On this day

As the year draws to a close, your Pouring Beans Calendar 2025 is running out of pages. Luckily another one is on the way, and everybody should have their copy ready for the New Year.

This is going to be the sixth consecutive year I’ve had to find just over 310 things that we have said, done, drawn or written to fill the pages of a calendar, meaning I’ve had to find 1565 things already. In my quest for content I thought I would try something new. So in 2026, you can expect a lot of the pages to reference things that have happened on that specific day in the past.

The “on this day” thing proved to be a great way of coming up with things to fill a calendar, but to make it happen I needed to find out what has happened on each day of the year. Obviously I could find old photos and look at the day and time they were taken, which got me a few. But I needed something bigger. I needed nostalgia on an industrial scale. I needed an “on this day” machine.

So I made one, and now you can play with it as well if you like. It’s in a secret location on the Beans server here.

Give it a day of the year and it will find everything that has ever happened on the Beans that day. Every post, every comment, from both New Beans and Old. It will then list them all with the year they happened, from most recent at the top to most elderly at the bottom, and it will give you links to see them in their original homes.

It was just meant to be a means to fill a calendar, but I found it hugely enjoyable and thought you might like to play with it too, so there you are. Enjoy.

Jolly good: free rubber rings for all

Not to brag, but we’ve got one of those kitchen taps where you can pull the end of it and it extends out like a hose. It’s pretty good.

Recently the hose bit stopped going back in to the tap nicely, and that was because a little rubber ring that made it seal snugly in place had broken.

I did some searching online. No combination of words referring to a “washer” would produce results, nor did my searches for any kind of “grommet”. No, it turns out this wasn’t rubber or even silicone, nor was it a washer, grommet, seal or band. The thing I needed was a nitrile O-ring.

Amazon sell them for a couple of quid, so I placed my order. Here is the thing I needed. I fitted it to the tap and the tap works nicely again now.

The only issue is that Amazon won’t sell you one of them. It will only sell you a pack of 50. So I now have another 49 going spare. Assuming these things fail at the same rate as the original, this will keep my tap in full working order through to December 2175.

As a result I feel safe in letting go of a few spares if it will help my fellow man. They have an external diameter of 20mm, an internal diameter of 16mm and the band is 2mm thick with a circular cross section. Let me know if you’d like one.

The right way round?

I am at my best a pedant and at my worst a twat.

Have you ever been walking around a shop and something catches your eye for the wrong reason? With the Orb now here on planet Earth it means that any casual shopping either doesn’t exist or can only take place if the grandparents take him for the afternoon. I love my Orb but he’s not old enough to comprehend that sometimes boring chores need to happen. You get them out the way and breathe a sigh of relief. It’s all over. Game over, man. It takes so much longer with a trailing Orb. You take up way more space with a buggy or a pram.

There we were, looking for a new Christmas tree in every garden centre and kind of shop that would sell them. Once it’s done you have a tree that’ll last for a decade (no more flopping around trying to decide what size constitutes as “too high”) and you can get on with your life. Trying to get there can be a long and treacherous hike though; be sure to pack for all weather types.

I can feel my eyes glazing over underneath the artificial lights. My lizard brain screams, “get the one with the thing and the other thing and get outta there,” and I want to agree with it but there are so many options to consider that I shrug it off and carry on browsing. You can’t make a split second decision when fake trees can reach upwards of hundreds of pounds. What if we make the wrong one?

I’m walking past the lighting section in a particular store and I see it. “Wait, what? Nah that can’t be right. That has to be wrong, right?”

Shouldn’t it be ‘rechargeable octopus table lamp’? Why is the Natural History Museum collaborating with Dunelm? Who would buy such a thing and why do I care so much?

Does it really matter? Hardly. With Orb life being the only life there’s very little else going on. If you want thrilling stories and sexy adventures then you’ve come to the wrong place. I have nay nonny no nay none to my name. What I do have are questions about grammar on the boxes of table lamps.

Welcome to middle age. Population: us.

How not to catch a train

Recently, thanks to a kerfuffle relating to a car being serviced under warranty at a garage that was nowhere near where we live, I needed to get back home from Maidenhead by public transport.

Getting to our house from anywhere by public transport is difficult, but even given our limited options, no effort has ever been made to link our home with Maidenhead. So getting home meant two buses and four trains and would take a minimum of two hours and 40 minutes, and even that journey time was only possible a few times a day.

The last couple of weeks have been both busy and stressful, so I will admit I was not in the optimum frame of mind for a difficult journey, and may have been distracted when a little concentration would help. But even given that excuse I managed to screw this up to a degree I would scarcely have believed possible.

This is the story of my #trainsaga.

Jolly good: 81 days

Those of you with long memories will recall the harrowing story I related back in July about clearing the browser cache on my phone and losing my winning streak on a stupid tetris game I play every day. I’d been trying to beat my personal best of 80 and bombed out at 79.

I had to start again at 1, and Wednesday 15 October was the day I would finally reach 80 if all went to plan.

Well, good news: today is Thursday 16 October, and I now have a new personal best.

I’m not going to pretend this is the biggest thing going on in my life at the moment, and it might not even be the biggest thing happening in yours. But it is a bit of good news and we could all do with that. Jolly good.

Anniversary (M-me)

July was a very important anniversary for me. It officially marked my twentieth year up in the North-East of England.

I forget the actual day, some point in July we jumped in a van and drove almost hundred miles into the distance. That doesn’t matter anyway because we’re already way past that point.

Why didn’t I mention it sooner? I was planning on writing this last month and never did. As a prolific writer of bobbins posts, you think of and store one or two things you plan to do in the future. I may have even been planning to do this a lot earlier. Part of me wanted to go all out and wrangle some people together for a party. That would have been nice.

But it never happened. July is a busy month for most people what with the summer holidays, Kev’s birthday, Independence Day, National Fried Chicken Day, National Lipstick Day any many, many more. Trying to shoehorn a sort of important but not really party into all of that would have been exhausting and I doubt many would have been in attendance. Besides, I was too busying wearing so many different types of lipstick that it slipped my mind.

Will I remain up here for another twenty years? I suppose so, what with another tiny person on the way. I’d rather not be putting everything I own (which is a lot more things than 2005 Ian) in a moving van and driving to another part of the country. People barely tolerate me here so there’s no way they’d want me down in *checks* Wells-Next-The-Sea? Is that a real place? It’s on a map but it doesn’t sound like a real place.

Everyone LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! Okay, now stop.

Cabinet saga, part 2

Back in May I offered a tantalising glimpse of my next DIY project, which were a set of custom-made alcove shelves. In the two and a half months that have passed since then, you have probably thought about little else.

It’s not yet time to show you the final result – not when I can wring another post out of this story – but it is time to update you on scribing, a new skill I had to acquire as part of this project that would let me cut pieces very precisely to fit the contours of my old house’s wobbly walls.

I did a thing…

I am now officially a graduate!

I’ve done it.

It’s over.

I am finally (legitimately) Kevin Hill: Science Master.

If you had any doubts about how happy I am to see the back of academia (studying, not my job obviously) then check out this image of me after the ceremony a few weeks ago…

This is not the face of a man about to embark on further study.

Dr. Hill? No thanks.