Month: July 2024

Avatar Good deed o’clock

What’s a modern day hero to you? Is it someone who saves your life after getting your tie caught in a printing press or is it the person who hands you your sandwich and wishes you a good day? What even classes as a good deed anymore when the tiniest thing can be misconstrued or misunderstood?

It’s a good job that I’m such a good egg, ready to put all of you to shame with the sheer wealth the SHEER PLETHORA of good deeds that I’ve knocked up this month. My days have been brimming with altruism that I don’t even know where to start. I suppose I’ll have to cut them down to, I don’t know, a list of three, the three main ones, so that you don’t all die of embarrassment.

Don’t tell me that I never do anything for you.

  1. Package save – when I was out walking the doggo one afternoon-o I chanced upon a package in the street-o. The delivery truck-o must have dropped it-o when they were doing something else. I took it back home and checked where the address-o was and, thankfully, it wasn’t too far away-o. Later on that day-o, I posted it through the person’s letterbox so that they safely received their goods.
  2. Pigeon save – when I was out walking the doggo one afternoon (again?), we turned the corner and I went to put the doggo’s poo bag in the bin. What I wasn’t expecting was a pigeon to be staring back at me from inside the bin. It looked a big manky and had green stuff smeared on its wing, as if someone had thrown a drink and showered the poor thing. I ran back to the flat, picked up a few items and then carefully (hands wrapped in empty poo bags) scooped it up and placed it on the floor. After a drink of water, it looked a lot better. I was reluctant to give it food in case this was some kind of pigeon grift and a thousand pigeons all flocked towards me as soon as I brought out a bag of breadcrumbs.
  3. Spoon save – I gave a friend at work a plastic spoon so they could eat their breakfast.

Personally, I think the last one is the most important because if you don’t have the right implement, how are you going to eat your oats? Think about it.

Avatar Tile saga

Would you like to have a go at tiling? You should try it, it’s very satisfying. The only thing you need to consider is that your first project should start off small so you can get the hang of it.

Our utility room has a toilet and a tiny microsink, but the sink was on a painted wall so water would splash on the paint all the time. It needed some tiles. Do a bit of googling and the entire internet will tell you that tiling a splashback is one of the simplest jobs and a great way for a beginner to learn tiling. Great, I thought. I’ll do that then.

The project scope expanded a bit, so now we are tiling the wall around the sink, and the windowsill which didn’t have an actuall sill, and the wall beside the toilet because it’s just a big empty wall and it will look nice. No problem. Bigger than a splashback but that’s just more tiles to stick on, not more difficulty.

Chris heroically tiling a wall

All of the above is incorrect. It turns out that I have selected the world’s most fiddly tiling job as my first foray into the world of tiling. This isn’t an easy beginner’s introduction. It is a Tile Saga.

  • The sink is hard up against the side wall, so ideally would be removed so that the wall to the side and behind it could be tiled and the sink re-attached on top of the tiles. But it would have to be replaced slightly to the right, which is further than the pipes will reach, so it would all need re-plumbing, which I am not prepared to do.
  • Therefore the sink must stay in place and have tiles cut to go around it. But the sink is entirely curved – every part of it is curved, even across the top, where it could easily just be flat. So all the tiles around it must be cut with very specific and unique curves in them.
  • There are three pipes underneath and another pipe coming out of the side wall for the toilet cistern overflow. Tiles must be cut around these, requiring more curved cuts.
  • There’s no point getting an extremely expensive tile drill because they are for cutting circles in the middle of tiles, which I don’t need because all the pipes meet joints, and anyway the pipes are all different sizes and the curves are all unique and not even a consistent radius, so every curved cut needs to be done manually.
  • I have therefore invested in an angle grinder with a diamond cutting disc, which lets me cut very thin slices, and gentle curves, and notches out of tiles to go around the corners of the window. The angle grinder is the single most terrifying object I own because it cuts through ceramic tiles like soft butter and would remove fingers or even whole limbs if given half a chance. The tiles are small and must be held in place when you cut them so your fingers are very close to the blade. I am scared whenever I have to turn it on.
  • The angle grinder still cannot cut tight enough curves to get the pipework or the tighter sink edges right, so those bits must be manually filed out of the tiles using a file, which can take up to 20 minutes for a single tile and produces huge volumes of ceramic tile dust, as does the angle grinder now I come to think about it.
  • I didn’t think about the dust until I developed a dry cough which has mostly gone now but still occasionally rears its head.

The tiles arrived in April and I have now finished tiling the two walls and the windowsill. They still need grouting which is another new skill I am now approaching with some trepidation because it must surely hold further unknown pitfalls.

The other windowsill and the backsplash around the worktop at the other side of the utility room need tiling too, but that can now wait for a few months because I need to do some jobs in the garden and tiling the utility room has used up all my DIY time so far this summer.

The tiling looks nice.

I am pleased with the result.

I am glad I don’t have any more pipes or curved bits to do.

I’m pretty sure I am now due an honorary doctorate in tiling.

Avatar One from the Archives – “Lyrics”

What do you do when you have a habit of keeping almost every scrap of paper that either someone wrote something on or drew a silly picture on? Eventually you have no choice but to sift through that paper and determine what stays and what goes.

As a parent, I was duty bound to keep a lot of Reuben’s pictures. Some were merely because they were cute and reminded me of simpler times, others were because they were downright weird and prompted referring to a psychiatrist for confirmation as to whether it was time to call the men in white coats. Shame you can’t call it a looney bin anymore because it’s not politically correct. It’s not a real bin full of loonies, how would anyone ever confuse a large building full of crazy people with a bin? Silly. I suppose looney building doesn’t have the same ring to it. “I’m going to put you in a looney office,”

Mixed in with some frightening scribbles of monsters ripping people in two and an invention of mine called the ‘Scuba Umbrella’, I found some hand-written lyrics for two of the Papples most played / most requested / best loved songs of all times: ‘Mincey Beef’ and ‘(Do it)’, the latter of which is a lot harder to type at 11pm at night.

Does it offer an insight into the collective minds at work? Does it share the rare genius hammering out the hits during a prolific time in their career? Not really. The top left-hand corner reveals what I think I was trying to crowbar into the song: mince, beef (obviously), nen tosh, Shergar (?), Aberdeen angus and no neddy beef. The rest is pretty much the lyrics of the song verbatim with the odd tweak here and there, no doubt as a result of hours of sweat and toil in the recording studio working out the best arrangement.

Let us not forget the immortal words: “Beef is back, meat attack.”

‘(Do it)’ is less interesting because there was only two strips of lyrics and nothing on the back. These were probably used as the starting blocks of the songs because they were transferred to somewhere more permanent, a larger piece of paper or a notebook, or maybe even a word document. It’s hard to remember the long ago times as we all know.

Avatar Dangle a dongle

A dongle is a gay wooden jigsaw puzzle designed to hang on the wall.

It comes with your own initials carved out of it.

And you can choose whether you have a bird, cat, dog, Christmas tree, train or flower motif at the bottom.

Directions: use paper and an envelope. Enclose 80p for each letter of your initial or name.

Ask for: a dongle. State the initials and motif that you want.

Write to: Dept FSFK, Puzzleplex, Stubbs Walden, Doncaster, South Yorkshire, DN6 9BY

Avatar Election puffins?

Kev’s done the traditional Puffins? post this year, but I had this saved up already, and next year Puffin Day won’t be an election day, so I’m not wasting it.

That makes it… DOUBLE PUFFIN DAY!

Avatar Puffins?

Ian and Chris have both had multiple shots at this… so this year its my turn. Its a huge honour, I know, but I’m ready. I can do this. I’ve got it. Leave it to me.

Recently we did a trip ‘ooop norrrth’ to Amble, which confusingly isn’t Ambleside where I’m heading in another few weeks time. Anyway, this Amble is on the Northumberland coast, and just a bit further up is Seahouses. In Seahouses you can get on a boat. The boat will take you to an island. The island is called Inner Farne. Inner Farne is full of… PUFFINS!

Here are some actual pictures of actual puffins I took with my own camera-phone…