At home

Fat chance

/ masher / 7 Comments

“Skinny bitch!”, said Mrs Masher with more than a little bit of spite in her voice. “She’s the same bloody age as me! How does she manage to stay so trim?”, she asked, dipping her hand in to the bag to grab another mouthful of crisps.

I looked away from the telly. “I’ve no idea. Maybe she eats sensibly and exercises?” I proffered.

“Hmmm…”, said Mrs M, picking up her phone. “I’m going to order her workout video. I wanna look like that when we go on holiday.”

24 hours later, Davina McCall’s latest Keep Fit DVD fell onto our doormat, courtesy of Amazon Prime. “Burn Fat In 30 Days” it promised.

For the past week, it has sat on top of the microwave, a trim Davina – her abs on show –  smiling out through the cellophane wrapping.

I just know that at some point we are going to sit down on the sofa, with a nice big box of chocolates and watch it.

 

SAMCRO

/ masher / 8 Comments

If I’m honest, one of the reasons I haven’t been posting much of late, is because I have been getting lazy.

Yes, my blogging mojo went, but so did most of my other mojos.

For ages now, I have mainly been found of an evening, slumped on the sofa, in front of the telly.

Y’see, a particular box-set on Netflix has me hooked.

Sons of Anarchy.

With ninety-one episodes spread over seven seasons, it has kept me going for nearly four months.

It’s got sex.

It’s got violence.

It’s got Harley Davidson motorcycles.

In short, it ticks all the boxes for me.

I’m now more than halfway way through the final series and wondering what I’m going to do once it’s finished.

Maybe I’ll get my life back.

Crushed

/ masher / 9 Comments

I have warned Mrs Masher many, many times about playing Candy Crush in the bath.

And so, when I couldn’t get hold of her on her phone the other day, it was with some sheepishness that she later told me she had dropped it in the bath.

It was very difficult for me to hold back from saying “I told you so”.

So, I didn’t hold back.

To make things worse, it wasn’t even her two year-old phone that she had dropped: it was the brand new one that I bought her for Christmas.

Less than a month old and it’s knackered!

A few days in the airing cupboard got it to the point where it would (sometimes) switch on again, but it won’t go past the boot-up screen – which is pretty much unreadable on the display.

No combination of soft/hard/factory resets has any beneficial effects.

Just like Monty Python’s parrot, it’s dead.

Bereft of life, it rests in peace.

It has ceased to be.

It’s Mrs M’s birthday next month, so a new phone may be on the cards.

A bloody waterproof one.

Can we fix it?

/ masher / 10 Comments

Yes we can!

This weekend has been a time for fixing things:

The external speaker that I connect to the radio in my car, has been intermittently playing up for the past couple of months and I just keep forgetting to look at it. But today, I have fixed it! I replaced the cable and it no longer sounds like Norman Collier (now, there’s one for the kids!) and the sound quality has actually improved as well. That old cable must have really been rubbish!

 

Now, when I put down the concrete base for the new shed a couple of months back, I accidentally tripped and – to stop myself falling face-first into the wet cement – I grabbed at the nearest thing to steady me. That nearest thing was my active loop aerial, which didn’t take my weight particularly well. It has been broken ever since. But yesterday, I dragged it indoors: if the soldering iron can’t get to the mountain, then the mountain must come to the soldering iron! I repaired the circuit board, put it all back together and then added some clear silicon sealant around the entrance holes. It’s now all working good as new, again.

 

For Christmas, Santa brought Son  a new bike. Unfortunately, on it’s way from Lapland (Halfords), the handlebars got twisted in the back of my sleigh. Also, we discovered that the rear brakes squealed like a pig being chased by a former Prime Minister.  Although it is obviously under guarantee, getting it back to Lapland would prove difficult, and so yesterday I set about it with my toolkit.  Rides like a dream, now.

 

 

Finally, there is my bench power supply.  I built this in 1980 from Practical Electronics magazine. It has given faultless service, until just a couple of weeks ago, when it just decided it didn’t want to play any more. I did consider just buying a new one, as they are relatively inexpensive nowadays, but then I thought I’d have a go at fixing it – I get a lot of enjoyment from fault-finding and fixing things… although maybe not so much when I can’t figure it out and can’t fix it! But this was pretty easy in the end.

 

Turns out the primary windings on the mains transformer had never been soldered on to the tags. Upon inspection, it seems the enamel coating hadn’t been properly scraped off either. It had obviously come like that from the manufacturer. In all, I’m surprised it worked for as long as it did. But it did. For 39 years! And now that I have properly made those connections, I might just get another 39 out of it!

… But No Cigar

/ masher / 15 Comments

We’re getting a new shed.

And so, I got a couple of quotes for a concrete base to be fitted.

And was staggered at the cost.

And so, with help from a friend, I did it myself.

We measured and we measured again.

Then we calculated how much ballast and cement we would need.

Over two days, we dug out the ground and levelled it as much as possible. Then – by shovel and wheelbarrow – we shifted two tonnes of concrete mix.

And then we ran out.

It was close, though!

 

Ouch 2

/ masher / 9 Comments

We were sitting watching Strictly on Saturday night, when I felt a strange tingling sensation on my right foot.

Within a couple of seconds, that changed to a searing sensation of pain.

I looked down to see that I had managed to knock over the freshly-made, boiling-hot, cup of tea that Daughter had just brought in… all over my foot!

“Ow ow ow!” I ripped off my soaking-wet sock, but the pain continued, so I hopped and hobbled as quickly as I could to the downstairs loo and tried to squeeze my size 11 plate into the world’s smallest hand-basin.

“Ow ow ow!” The cold water didn’t seem cold enough to be doing anything. “Quick!” said Mrs M to Daughter, trying to show concern, but  at the same time not take her eyes away from Emma and Anton’s Paso: “Quick, get a bag of frozen peas out of the freezer!”

We didn’t have any frozen peas, so I had to make do with Curly Fries.

It  wasn’t helping much and after a short while the fries started to warm up, so they went back into the freezer and out came a bag of Chicken Fillets.  Surprisingly, frozen chicken fillets don’t mold themselves around the toes that well!

I spent the remainder of Saturday evening with my foot in the washing-up bowl filled with cold water.

This time, I remembered to take a photo.  I’m sure you’re all pleased about that!

I Forgot I Have A Blog

/ masher / 14 Comments

No, really, I did!

It’s been exactly a month since I wrote anything here.

A whole month.

So much has happened in that time.

Not true.

I’d like to say that I’ve just been so busy that I’ve not had the time.

And that, I suppose, is true to an extent: I’ve been very busy… doing bugger all.

Work. Eat. Sleep. Repeat.

Pretty much sums it up.

Oh, and watching telly.  I seem to be doing far too much of that lately. Just finished watching the first series of Jack Ryan on Amazon – which was pretty good – and I’m currently into the second series of Timeless, on Netflix, which I’m enjoying quite a bit, despite the glaring plot holes. But, of course, anything with time travel in it, is bound to be full of plot holes!

Anyway, as soon as anything of interest happens, I’ll let you know.

Woody

/ masher / 14 Comments

We are lucky, in that just five or six minutes walk from home, we have a small area of woodland to visit.

And – having a dog – we visit it often.

Almost daily.

According to the Forestry Commission board at the entrance, the woods are classified as “Ancient Woodland” and are estimated to be about 800 years old.

Saber loves it in there: as far as she is concerned, these are HER woods and she runs around like she owns the place, chasing squirrels and the occasional Muntjac Deer which, I hasten to add, she never gets close to catching, as they quickly disappear into the undergrowth.

And we’ll often meet other walkers and dog owners in there and after a while, we all get to know each other.

But, by far, I prefer it when we don’t meet anyone else: early mornings or late evenings just before the the sun sets, is best.  It’s perfectly quiet as we walk along the multiple tracks that traverse the woods and sometimes I find myself wondering about those who have walked here before… not like yesterday or last week, but hundreds of years ago: Elizabethan; Georgian; Jacobean.

Are our footsteps treading the same paths, I wonder?

At certain times of the year, a low mist or fog will hover over the ground early in the mornings, mixing with the long shadows cast by the trees and just making the place feel even more wondrous.

And at this time of the year, the bluebells come out, adding some extra pizzazz to the greens and browns that colour this particular piece of countryside. I took the above picture yesterday, and tonight I converted it to black & white and then colour popped the bluebells. All a bit rushed, but you get the idea of what I was trying to do.

Buzby’s book

/ masher / 6 Comments

This came through the door the other day.

Look at it: pathetic!

Those of you of a certain age – that’s my entire readership, then… yes, both of you – will remember when the phone book was such an epic tome, that it wouldn’t actually fit through the letterbox. And the ‘… good ol’ Yellow Pages’ wasn’t much smaller.

I can remember seeing Geoff Capes on Nationwide (I think), showing just how strong he was by making a Herculean effort to tear a phone book in half.

This latest edition is a combination of both the residential phone book  AND local businesses. Those two books stacked on top of one another would have been about two and a half inches thick! This new one is exactly one quarter inch. I doubt that Geoff would have much of a problem with that. In fact, I reckon even I could probably tear that in half with just my bare hands.

In fact…

*Five minutes later*

 

 

 

 

I RULE!

(actually, that was bloody hard!)

Starter for ten

/ masher / 12 Comments

The current Mrs Masher and I were watching something on Netflix, earlier this evening.

It finished and as I pushed the button on the remote to exit the streaming service, the TV reverted back onto BBC 2, where the ridiculously difficult quiz programme Only Connect – hosted by the ridiculously wonderful Victoria Coren Mitchell – was playing out it’s final half.

Too lazy to go channel surfing, we sat and watched it through to the end – attempting to answer questions as we went along.

I think I managed to successfully answer just one question… and that was a guess.

When that programme finished, it was immediately followed by that stalwart of British quiz shows: University Challenge.

Still being too lazy to do anything else, we watched some of that too.

This time, I managed to get two answers correct.

We watched just the first half, before Mrs M claimed she’d had enough and went into the kitchen to do the washing up.

Sometimes, you don’t have to be smart… just patient.

TW3

/ masher / 2 Comments

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