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.

Easter Eggcess

You probably know that, once Easter Sunday is gone, the supermarkets want to ditch their remaining Easter eggs and clear the shelves for something else.

Anyway, it turns out that if you’re a grown up you can do what you want, so on Monday we bought all this.

Then, on Tuesday, we came home to find that each of us had bought some more without mentioning it to the other. So now we have everything you see above, plus three more of the biggest Easter eggs, six more smaller ones, another 16 Creme Eggs, some sort of Creme Egg chocolate bar, quite a lot of Reese’s Eggs, numerous Cadbury’s Caramel eggs and two Toblerone products called Edgy Eggs.

We are now faced with a storage problem that, somehow, neither of us had foreseen.

Anyway, don’t worry too much, we’ll sort it out one way or another.

Spoons

I’ve developed a new hobby… carving spoons. Its really therapeutic. I got the idea as I was pondering something different we could teach the scouts on camp, and I happened across the idea of spoon carving.

I did what most people do these days and looked on amazon, where I discovered that hook knives (that you need to carve out the ‘bowl’) are too expensive to buy 15 of them for a camp. So then I looked at eBay, and discovered that you cant buy knives on ebay. So then I looked at AliExpress, the cheaper, dodgier, Chineseier version of Amazon and bought a load of them for £2.50 each! Woo.

Anyway I had to get a bit of practice in before I taught a load of kids how to do it, so after too many hours on YouTube these are the result, my spoons.

From left to right…

First attempt, using a bit of old pine bed slat
A walnut spoon, much better.
A (bed slat pine) Welsh love spoon, an additional (late) valentines present to Sarah.
My favourite spoon so far, I’ve no idea what the wood was but it finished up lovely.
Roughed out spoon from this weekend’s camping, made from freshly cut silver birch (tree had blown over in a storm) needs to dry out before I can finish it nicely.
The tools. (Not the cheap AliExpress ones though. Once I made the first spoon and enjoyed it I bought myself some nice MoraKniv ones)

So there you are. Spoons.

Inginuity

I’m delighted to announce the launch of my own personal high quality alcoholic spirit, Inginuity.

It’s a high quality gin, with a superior blend of botanicals that together produce a slightly sweet and satisfyingly spicy way to get hammered.

Like any gin, it has a base of juniper, orris root, coriander seed and angelica root – those alone would simply make it a London Dry. To this my team of expert blenders (me) have added the essence of Yorkshire Gold tea, pink peppercorns, cassia bark, lemongrass, lime, fennel seed, rosemary and rosebud. These were carefully chosen because they tasted the nicest when I tried all the things I could put in it, and because one of them is from Yorkshire.

Anyway, much as I’d like you to try Inginuity – either in a classic G&T, or perhaps a martini, or even just straight from the bottle like a hobo – it’s such a classy, small-batch drink that only one bottle was produced. But if we ever do get that lucrative distribution contract with a major supermarket, you’ll be the first to know.

Pouring
Beans

Category: Things that I did