Swimming, 12th December 2021

Posted on December 12, 2021 by james

Another no-so-great performance today. Better than Thursday, but not at the level I was at prior to that. Tiredness still affecting me I think, or my daughter’s cold. I stuck with it though, just because I didn’t want to leave the session early.

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Swimming, 9th December 2021

Posted on December 9, 2021 by james

Well, today was just awful 🙁

I’m still not sleeping well and I think today was the day the tiredness chose to make itself known. Either that or I’m getting the cold that my daughter currently has and my body just hasn’t let me know yet.

I barely had a single 50m rep below my target time and had failed three by the time I’d been in the water half an hour so decided that wimping out was the better part of valour and went home.

Perhaps the cause will become obvious over the next few days.

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Piano is not my forte. Yet.

Posted on December 8, 2021 by james

I’ve dabbled with musical instruments over the years, but I’ve never really gone anywhere near a piano and I’ve decided I quite like the idea of learning. Happily this weekend I discovered that we still have one of the keyboards my son used fairly early on. It’s a Yamaha PSR-E353, so it only has five octaves rather than the full piano complement, but there’s always my son’s electric piano if/when I reach the stage of needing more notes. I just won’t have access to that out of term time, so the Yamaha is more convenient for the time being.

As for how to learn, I’m dithering at the moment. I’ve been watching some of the videos on Andrew Furmanczyk’s YouTube channel. I find the music theory stuff good because I don’t know a lot about that, but the first “learning piano” one is perhaps a bit childish in places and rambles a little. I’ll stick with it though and see how the later lessons are. From the point of view of being an author of open-source software, I certainly appreciate that they exist and are available for free.

I’ve also bought a couple of books:

I picked the spiral-bound versions so they’ll sit flat on a music stand or desk. Going through a few reviews they seemed to be the closest match to the kind of thing I’d be after, so I’ll see how I get on with them as well and post a review when I have a good feel for what’s what. Perhaps I’ll review Andrew Furmanczyk’s lessons on a video-by-video basis too.

Oh! I nearly forgot… The other important purchase I made was a set of headphones. I don’t need to inflict the sound of me practising on the rest of my family just yet 😀

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Swimming, 8th December 2021

Posted on December 8, 2021 by james

I’ve not slept well for the last two nights, so once again I wasn’t expecting much when I went to the pool today and the situation wasn’t improved when four other swimmers joined the fast lane, all about ten seconds a length slower than my usual speed.

In fact, things actually went pretty well for the 50m reps and I had no failures, though I did have a couple of reps slower than my 43s target time when I was obstructed at the turn by one of the other swimmers. Whilst I’m happy with the performance therefore, I’m not going to count it as a “completed” set.

My 25m reps were a real struggle though. By that point I felt very tired and ended up having to skip a couple due to failures. Not great, but I understand the reason so I’m not going to get stressed about it.

Now I’ll just have to see how things go tomorrow. Hopefully I can get some decent sleep tonight.

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The rain gauge is playing up again :(

Posted on December 6, 2021 by james

When I put it back up things seemed to be going well, but over the last few days the rain gauge has been giving some very strange results. I suspect it has been counting bucket tips when there aren’t any, and over-counting those there are.

Initially I think I’m going to pop to top off and remove some of the magnets I added to try to get it to trigger the reed switch more positively. It is perhaps possible that the switch is getting triggered more than once per tip, but perhaps the buckets might also be getting caught up somewhere that is causing the switch to trigger when it shouldn’t. In the last hour for example, almost seventy tips have been counted when it hasn’t been raining (and nor is it windy enough that the gauge might be rocking and counting extra tips).

Another oddity is that despite starting with both counters in the DS2423 at zero, counter A is now sixty greater than counter B. I’m really not sure I understand how that happens when the two inputs are tied together.

Periods of heavy rain are forecast for tomorrow with “Storm Barra” following closely on the heels of “Storm Arwen”, but hopefully I can find a few dry minutes to open the unit up and see what’s going on.

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Swimming, 6th December 2021

Posted on December 6, 2021 by james

The mince pies have all disappeared, so today’s session was fuelled by a chocolate brownie 🙂

I could tell as I was warming up that my arms still felt a bit tired from yesterday. I think my body must have been making some serious adjustments overnight as I ended up having to put the fan on to keep comfortable in bed despite the bedroom being quite cool. I could feel the increased temperature in my shoulders and lats. Because of that I wasn’t expecting too much. As it turned out there were positives and negatives.

Overall I was a little slower than yesterday for both my 50m and 25m reps, but only by an average of about three quarters of a second and 0.3 of a second respectively. I also failed one rep earlier in the 50m set than yesterday, but it was my only failure of the entire session whereas I had two yesterday. My 50m times were also very consistent — close to my best ever — and my 25m times were the most consistent I’ve ever been when there was time to swim the full set.

So, overall I’m not unhappy and I think it bodes well for future sessions. Not tomorrow though. My shoulders really do need a bit of rest now 🙂

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Swimming, 5th December 2021

Posted on December 5, 2021 by james

I felt distinctly lacking in energy before I went to swim today, so I sneaked a mince pie before leaving to see if it would help. I can’t say I felt any better when I arrived at the pool, but my first 50m rep was below 41s and things progressed well from there really with most of my reps below 42s. I did slip outside 43s on a couple of occasions on reps nine and fourteen, skipping the following reps as a result, but my average time for the rest was 41.84s which is only a few hundredths off the fastest I’ve ever managed. Hopefully tomorrow I can push that first fail out a little further.

Surprisingly considering the speed of the 50m reps, my 25m set also went well, with one rep even dipping below 18s which isn’t something I manage too often after a set of fifties and I may not be that far off keeping the whole lot below 19.5s now.

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Pressing apple juice, 2021

Posted on December 5, 2021 by james

It seems far longer than three weeks ago that I collected all of the apples from our orchard that could be used for juice, but today I finally managed to get organised to press them. I collected six 20kg feed sacks full, but one of the sacks of Ashmead’s Kernel we’ve kept back to eat so I only pressed five. I wasn’t expecting to need more than one run of the press to get through them, but after building a nice big cheese I did still have a few left over, requiring a second run. At the start of the pressing the cheese was perhaps about 60cm tall.

But after I’d squeezed as much juice out as I thought was possible, it was about half that size.

and all that remained of the five sacks of apples didn’t even fill a wheelbarrow.

That’s going to go on the compost this year, but I have been wondering about soaking the spent pomace in a little water (just enough to turn it back into a “slurry”, basically) for a few hours and then pressing it again to make a sort of “apple juice lite”. Something to try to remember for next year.

In the end I had a shade under eleven and a half gallons, or somewhere around 51 litres of juice. That now needs bottling and pasteurising. The latter is a bit of a faff for the moment. Building a large pasteuriser needs to be on my project list 🙂

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A time for dying

Posted on December 3, 2021 by james

Hot on the heels of one of my Raspberry Pis trying to persuade me that it wanted to meet its maker, yesterday I had need of my Dremel and discovered that it also showed no interest in functioning. I didn’t use it last and it’s possible that whoever did may have allowed it to overheat, popping the single-use thermal fuse attached to one of the brush-holders.

It turns out that almost all of the few UK stores claiming to sell Dremel spares don’t have the necessary replacement part in stock (the thermal fuse is soldered to one side of the brush-holder and to a power connector for the motor and the whole lot has to be replaced as a single unit). Fortunately I did find some available at powertoolspares.com and bought a couple so I can keep one as a spare for the future.

I’ll take some photos and document the replacement process when they arrive.

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Swimming, 1st December 2021

Posted on December 1, 2021 by james

Today was my first swim with a new, reduced, rest interval for my 50m reps. It’s still very generous to be fair, but I feel it’s important not to push things too fast because I really want the changes to my technique to stick and I have no coach to keep reminding me when I’m not doing it right.

I’ve got to admit that it really did feel quite punishing. I did make it through the set with a failure in the first five and another on rep twelve which isn’t too bad I guess. I wasn’t in that good a shape to do the 25m set afterwards though 😀

That’s my last swim for this week as I have other things to do tomorrow when I would normally swim again, so I’ll have to wait to see how it goes on Sunday after giving my body such a shock 🙂

I am going to stick to my new rule of not reducing the interval time more than once a fortnight though. I think my body needs time to adapt to the new pace and this gives it that time.

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