Science the Universe and Everything erm… including Cake Pops (by sarah)

So I have had my eye on a cake pop machine since before christmas and have bought one for basically £20 from lakeland as the amount of ideas I am having for them means I can't sleep and Jeany wants a darleck cake for her birthday so I would have to get one then!

But I have also been thinking on science and science communication and things right so two creative things that aren't cooking have come out of this already.

One is a bizar video of the cake pop characters that Jean and Alaric made called The Gape Mouthed One and is obviously part of a series not to mention the stills I tool will be finding their way onto the Wiggly Pets blog.

Then there is a poem. It is about the way I think basically and came out of Alaric's impression of me talking just after we got the cake pop machine. I have recorded as it was only written last night and I haven't had a chance to sort out the spelling issues yet 🙂

It is called ADHD The Polymath Dream.

On top of that I have found myself looking at Science Communication courses which is probably nuts but it occured to me that I now live in walking distance of a train station that can get me at least to either London or Bristol.

Brilliantly Big Birthday Bonanza BBQ, Banquet and Baffonary (by sarah)

Friday it all started with the arrival of the alien shroom

a.k.a. my father or Ferfer as he is better known. This was accompanied by the rest of my family as in my mum.

My bro and his wife all of whom got family snuggles 🙂

Jean had been preparing treats for the last few days 🙂

Which she forced people to eat - especially people with April birthdays

I'd been baking too.

Lots of DIY and work on the house was done then Saturday night more madness ensued with the arrival of friends who also had April birthdays - they bought yummy vegan cake with them 🙂

We ordered take away - I set the table up nicely - the 'new' table as in my grandmothers dinning table which had come up in my parents car on Friday. It has leaves that fold out to make it a big table - but there were now 11 people in the house so I went for buffet style.

Food arrived - a mix of pizza, chips, curry, and chinese food. Everyone was catered for 🙂

Including the baby

Aunty Michelle kept giving in and feeding her 🙂

The next day - with five birthdays to cater for we decided BBQ was the way to go 🙂

the neighbours bought round cake too as it was their easter celebration 🙂

Of course it had to be lit first

Then the celebrating began 🙂

My Bro on his birthday celebration 🙂

The weekend also saw scrabble playing

And Music!

A good time was had by all 🙂

p.s. almost forgot to mention the welding and papier mache that took place too!

My new workshop (by alaric)

I took the day off of work on my birthday, to do something I'd been dying to do since we moved in - get my workshop set up to a state where I can actually use it.

To begin with, I had a load of things to put away. The floor was covered in boxes that needed unpacking, but as soon as I'd cleared enough to get sufficient access, I put up my big shelf.

It goes on the wall above my welding bench:

Drilling into masonry can be a pain, especially coarse breeze blocks like those, which are comprised of a load of tiny stones joined together with cement; the bit will tend to wander into a convenient gap between stones rather than ploughing through the wall where I want it to go. So the only thing to do is to break out my serious drill. Which I call Vera:

Vera is an SDS+ drill, which means it has a special chuck and takes special bits. The chuck fixing is actually designed for hammer drilling, unlike standard drill chucks, which means the drill can apply a much more significant and reliable hammering force. As such, it glides through walls like this in the way a normall drill glides through plywood.

As such, in no time I had each bracket mounted with 6x40mm screws into 10mm diameter wall plugs:

I could then life the shelf into place:

However, Vera's SDS+ chuck can't drive ordinary bits (although I do have an SDS+ to ordinary chuck adapter, but Vera would really be overkill for the next step), so I used my cordless drill to predrill holes for the screws into the bottom of the shelf. I like to think of this drill as Vera's filthy little sister, as it's fast and easy. The observant will also notice that it goes up to eleven:

Having done that, I screwed the shelf onto the brackets so it won't budge:

With the shelf up I could then put even more stuff away. I've made a little guided tour movie:

There's still more to do - I need to get Ethernet cabling down there so I can get Internet access, and I need to fix the leaking flat roof, and do something about the draughty eaves and the ivy creeping in. But now that the floor is clear and things are in useful places, I can actually use the workshop, which is great.

So two days later, I performed my first project. We needed a coathook for children's coats and bags, and we found the perfect design in a shop, except it was made to hang over the top of a door rather than to be mounted on the wall.

Not a problem when you own metal working tools.

First off, I used the angle grinder to chop the bits that go over the top of the door off, then with them out of the way, went in and neatly chopped the long metal bits off close to the part we wanted:

Then I used a center punch to mark where I needed to drill at each end:

To begin with, I drilled a 2mm hole, as that's a lot easier to drill accurately by hand than the 5mm hole I need:

Then I drilled it out to 5mm:

And then the screw could fit in:

And it was done:

And Now…. an Organ! (by sarah)

So we are on a strict budget for the house - so we went to the charity shop to get a sofa bed... we ended up with an electric organ - a Hammond with Liesel Chorus and stuff!

Alaric is as ecstatic as me and Jeany is really excited and Mary has discovered foot pedals!

Alaric says he knows where this is going though - he envisions Jean pressing down keys and Mary pushing down peddles whilst I reciet poetry and him holding microphones in various rediculous poses.

Part of me does wonder weather I should have taken the piano instead though - but this just has more functionality and wacky electroness that I am just itching to sample.

British Gas (by alaric)

Ok, I'm starting to get annoyed with British Gas, so it's time for a RANT.

When we moved into the new home, it had prepayment meters for gas and electricity. For those not familiar, these are meters where, rather than having your meters read and being billed on what you have used, you have to take a smartcard to a shop and pay to get it "charged" with credit, which you then take home and insert into the meter. The meter keeps a credit balance, which it subtracts from as you use energy, and when it hits zero, you get switched off until you put more in.

This is annoying, as you have to keep remembering to top it up, and it's also more expensive; you get charged more per unit of energy used for the privilege of all that extra infrastructure. It's usually an arrangement one enters into if one is having trouble paying the energy bills, as it makes you unable to use more than you can afford. In which case, you can get put onto prepayment meters, at an even more inflated rate, in order to pay off the debt as well as buying your energy every time you top up.

So, we of course wanted OFF. To do this we first need to take over the gas and electricity supply from the previous folks, then when the account's in our name, we can get it transferred. The gas and electricity accounts are both run by British Gas, who helpfully send a letter to "The Homeowner" at the address telling us to get in touch with them as soon as possible so we can take over the account, as the previous folks had told them they'd moved out; in particular, it warned us that the previous owner's smartcards may be configured to repay debts, so we'd need our own ones to be charged a more reasonable rate.

So we sign up with them, as advised, and are told it'll take about twenty-eight days for "the paperwork" to happen, and then we'll get our new gas and electricity smartcards shortly after that.

So we plod on, using the previous owner's smartcards which, I note, are particularly expensive for gas at least; we're putting in £20 top-ups of gas at least once a week, and often twice.

Then we get a letter asking us to ring them to confirm some details, which I do, and am thanked for the details, and told the account take-over can now REALLY start, and will probably be finished around the end of February, and we should be able to get our meters swapped over to normal ones after that.

Well, it's now March, and I've rung up to ask about that, only to find out that only the electricity is in our name; the gas is still in the previous people's name. Apparently "an error" was made originally. Anyway, apparently that's being cleared up, and they're trying to get me set up for a credit meter, and I was on hold for ages, and got cut off, so rang up again, and was on hold for ages, then was told it was taking a while so they'd ring me back...

That was a few hours ago. I'm still waiting. And we're still running on the previous owner's smartcards, paying inflated rates. It'll have been two months soon.

WHY does this have to be so SLOW? Why can't they just put the account into our name immediately, when we ring up? Why does it need to take 28 days at all, let alone take the month and a half it's been so far?

While we've been waiting for the gas and electricity to be fully transferred, British Telecom have managed to lay an entire NEW PHONE LINE to our house, complete with digging trenches and everything, and Andrews and Arnold (AAISP) set up broadband on it. Both actions requiring ACTUAL WORK to happen rather than just changing some entries in a database and posting us some smartcards. AAISP's contribution to this alone is probably similar to what British Gas had to do; adding us to their accounts database and contracting BT to put an ADSL linecard in at the exchange, then posting us a configured router, and it took them one week, most of which was waiting for BT to do their bit...