Ye Gods! More frames!

Posted on June 3, 2024 by james

Yes, I’m still going 😀

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Memory Lane, 23rd August 2023: The end of the Fiesta

Posted on June 3, 2024 by james

I have had Covid for the first time. It was horrible. I had a pounding headache for a week solid and it didn’t get much better from there 🙁 I’m feeling slightly brighter now, but absolutely exhausted.

My wife has had it at pretty much the same time, so my son has been doing the occasional trip into the local town in my car to buy food and suchlike. On one of these journeys someone pulled out of a field entrance completely blind (high hedges either side and no way to see), leading with the front-loader of their tractor. My son took evasive action (we have the video from the dashcam), but the front-loader still scraped down the side of the car, ripping off the wing mirror, damaging the door handle and creasing the bodywork.

It’s not a huge amount of damage, but the insurance company have determined that it will cost more to repair than the car is worth. I doubt it is, but these days when insurance claims often involve the loan of a hire vehicle at surprising expense and so on, the costs mount up. So they’ve written it off.

To make matters worse, we’d said that come the time to leave for university (end of next month) he could take the car so we now have to find him a new vehicle too.

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Planting out frenzy!

Posted on June 3, 2024 by james

The weather has improved and the greenhouse is still full, so today I have been planting out as fast as possible. I’ve completely lost track of everything that has been done. The staging is at least starting to look a little more spacious and there’ll be room to start sowing again soon.

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More frames still

Posted on June 3, 2024 by james

Yes, I’m still going with the beehive frame-making. Another hundred or so done now. I’ve moved on from Manley frames for the supers to Hoffmans for the brood boxes (because those were the parts on top of the pile on the shelves). Still quite a few to go yet, but back to Manley’s now.

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Memory Lane, 22nd August 2023: Steady, or it’ll have your leg off!

Posted on June 3, 2024 by james

I’ve never seen one of these before. No idea where this one came from, but an amazing thing to find crawling up your driveway anyhow.

As far as I’m aware it’s an Elephant Hawk Moth caterpillar. I wish I’d seem the parent moth. The look stunning from photos on the interwebs.

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Under pressure over pressure

Posted on June 3, 2024 by james

Bit of a shock last week. I dropped into the GP surgery and ended up “breaking” their blood pressure machine. The nurse had to go back to the old-fashioned method of a cuff with a manual pump, dial gauge and a stethoscope. The reading could be used as the jumping off point for a mission to Mars, so I’m now on medication to try to bring it down. I have none of the other symptoms of high blood pressure that he asked about however.

On the positive side the GP told me that much against my daughter’s insistence I am not considered old, and even better, that if I drop a few kilos to weigh 100kg, he would consider that a healthy weight for me personally. The latter is such positive news from my point of view. The NHS’s apparent insistence on using BMI to judge everyone when mine is around 35 is quite depressing and has been for some time, particularly when I was swimming hard three times a week (and hopefully I will be doing so again soon, once the pool reopens). Even at 100kg my BMI would be over 31.

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Memory Lane, 31st July 2023: Gates to control the world

Posted on May 28, 2024 by james

Well, the chickens’ world, at least. I’m rather proud of these. Not an enormous amount of work, but they look neat and work nicely. Now I need to crack on and make some more for the other runs.

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A possible new job?

Posted on May 28, 2024 by james

I posted a few months back that I was looking for work again. Well, not much has turned up, and even less that I’d actually want to do. But in the way that things just drop into place sometimes, I’ve been offered the opportunity to buy into a local company, doing something completely different that in fact I’d considered a while back myself. There’s a bit of work to do to make sure it’s not an excessive risk, but at the moment things are looking fairly positive. The only downside is that I won’t be earning anywhere near as much as I used to. But then I will also have the opportunity to do other things alongside without awkward questions being asked and I think that should help out nicely.

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Frames for my new boxes

Posted on May 28, 2024 by james

I need to move some sheet materials because they’re in the way of work that must be completed, but the place I’d like to move them to is already occupied by some other sheets for lining the bee shed. I can use those, but the bee shed will need emptying (eek!). A fair bit of space on the shelving is taking up by frame parts and it occurred to me that if I make those frames up and don’t wax them, I can store them outside in the double-decker xylophone. So today I started on that. It’s a bit of a tedious job, but the frame-making jigs and the staple gun do make it go more quickly so I think I’ve done close to one hundred frames already.

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Memory Lane, 18th July 2023: Fractal vegetables

Posted on May 28, 2024 by james

I love these on so many levels. Not only do they taste nice and look amazing, but they’re a beautiful illustration of how a simple rule can create a complex design for the plant that suggests something far more complicated is going on.

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