Filling the lake (by alaric)

With all the rain recently, the place where I park the van has developed an annoying tendency to be a lake. So I have to paddle to get in and out of the van, and so does Sarah - Jean, being sensible, just refuses and asks to be carried.

So I invoked the power of Freecycle and obtained a van full of hardcore, then used a pickaxe to dig out the mixture of hard-packed gravel and mud that comprises the parking area, making a trench which I filled back with hardcore.

After packing it down with a lot of treading, thumping, and the use of the big concrete roller, I dumped the gravel/mud mixture back in, to pack back together again and provide a smoothish surface.

I only had enough to do that one strip, but it's a start! When I've stopped aching from all this work, I'll bid for another load of hardcore on Freecycle and do the side where I get out - then another load for the strip down the middle...

UPDATE

It soon started to rain heavily later that day, so I took another picture. Sure enough, the lake is now constrained to one side of the parking area, and the bit I built up is kept out of the standing water. Yay!

Workshop shelf (by alaric)

As part of my tireless service to the village of Cranham, I'm now a member of the Cranham Village Hall Committee (and so a trustee of a second charity!)

This has its perks. In particular, when they renovated the hall, a big thick solid shelf was torn out, and I saved it from the skip to put it in my workshop. It's a bit battered, so not very pretty, but as a workshop shelf it'll only get more scarred, so that's fine.

After some trials and tribulations, I managed to mount it on the wall:

Mainly, I had to cut gaps in the brackets to let them fit over the black power conduit (while maintaining their structural integrity), despite the conduit being level with the wall but not level with the shelf, as the line of the blockwork in the wall is not level with respect to gravity. No surprise when you consider that the building had shifted somewhat since it was built.

So, for the record, despite the shelf looking quite wonky, it's level:

I also had the choice of 75mm or 50mm screws. 50mm screws would have only protruded about a centimetre into the wall, which would not bode well, while the 75mm screws had a good centimetre spare, so I cut little blocks of wood and ran 75mm screws through them, then through the brackets, then into the wall. There's something really satisfying about screwing a long, thick (6mm), screw tightly into a fresh, virgin, wall plug.

The 50mm screws were perfect for screwing the horizontals of the brackets to the undersides of the shelf, mind.

Finally, I mounted a strip of angle iron under the shelf, for clipping my set of clamps to:

Much nicer than having them languishing in a bag...

A nice toolboard for my workshop (by alaric)

As an exercise in her art class, Sarah made some pictures by cutting out shapes in coloured paper:

Coincidentally, at about this time, I was thinking that I ought to screw a bit of wood to the wall in my workshop and hang tools from it to make them more accessible, and to store them more compactly than having them sitting on a shelf (which is the worst way of using a shelf EVER). So I was delighted when Sarah announced that she'd thought her pictures could be stuck to a piece of wood to make me a toolboard...

Read more »

The Cost of a £1 Bucket (by sarah)

One of Barbaras buckets had found its self lodged in the trout pond behind our house - how it got there is something of a debate. Barbara had asked Alaric to retrieve said bucket early afternoon yesterday whilst he was dealing with something on the van in preparation for us going to the bank, so he said he would putting it on his list of jobs to do that day.

Barbara went out for her meeting and due to work running late Al started his outside jobs after she'd left. These where mowing a section of lawn and retrieving the bucket. Dad asked if he needed any help and Al said it would be great if Dad could don the waders and retrieve the bucket. Then they noticed the bucket was no longer in the trout pond - obviously it had washed over the little water fall there and gone behind our house.

Normally such things get lodged in the weir but no bucket so dad began to wade upstream in search of the bucket. But alas, no sign of the bucket was there and just as he began routing around the bushes right by the water fall of the trout pond a swarm of insects started really attacking him but he tried to ignore them thinking the bucket must be stuck in the bushes. Anyway in trying to swat away the midges and fight the bush he accidentally knocked his glasses off of his face - splash.

Straight in the water - he spent about an hour and a half searching for them with a magnetic poky stick Al has. Dad needs glasses to drive and needs to get back to Essex by Thursday morning for a hospital appointment. This meant he was refusing to get out of the stream and eat his dinner - in the end I got in the stream to look for them and sent him inside.

I found bits of old barbed wire so rusted the barbs are no longer evident, bits of hinges, old nails, bits of very rusty squashed cylindrical metal, a galvanized steel sheet and a bracket but no glasses. To be fair on the magnet we have no idea what exactly the frames or screws where made out of so were sort of just hoping they were going to be magnetic.

Unfortunatley the cold water though it numbed my foot and acted like the cold treatment I've been doing to bring the bruise out did mean that I painfully collided with not only the bank of the stream down on the green house corner where it gets deep but also in the house when I first came in - mainly due to the fact my mother had moved our fold-up tables legs to get access to the window over the stream - she had put them across the path straight into the kitchen - I wasn't expecting them to be there and did not see them (I blame the stinking cold I have which is Jeans fault, which is dads fault, which is Mr Mike's fault which is Seb's fault and so on). Pain ouch - my poor right foot its really taking a bashing at the moment.

Anyway we had all just given up and retreated inside the house for warm drinks and Al had taken me upstairs to try and see if we could strap my ankle up but the bruising is just too bad for me to allow it too happen - it was at this point my art teacher walked in in his wellies saying he'd just trodden on his glasses (well actually he came to say he could pick me up and take me to my class as he turns out to be one of my neighbours but then he mentioned his glasses :/ ). He then had a drink with us and offered to look in the stream as well - so off he went wading through the stream in search of the glasses - at no point had anyone seen the bucket.

The art teacher left and then Barbara came home and I told her what had happened and then found out the missing bucket had been retrieved by her that afternoon because Al had taken too long over it and she considered it an urgent job. So the £1 bucket that cost a pair of glasses, my white trousers getting mucky, lots of time and one even more screwed up ankle was in fact not missing at all and already rescued rendering the whole fasade completely and utterly useless.

I knew it was going to be a bad day when one of the first things I did was hit my forehead on the corner of the old metal vice/clamp whilst trying to move a pot of paint. I blame the cold.

Smelly Cat (by sarah)

Poor Minni has been getting abit smelly and then I noticed that her bottom looked a bit odd and she kept cleaning it all the time. She was also beating up the poor kittens and turned out to be prime suspect for poor Heliums injuries last week.

I picked her up to look at her properlly and lo! She appeared to be leaking the brown stuff which was to say the least skuzzy plus it had me worried - I thought she might be having a prolapse and got very unhappy as I thought she was going to have to be put down.

Al took her to the vet this morning and much to our relief it was an infected anal gland so after some rough prodding/cleaning out of the gland by the vet (resulting in icky brown slime) and some antibiotics injected into the infected area she seems quiet happy and far more even tempered than she has of late.

The down side is that obviously this was another £30 odd quid and she is going to have scar tissue there making her more prone to this sort of infection in the future :/

Still all in all we now no longer have a Smelly Cat!