meanwhile I am running again (when it's not actually raining). Nowadays I have a pair of bluetooth earbuds (super-cheap from 7-day shop) and sporty leggings (£6.99 from Ebay) under the shorts for winter weather.  I still listen to banging psy-trance, but not running in time with it - which seems to work OK, and there's more musical choice if you don't need >160bpm (which is where I run now). My last run was over my new 5km course in 34:47, for what it's worth.

Still waiting for consistently dry weather for some other projects in the pipeline - the van needs some attention, for example.  It currently produces a small cloud of vapour from the back heater vent when it gets hot, which is quite distressing.  Sometime it flashes the thermometer symbol on the dashboard when it isn't hot, and sometimes it doesn't. So, there's a bit of work to be done there...

And there are many, many more tasks in store. I know, you can hardly wait. Me neither!

Welcome to 2018

I don't know about you, but my 2018 seems to have only just got going properly.  I'm STILL coughing like a horse, blowing my nose like a foghorn and generally sounding like a sickly person after what seems like months of on-and-off below-par bodily performance.  As soon as I feel better, I naturally celebrate by slightly excessive (or, when other people's birthday celebrations etc. require it, extremely excessive) drinking and staying up late, and - would you believe it - then I feel worse again afterwards.  This has been going on (and off) for the whole of 2018 (at least it feels like it) so I haven't been reporting much.  Meanwhile the weather has precluded any outdoor activity of note.  Honestly, you wouldn't want to know, for the most part.  I didn't run at all in March, what with the snow, the horsing around, and the foghorn.

However, recently the weather had a little fit of being OK for a day so Leo and I leapt at the chance to rip the garage roof off.  Overnight rain was expected, meaning it had to be weathertight at the end of the day, so I invested in a pair of bolt croppers to save time dismantling the old roof.  Being an inveterate cheapskate, I chose an almost-unfeasibly cheap 18" model from Screwfix at a bargain £9.99.  When I got them home I discovered that actually, although 18" sounds like a lot, it doesn't actually provide enough leverage to get through an 8mm bold.  No problem, I just made them into bigger ones with two pieces of aluminium tube (actually bits of old hang-glider uprights (hang gliding came next after windsurfing in my adventure sports history, in about the 1990s)) cunningly secured internally with a bit of paracord.  This turns out to actually be better than buying longer ones because they work just as well, and they collapse to go in the toolbox.  Here they are, hanging from a wall with one leg extended (a bit like the birthday celebrations actually):

They happily hacked their way through all he old fixings with a very satisfying thunk, as well as providing the warm glow of a special tool constructed.  Here's the garage with the roof off (showing just how little holds the roof up when it's there!) 

And here it is now:

Still a few bits to fix but it's functional.  I used expanding foam to fill the gap up to the concrete beam across the front, with the totally amazingly marvellous Bostik Flexacryl Grey roof repair paint (which is like flexible fibreglass reinforced paint) to make it waterproof; the same paint around the edges where the insulation shows; a couple of bits of shaped plywood to match the doorframe to the roof line, and it's pretty much done.  I still have to replace the guttering, as you can see.  Oh, and get rid of the old roof: 

which is distressingly heavy stuff.  It all need to be packed up in double-wrapped polythene and taped which requires dry weather (which we have) and someone else to help lift the bloody stuff (which I don't).  So the drive is still not fully available for vehicles - bah!

But at least I'm back to running.  Yesterday I crushed my previous PB up the hill with a stonking 19:31 (1:24 quicker than my previous PB) and today I ran 4.1km in 28:52.  Still no prospect of Olympic glory except unless the opposition are required to hop, but I'm feeling quite chipper about it all.  So, roll on 2018!

Car Repair - what fun!

Another marvellous feature of retirement is that you have the opportunity to mend your own car.  I understand that you, dear reader, being generally of sound mind, are only too happy to pay someone else to get their fingernails filthy grubbing about underneath your expensive status symbol, but I am made of sillier stuff.  Particularly silly when it's a cold, wet February, the fault is an exhaust system leak, and I don't have either a usable garage or a flat drive.

What I do have is a pair of 10ft long car ramps made of Dexion. 

Dexion car ramp - slightly bent

I originally made them to transform our sloping drive into something horizontal, so that I could at least change the oil in a Toyota MR2 Mk1 which I owned a long time ago.  Since then they have held up all sorts of vehicles, including various camper vans, some of them even with sleeping guests aboard.  This last use case is definitely beyond the safety limits of the design, so I now prop them up with axle stands and bits of wood for camper vans, but they are still good for cars if used carefully.  They are about a foot high at the garage end, so you can get quite a long way under with gradually diminishing headroom.  I roll carpet out underneath, which makes it quite cosy under there, as long as it doesn't rain too much.

At the moment, of course, the drive is somewhat obstructed by bits of garage roof, still waiting for their moment of glory.  But blown exhausts wait for no man, so I had to just go for it.

The first issue is that the broken flexible part of the BMW 118d's exhaust is not a part which anyone lists.  It turns out that BMW think it's part of the catalytic convertor box, since it's welded on.  So you need a special aftermarket part, which is a bit more difficult to locate.  Only a bit, of course.  We have the internet, and the internet has the delightfully named Every Exhaust Part Ltd., who do the business with their special repair kit.

So far so good.  The exhaust system is stainless throughout, so it's fairly easy to dismantle, except for the nuts and bolts, some of which are still made of the traditional rust.  The "access only one end at a time" feature of the ramps results in a lot of farting about to get everything undone, but hey.  The new bits arrive (clamp included!), the catalyst box comes off under the car with only one slight mistake - there is a bracket which you get at from underneath, which has studs welded onto it so that you can just undo the nuts - lovely.  Then there's a bracket where you can see the nut from the top (with a big long extension on your socket) so I expected the same genteel, mechanic-friendly design.  Only it was a bit stiff, so I put my big breaker bar onto it... still very stiff... actually VERY stiff... BANG!  Turns out that this time, the nut was welded on, and you're suppose to remove the bolt from underneath.  Oh well, it got the bits on the bench.  This is what they looked like, with the old flexi now missing its pretty woven skirt.  I'd already started in with the angle grinder by this point.

Here's a more detailed view, for annotation nerds:

1.  This weld holds the cat. exit pipe onto the catalyst box - needs to stay and be gas-tight!
2.  This weld holds the old flexi on to the cat. exit pipe - this must go (all of it) to expose the pipe underneath (5)
3.  This weld holds the heat shield / cover onto the catalyst box.  Ignore.
4.  This is what happens when you remove a bit of (2) with an angle grinder, exposing the sleeve of the flexi underneath
5.  This is the exit pipe we have to keep
6.  This is a bit of weld metal peeled back

It's marvellous what you can do with an angle grinder!  I removed all the old flexi and its associated weld to leave a nice shiny exit pipe in what we non-time-constrained people call "no time at all".

All looking good, offer up the new part - aaargh!  It's super floppy!  Have I ground off too much?  I instantly consider making a sleeve from the middle section of the old flexi, but really, this can't be right, can it?  After a cup of tea, I measured it up. The pipe is 60mm OD, the new sleeve is 65mm ID.  Hmmmm.

It seems Every Exhaust Part Ltd. stock slightly too many exhaust parts to keep track of, and there's an almost exactly similar part with a bigger inlet pipe, which they have sent by mistake.  They were very nice about it and rushed me out a new one.  Meanwhile, I don't care about he delay, because we still have plenty of functioning vehicles.

Almost exactly similar

Actually the parts are more nearly identical than this photo suggests. It all went back together fine, except that one of the rear hangers turned out to be broken.  The rubber mount holds a bent rod which is welded onto the side of the pipe, but the rod had broken part-way through at the end of the weld.  I have a MIG welder, but no stainless MIG wire, and I couldn't face the idea of farting about with the one-end-at-a-time ramps yet again to take it all off and put it back again; so I made a custom clamp by drilling/filing a slot in a U-bolt style exhaust clamp (from stock, natch) so that it clamps the rod against the pipe in a nice controlled way. 

Custom lamp in lieu of (broken) weld

Seems to work.  Not stainless, mind. Oh well.

Meanwhile, I notice that if you had a nice big garage with a 6" thick concrete floor, you could buy a lovely two-post lift just like the one your local repair garage uses for as little as £1200!  Ah.  Such is the stuff that dreams are made of.  Silly, eh?

More music, more everything

Things have been cracking along in the Sears music foundry.  I bought myself a winter solstice present of a bundle of MIDI instruments from Native Instruments (not to be confused with National Instruments, who make Labview, even though they both call themselves NI).  This includes various sampled "real" instruments as well as fully-electronic synthesizers and effects.  One of which is "strummed guitar".  This saves all the trouble of learning how to play chords and not sound like a complete beginner (which of course I am, because I don't usually play songs) and gives instant gratification with professional sound quality in no time at all.  Couple that with the "Session Drummer" and a few processing tweaks, and you're mostly done.  The only thing they haven't provided yet is a MIDI-controlled vocalist, but it won't be long, I'm sure.  In the mean time, I've saved months of guitar practice, selecting snare drum sounds and placing individual cymbal bashes using a mouse to create a new song from some more of Pete Golding's lyrics in record time.

Actually I've had the lyrics for a while now, but knowing that they were originally written for a punk rock band made it difficult to think up a different way of presenting the song.  I wanted to do something in contrast to the obvious rhythmic rant, but it took a while to come up with anything.  I'm really pleased with the result though, and this time I don't feel the need to apologise for my vocal efforts.  I hope my version carries the song a bit more gently, and maybe makes the ending a bit more poignant.  See what you think.

Here's the link:  Run Like You

Meanwhile I've started running again after my winter solstice food/booze/laze-fest.  The hill run has proved difficult due to persistent flooding at the top (I know, but that's just reality breaking through your idea of what a hill looks like) but I've got a new PB on the river (20:55) and recently started to extend the run a bit towards 5km, which is some sort of industry standard for running people, apparently.  So far it's about 3.8km in 24:18.  Yesterday I had a new sensation for a while that my legs were doing the running on their own, and the rest of me was just along for the ride.  Interesting, and rather appealing, I must say.  It all changed when I got to the last bit up Exwick Hill though. 

Just for a bit a fun I looked up the record for 5km - as run by 60 year olds.  The current holder is a Welsh chap called Martin Rees, who ran 5km in 16:08 in 2013 when he was 60, although he went 2 seconds faster the next year (when he was 61, obvs).  So he's running just a little bit more than twice as fast as me. To anyone with a competitive nature, that would be a thing, I'm sure, but thankfully my Spinozist philosophical bent (not to mention my Citalopram habit) means that I'm still quite content. 

This post has been entirely about things which I don't have any pictures to associate with, which makes it look a bit dull on the page, so here's a picture of me and Layla.  Layla, is of course, growing rapidly and learning all sorts of new stuff, which is very exciting for everyone.  Here, she is demonstrating her ability to give stuff to people, by emptying the contents of her bag of clothes etc. into my arms, one piece at a time.  As you can see, it's pretty satisfactory all round.

Pretty satisfactory

If you were thinking "My, she certainly has grown!", well you're right of course, but I should point out that she is standing on a worktop.  I'm still quite a bit taller than her, really.